Discover more stories set in the Warhammer Chronicles from Black Library

• THE LEGEND OF SIGMAR •
Graham McNeill
BOOK ONE: Heldenhammer
BOOK TWO: Empire
BOOK THREE: God King

• THE RISE OF NAGASH •
Mike Lee
BOOK ONE: Nagash the Sorcerer
BOOK TWO: Nagash the Unbroken
BOOK THREE: Nagash Immortal

• VAMPIRE WARS: THE VON CARSTEIN TRILOGY •
Steven Savile
BOOK ONE: Inheritance
BOOK TWO: Dominion
BOOK THREE: Retribution

• THE SUNDERING •
Gav Thorpe
BOOK ONE: Malekith
BOOK TWO: Shadow King
BOOK THREE: Caledor

• CHAMPIONS OF CHAOS •
Darius Hinks, S P Cawkwell & Ben Counter
BOOK ONE: Sigvald
BOOK TWO: Valkia the Bloody
BOOK THREE: Van Horstmann

• THE WAR OF VENGEANCE •
Nick Kyme, Chris Wraight & C L Werner
BOOK ONE: The Great Betrayal
BOOK TWO: Master of Dragons
BOOK THREE: The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

• MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Witch Hunter
BOOK TWO: Witch Finder
BOOK THREE: Witch Killer

• ULRIKA THE VAMPIRE •
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BOOK ONE: Bloodborn
BOOK TWO: Bloodforged
BOOK THREE: Bloodsworn

• MASTERS OF STONE AND STEEL •
Gav Thorpe and Nick Kyme
BOOK ONE: The Doom of Dragonback
BOOK TWO: Grudge Bearer
BOOK THREE: Oathbreaker
BOOK FOUR: Honourkeeper

• THE TYRION & TECLIS OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Blood of Aenarion
BOOK TWO: Sword of Caldor
BOOK THREE: Bane of Malekith

• WARRIORS OF THE CHAOS WASTES •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Wulfrik
BOOK TWO: Palace of the Plague Lord
BOOK THREE: Blood for the Blood God

• KNIGHTS OF THE EMPIRE •
Various Authors
BOOK ONE: Hammers of Ulric
BOOK TWO: Reiksguard
BOOK THREE: Knight of the Blazing Sun

• WARLORDS OF KARAK EIGHT PEAKS •
Guy Haley & David Guymer
BOOK ONE: Skarsnik
BOOK TWO: Headtaker
BOOK THREE: Thorgrim

• SKAVEN WARS: THE BLACK PLAGUE TRILOGY •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Dead Winter
BOOK TWO: Blighted Empire
BOOK THREE: Wolf of Sigmar

• THE ORION TRILOGY •
Darius Hinks
BOOK ONE: The Vaults of Winter
BOOK TWO: Tears of Isha
BOOK THREE: The Council of Beasts

• BRUNNER THE BOUNTY HUNTER •
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BOOK ONE: Blood Money
BOOK TWO: Blood & Steel
BOOK THREE: Blood of the Dragon

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FIRST OMNIBUS •
William King
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BOOK TWO: Skavenslayer
BOOK THREE: Daemonslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE SECOND OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Dragonslayer
BOOK TWO: Beastslayer
BOOK THREE: Vampireslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE THIRD OMNIBUS •
William King & Nathan long
BOOK ONE: Giantslayer
BOOK TWO: Orcslayer
BOOK THREE: Manslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FOURTH OMNIBUS •
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BOOK ONE: Elfslayer
BOOK TWO: Shamanslayer
BOOK THREE: Zombieslayer

Discover more stories set in the Age of Sigmar from Black Library

~ THE AGE OF SIGMAR ~

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 1
An omnibus by various authors
Contains the novels The Gates of Azyr, War Storm, Ghal Maraz,
Hammers of Sigmar, Wardens of the Everqueen and Black Rift

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 2
An omnibus by various authors
Contains the novels Call of Archaon, Warbeast, Fury of Gork,
Bladestorm, Mortarch of Night and Lord of Undeath

LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF SIGMAR
Various authors

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: PLAGUE GARDEN
Josh Reynolds

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: BLACK PYRAMID
Josh Reynolds

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS
Josh Reynolds

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON
C L Werner

RULERS OF THE DEAD
Josh Reynolds & David Annandale

SOUL WARS
Josh Reynolds

CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD
Nick Horth

THE TAINTED HEART
C L Werner

SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY
Josh Reynolds

BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK
Andy Clark

GODS & MORTALS
Various authors

MYTHS & REVENANTS
Various authors

HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS
David Guymer

GLOOMSPITE
Andy Clark

THE RED FEAST
Gav Thorpe

WARCRY
Various authors

GHOULSLAYER
Darius Hinks

BEASTGRAVE
C L Werner

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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer

Map

SKARSNIK

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

HEADTAKER

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

THORGRIM

King of the Eight Peaks

King of Black Crag

King of Kings

THE KARAG DURAK GRUDGE

THE KING OF BLACK CRAG

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Knights of the Empire’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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.

SKARSNIK

Guy Haley

CHAPTER ONE

THE SISTERS OF MERCY

In his carriage, Kaspar Wollendorp shivered. Cold prodded at his flesh with iron fingers. It scraped the inside of his nose with its nails. It dragged his breath from his throat in plumes, tugging it out of the carriage window to merge with the fog blanketing Averheim. Outside, the torches either side of the barrack doors were orbs of yellow, marsh-lights deep in the city. Black shadows of men in the yard slapped at their arms and rubbed their hands round a smear of brazier flame. Dawn was some time away. This was not an hour Wollendorp was accustomed to.

He was well fleshed, Wollendorp, but in weather like this, that only meant there was more of him to freeze. His long cheeks ran off his face to form jowls, giving his face a lugubrious expression. His lips were full and downturned. Together with his hooded eyes, he had a look of sorrowful disapproval to him. Those who were acquainted well with Wollendorp knew he was a kindly man; his face did not match his heart at all, but for once it displayed his emotions accurately.

He blinked. His eyeballs ached with the chill. His hat did little to keep the cold from his bald head. He pulled his chin further into the fur collar of his coat and let out a shuddering groan. His hands found each other within his muff. Touching his own fingers was as pleasant as grabbing ice. This would not do, not at all. He tried to doze. The cold battled his efforts until his thoughts blurred into dreams and he sank into an uneasy place of cold moors and inexplicable noises.

Squealing iron dragged him back to full wakefulness. He leaned forward as the door of the carriage jerked open, nearly banging heads with Captain Aldous Meisen of the Scarlet Blades. The carriage rocked. Sharp clips of hooves on cobbles sounded thinly in the fog.

‘What cursed hour do you call this, Wollendorp?’ growled the captain. He threw himself into his seat. He was a singularly ugly man, huge and bullish with a squashed nose and a scar across his forehead. He was not yet into his thirties, yet already his hair was thinning, and Meisen had taken to wearing it cropped close to his skull to hide the fact. The white roads of old blade wounds were stark on his scalp. A gaudy earring hung from his right ear. His clothes were of rough suede, the red of the Scarlet Blades, and he stank. He stank of beer and cheap Tilean wine and dwarf tobacco and the faded glory of the Blades. ‘I should have stayed abed and let you freeze out here alone.’

Wollendorp was not fond of Meisen. He made little attempt to hide his dislike. ‘He is awake, and he is lucid,’ he said.

‘What of it? Surely the ravings of a madman can no longer be of interest to the city. There is too much to be done here, half the place is in ruins still. Let the aldermen look to their own, not be casting their gaze over the mountains.’

‘Lord Osthammar thinks it worthwhile,’ said Wollendorp. He pulled his left hand from his muff, picked up his cane and banged its brass top on the carriage ceiling. ‘On, driver! On!’

‘Sigmar blast Osthammar,’ grumbled Meisen. ‘Last thing the city needs now is wretched foreign adventure.’

‘Nevertheless, it is he who commissioned us,’ said Wollendorp.

Meisen muttered something unintelligible and spat out of the window.

‘I think you are still drunk, captain.’

The carriage clattered into life, rumbling along Fleischstrasse. The Scarlet Blades, Averheim’s darlings during the time of Countess Ludmilla, had fallen far in the city’s affections. When the Neumarkt had been commissioned in the wake of the city’s recent unrest, to be built back up from the river, the Blades’ barracks had not been relocated, and that spoke volumes as to exactly how far their fall had been. The stink of cattle and slaughter hung about this district now. It did little to mask the malodour of disgrace emanating from the barracks.

With a freezing finger, Wollendorp lifted the leather flap covering the unglazed window. Cranes and the frames of unfinished buildings loomed suddenly out of the dark like grotesque skeletons. Somewhere to the left of them rose the great bulk of the Averburg, invisible in the fog. The lights on the nearest buildings were visible as cottony balls; further away they pulled themselves out into nothing. The fog glowed with the collected flames of Averheim, eerie and illuminating nothingness. The fog pressed hard around the carriage, and Wollendorp had the uncomfortable feeling they were travelling a sorcerous road, condemned to ride it forever. A shiver ran up his spine. He’d always had too much imagination.

In truth he found it hard to argue with Meisen, this was a waste of time. The man in the asylum, Bickenstadt, had been raving for months. Two years since their employment, and Wollendorp’s initial enthusiasm for Osthammar’s project had waned; he was bored and impatient to get back to his own studies. At the least, this meeting should be the end of it. His report was nearly done.

A cry of ‘Ware!’ went up. The carriage slowed. They were approaching the Geisttor. There was some conversation as the driver handed over Osthammar’s letter of patronage to the Averguard. Passage through the city walls at this time of night was not easily achieved. There was a slight delay, the Geisttor creaked open and the carriage clattered on.

Brickwork passed by inches away. Geisttor was one of the smaller gates bored through the thick city walls. Then they were out, back into the fog. Wollendorp looked up but could not see the tops of the walls, only that diffuse, horrible light. Nor could he see the moons, which was for once a small mercy. Morrslieb would be approaching full, and Wollendorp was glad it could not see him more than he was glad he could not see it.

They passed the ward, that broad zone outside the walls kept free of buildings, and then were into the outer city. Narrow lanes and alleyways led off the highway into warrens of timbered housing, all dead ends tonight, stoppered by the fog. A man stared at Wollendorp as the carriage passed, causing the academic to shift in his seat uncomfortably.

Streets gave way to scattered buildings, then to farms. The fog became a wall of grey, lit only by the carriage lamps. The road leading out from Geisttor became little better than a track. It was too early for the farmers who used it to be making their way in to market. The road was empty.

Of human traffic, at least.

Above Wollendorp’s head came a pair of clicks as his footman and driver pulled back the hammers on their blunderbusses. Even this close to the city, it paid to be careful.

Meisen snored opposite him.

He sat lost in thought for an hour or so, until the way grew less smooth, the track rutted. The cab swayed on its leather straps. Despite the lurch and bang of potholes, despite his mind going over what might be out there in the fog, Wollendorp was lulled to sleep by the creak of the carriage.

Once, he had loved travelling by carriage for that soporific song of wood and leather, but that had been a long time ago.

‘Herr doktor! Herr doktor!’ A hand was shaking him gently. Wollendorp awoke with a start.

‘Herr doktor? Are you awake?’

‘Dieter? Yes, yes, I am awake.’

Wollendorp’s footman bobbed a bow. ‘We have arrived, herr doktor.’

Wollendorp squinted past Dieter. It was growing light. His joints cracked as he pulled himself out of the carriage. The footman moved to support him. He waved the hand away. ‘I am growing older, but I am not yet old, Dieter.’

‘Yes, herr doktor.’ Dieter moved aside, and Wollendorp stepped out.

The carriage was in the bailey of a castle. A stable boy aided Wollendorp’s two footmen and driver in unhitching the horses and stripping them of their gear. Another gathered the tack, looping it neatly about his arms, and took it away to be oiled. The carriage, noted Wollendorp with annoyance, was filthy with mud.

He took in his surroundings. It was early morning. The fog had gone, clinging on only as wisps here and there. The sky was a flat white, the sun an irrelevant circle behind it. The cold lingered.

The castle was arranged at the summit of a knoll. To the north-east, where the curtain wall dipped down, Wollendorp could see into a sparse wood of pine and, beyond that, the flat plains of the province, thick with grain. The rolling nature of the land accentuated the modest height of the castle’s perch. The keep, a long lozenge-shaped affair, stood on the highest point of this promontory of rock. The castle was a compromise between luxury and military consideration. It had many decorative turrets. Blue slate tiles clad its roof in a diamond lay. An ornate lantern window crowned the octagonal roof, a bronze of Sigmar’s comet at its apex.

These days the luxury was fading, and the keep served to keep people in, not out. The windows sported heavy iron bars, rust from them streaking the fine ashlar. Stone additions to the buildings were obvious by their lighter colour. All were the badges of Shallya – hearts and doves – and before the keep’s main entrance was a small garden with a statue of a woman: Shallya herself, mother of mercy. Her face smiled and her hands were held out in blessing, stone tears on her stone cheeks.

He felt eyes on him, and looked to a wide oriel window on the first floor. Wan faces peered back: the inmates. After a lifetime of study, Wollendorp’s eyes were no longer good, and he could not pick out their individual features. Each was an identical ghost, dressed in white. They stared at him sadly until a stout female figure waved them back.

Wollendorp turned from them with a shudder.

Meisen stood by the stables, urinating upon a pile of dung and straw. He was staring upwards at the white sky, a cloud of his own steam wreathing him. He glanced back.

‘You’re awake.’

‘I am.’

‘Nice defensible spot,’ said Meisen. He hitched himself up and shook his shoulders. He did not pause to adjust himself, refastening his codpiece strings even as he walked to join Wollendorp. ‘Good wheat lands, good horse country too, down there.’ He pointed his chin down the hill.

‘Schloss Werdentraum was gifted to the order by the Alptraums seventy years ago,’ said Wollendorp. ‘I believe they still own the estate.’

‘And now it is a madhouse? Such a waste.’

‘Seeing as you know little of it, I doubt it had much military significance, and they are much blessed with large houses,’ he said drily. ‘Ah, here comes our welcoming committee.’

A dumpy priestess of Shallya passed through the keep’s double doors and came down the steps to the garden. She was one of those waistless women, all hip and bosom, whose form seem ill-suited to movement, but who nevertheless move with the bustle of those with a great many things to do and a low tolerance for those who would interrupt them. She puffed as she walked, cheeks red in the harsh morning air. A large bunch of keys chinked at her side.

‘Herr Doktor Wollendorp?’

Wollendorp put out his hands and dipped his head in a courtly bow. ‘It is I. Thank you for your message, blessed mother.’

‘Oh, no need for all that,’ she flapped a chapped hand. ‘I’m a lay sister, a nurse. The priests and priestesses have rather too much on their hands to receive visitors,’ she said, the subtext ‘as have I,’ stamped all over on her soft face. ‘Morrslieb waxes full two days hence, a busy time for us.’ She looked them up and down disapprovingly. ‘I am Sister Tabatha. And, there are two of you.’

Wollendorp gave a weak smile. ‘I am sorry for the inconvenience. I promise we will be brief and silent in our investigation.’

‘We? Your instructions said nothing about “we”,’ she huffed.

‘May I present Captain Meisen of the Averheim Scarlet Blades?’

‘Are they still clinging on?’ she said. Whatever merits Sister Tabatha might possess as a madhouse warden, tact was not among them.

‘The scandal did not quite finish us off, sister,’ said Meisen. ‘There are a few of us left who desire to restore our regiment’s honour.’ He held out his hand to take the sister’s in his own to kiss it. She looked at him as if he were mad and pulled it back.

‘I will see to it that your servants are fed. This way, please,’ she said, and turned on her heel.

The schloss was the picture of faded glories. Tapestries hung on the walls, yet they were dirty and torn. The windows held a small fortune’s worth of glass, but were smeared, and carpets were upon the floor, but threadbare. Lunatics wandered the halls freely. Some stared, some cowered, one hissed something at them in a tongue intelligible only to himself, another held spastic hands before her face and leered at them most horribly.

‘Do not fear them. They are, for the main part, harmless,’ said Sister Tabatha.

‘I do not fear them,’ replied Wollendorp.

‘Then why do you recoil, herr doktor?’ said Meisen. Wollendorp found the man’s swaggering most disagreeable. He jumped almost as much as the shuffling lunatics when Meisen made to scare them.

‘I cannot help it. We men keep our place and life by dint of reason shackled to the cart of our efforts. Without reason we are nothing. To see a man bereft of reason is one of the greatest tragedies this cruel world has to offer.’

A lunatic shrieked as Meisen pulled a face at her.

‘Oh, do stop that, Meisen!’

‘As you wish.’

‘Thank you, herr doktor,’ said Tabatha under her breath.

‘Meisen is an uncouth man,’ said Wollendorp loudly. ‘I can only apologise on his behalf.’

They passed into a broad hall, the one with the window Wollendorp had seen from the courtyard. Trestle tables were set up in rows and the afflicted sat there, quiet, loud, weeping, laughing – a carnival of human emotion, unfettered by custom or sanity.

Wollendorp found it all too tragic and looked out of the window. The view was quite astonishing, endless miles of golden wheat and horse farms, the broad bands of the River Aver coiled carelessly across the land in the distance.

‘You must have money to stay here,’ said Meisen. ‘I’ve seen a few madhouses in my time. Not like this at all.’

Probably as an inmate, thought Wollendorp, but he was too much of a gentleman to say so.

‘It is true,’ said Sister Tabatha. She reached another door, unhitched her keys and turned them around their iron ring until she found the one she required. ‘Our wards’ relatives give generously. Many here are the scions of noble and merchant families. A proportion of our income goes to the poorer houses the order runs in Averheim, but still… inequity was ever the way of the world.’ She looked at Wollendorp as if he were the source of said inequity. ‘Madness unites those we treat. All are equal before the mercy of the mother.’

A young man with drooping hair and huge eyes pawed at Wollendorp. ‘Oh, kind sir, kind, kind sir, please, I beg aid of you. You see,’ he looked from side to side, ‘I’m not mad,’ he said in a stage whisper.

‘Away with you, Maximillian!’ Tabatha said. A glance motivated two lounging orderlies, huge, unfriendly men, to move the boy away.

‘No, no, no! Please sir, please! I am not a madman, I am sane! I have seen them! I see them! Green things! Green in the night! Why will you not listen?’ The boy’s words choked off into sobs as he was hauled backwards.

‘I urge you to be careful, gentlemen. We are entering our secure section. Those confined within are less biddable than the inmates you have thus far seen. Are you ready?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Wollendorp and waved an impatient hand. Meisen sneered at his nerves, much to Wollendorp’s annoyance.

On the other side of the door sat a desk, and behind the desk sat a man with an avian face, lank hair as black as raven feathers, and button eyes of similar hue.

‘I must leave you here. Krest will show you to Bickenstadt’s accommodation.’

Tabatha returned through the door without acknowledging Wollendorp’s thanks.

Krest smiled warmly, belying the hardness of his features. ‘Come to see our playwright, have you, sirs?’

Wollendorp indicated that this was so.

Krest took up a bunch of keys even larger than that carried by Sister Tabatha. He stuck his head into a doorway and instructed someone within to man the desk. ‘This way, gentlemen.’ He led them down a long corridor, the drawing rooms, libraries, and ballrooms of the old schloss converted into quarters for the inmates. Heavy doors occupied each doorway, a barred window allowing the warders to look within. ‘Stay away from the doors, do not answer the inmates, do not give them anything.’ He gave them a reassuring look. ‘Best ignore them altogether, if I was you. Leave them to us, eh, sirs?’

‘Of course.’

Krest took a turn into a side corridor, and brought them to a narrow servant’s staircase. ‘Might I inquire as to what your interest is in Herr Bickenstadt?’

‘You may. I am Doktor Wollendorp.’

‘Ah, we could always use an extra doktor or two here, sir. Perhaps you’d like to tour the wards when you’re done?’

Wollendorp gave a wan smile. ‘You are mistaken. I am a doktor of philosophy. I am particularly interested in the habits and history of the green races. Orcs, goblins, suchlike creatures.’

‘Ah! Goblin expert are you, sir?’ said Krest affably. ‘Next left, sirs.’

‘Yes, you could say so. I am the author of Die Geheimnisse der Grunne Mannenm. Are you aware of it?’ The question was a habit, Krest would not have read it, few had.

They emerged onto a landing lined with more doors. The sounds of the mad could be heard, soft moans and weeping, the shuffle of feet accompanied always by the rattle of chains. ‘Can’t say I have, sir,’ said Krest apologetically. ‘I’ve not much time for reading, sir, although I can, and well.’

‘No matter. I and Captain Meisen here have been commissioned by Graf Osthammar of Averbad and Nord Wissen to investigate the wicked creatures that so bedevil the Border Princes. The duke has holdings there and wishes to learn more of the threats his lands over the mountains might be subject to. We understand that Bickenstadt has some information regarding certain of their tribes. We have been waiting a long time for an opportunity to interview him.’

Krest gave a little chuckle. ‘Oh, if he’s to be believed, sir, he knows all about that. He was picked up, him, mad and penniless in Wissenland over, oh, I’d say twenty-five or so years ago now. His family’s been paying for his keep ever since. They’re quite wealthy, or so I understand. Brother’s a merchant, I think; done better for himself than his poor Jeremiah here.’

‘I hear he has not been lucid for some time,’ said Wollendorp.

‘He has not, sir. But he has been here nearly as long as I have, and I’ve heard plenty from him when he’s been feeling more himself, sir, if you understand my meaning. Then he won’t stop going on about it sir, oh! About the mountains and caves, his work and some green monster by the name of Scheersnekken or some other such outlandish label. Says he was held captive by this creature, in his mountain hall at that. Could you credit it? You hear all sorts in here, but his story is among the most astonishing. I quite enjoy listening to him, if I may be honest with you.’

‘Wait!’ Wollendorp grasped Krest’s shoulder. Excitement coursed through him. ‘What was that name?’

Krest blinked his bird eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir? Have I got it wrong? Scheersnekken or Schnaksnek or something. Outside my area of knowledge, sir, sorry if I have it mistaken.’

‘Could it possibly have been Skarsnik?’

Krest beamed. ‘Why, yes! That’s the one, sir. Well, you are an expert and no mistake. Herr Bickenstadt will be so glad. Come on now, we’re just down here.’

‘What was all that about?’ hissed Meisen in Wollendorp’s ear. His breath was ripe with sleep and yesterday’s Tilean wine. ‘Why are you pawing at the servants, man?’

‘“Skarsnik”. He said that, he said Skarsnik!’

‘What are you blathering about, Wollendorp?’

‘The dwarfs. I have spoken with many of those who reside in Averheim and Nuln, their knowledge of the greenskins is second only to their hatred of them. They…’

‘This way, sirs,’ Krest beckoned them to a door. Outside it, on a three-legged stool, sat a boy whose pale face said he would rather be anywhere else than by that door.

‘What?’ said Meisen.

‘This might not be such a waste of time as we thought,’ said Wollendorp.

‘Now sirs, before I let you in, I must say that although Herr Bickenstadt is quite together today, he can turn quickly. He is restrained, but I advise you to stay away from the grille, and if he is taken out of sorts, I’d recommend leaving with some haste, poor man. He can’t reach you, but he has a sharp tongue on him, and a good aim. I have provided writing materials as requested in your letters, but please do not leave anything within reach of the bars. He can be a little troublesome, although I’m sure if it came to the worst, yon captain there would have the measure of him, wouldn’t you sir?’

‘Troublesome how?’ said Meisen, folding his arms.

‘Oh, you know, he rants, he raves, he fights. He might take you for some agent of this Scheersnekken… Skarsnik, I mean.’ Krest nodded, pleased with himself for remembering. ‘Some of the younger lads swear they can hear him talking of a night to something in there in some ungodly tongue. A couple of them won’t come up here on their own, but that’s just silly. Being in this place can affect you, I’m afraid to say, and there’s worse in the world outside these walls than there is within, that’s what I always say to them, not that they listen, sirs. The young, eh?’

‘Surely a man jabbering away at night is not out of the ordinary in an asylum?’ said Meisen.

‘Of course, captain sir! But they do say that something answers back, that’s the problem of it.’ Krest gave an apologetic grin. ‘There’s been talk of green lights and other such too, but I don’t put stock by that. The young y’see, they let this place get to them. Not me, I’ve been here far too long. Now, he does not like the sun, so we keep the drapes pulled at his insistence. There’s an oil lamp in there, but don’t light up any more if you please, and keep it burning low. Now, I’ll leave the boy up to sit outside the door. You need anything, or if, Shallya forfend, anything should go awry, you give the bell on the table in there a ring and Jurg here will get you whatever you need. Now, are you ready, sirs?’

‘Yes, yes, we are ready.’ Wollendorp struggled to maintain his composure. ‘Meisen,’ he whispered while Krest spoke through the grille. A raspy, old voice answered him, the words muffled. ‘Beyond that door could be a man who could give me… us… an insight into one of the most famed of all the greenskins, and information about the elusive cave goblin to boot.’

‘That may be so,’ said Meisen. He cracked his neck and yawned. ‘Or he could be a madman. What do you think the most likely?’

‘I refuse to let you deflate my enthusiasm, captain.’

‘Sirs,’ said Krest, holding the door open. ‘The playwright says you may enter.’

Wollendorp recoiled. The smell wafted towards him by the door was intense: stale air, cabbages, old chamber pots and skin unwashed for far too long. Wollendorp paused.

‘Smell bother you, Wollendorp? I’ll bet you’re one of those effete parchment scratchers who bathe once a week. I’ve carried a far worse scent myself on campaign.’ The captain pushed past into the room.

Wollendorp was indeed in the habit of bathing often. His annoyance at Meisen, never fully subdued, flared up.

‘Let us be about our business with some courtesy, captain,’ he said icily. The captain grunted. Cautiously, Wollendorp entered the room. Krest followed behind, and shut the door.

Foetid though the room was, it had once been opulent, and as Wollendorp’s eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, he saw that the ghost of luxury haunted the place. Oak panelling clad the walls, a frieze of wild animals and leaves round the top, the faces of Taal and Rhya peeking out from behind them in inscrutable, godly fashion. A large fireplace occupied one wall, likewise decorated in lordly style, although the fire held a pauper’s measure of coals behind its wire mesh. Tilean stucco work covered the ceiling, or rather it had, for a large portion of it had come away, revealing the lathes beneath. The room was altogether ghastly. Notwithstanding the smell, the dirty straw, the chipped and splintered furniture, the clashing styles of its decoration was simply appalling.

And then there was the iron grille running across the room, segregating a good third of it from its larger part. If the room was poorly maintained (and Wollendorp supposed it would look far worse in a strong light), this grille was not.

A table and two chairs were bolted to the floor out of arm’s reach of the grille. A ewer of water, a couple of horn cups, an oil lamp of indifferent manufacture and a pile of writing materials – paper, inkpot, blotter, sand and quills – were arranged neatly on its uneven surface.

‘There he is, sir,’ whispered Krest. He gestured to a shape in a high-backed chair on the far side of the fireplace. The playwright. Bickenstadt faced away from them, toward the windows as if he were taking in the view, even though all vestige of daylight was blocked by heavy, black curtains. A table stood next to this chair, upon it a large bundle of papers, roughly bound. A wizened fist, lit orange by the fire where it was not shrouded in shadow, rested atop this manuscript. That, and a glint of light off his bald scalp, was all that was visible of him.

The man in the chair spoke, causing Wollendorp to jump. He barely restrained himself from clutching at Meisen’s sleeve.

‘Are you the academic?’ His voice was raspy, metal rusted from too little use.

‘I–’ Wollendorp’s own voice came out a little high. He coughed again, and spoke more forcefully. ‘I am Kaspar Wollendorp von Averheim zu Heisenstadt, doktor of philosophy, formerly of the University of Altdorf, yes.’

‘Aha! Altdorf, I knew it well. I attended the university myself, you understand. And you are a gentleman also,’ the playwright coughed. ‘Although the Heisenstadts I understand are much richer than my own people.’

‘We are but a minor family sir, three generations ago nothing but simple merchants,’ said Wollendorp modestly.

‘We have much in common.’ The playwright conducted his conversation facing away from the two visitors but in all other respects he was as genial as a man meeting for debate and the pleasant passing of time in the better sort of tavern.

‘Indeed we have,’ said Wollendorp. He eased himself into one of the chairs and took up a quill. Its nib had not been cut into a shape he favoured, and naturally there was no penknife to be found to allow him to refashion it.

‘I want some wine. Do you want some wine?’ said Meisen. ‘Let’s ring for some wine.’ He looked pointedly at Krest. The warden nodded, and went to rouse the serving boy. ‘I hear you’ve some far-fetched tale of greenskins and the like.’

‘This is Captain Meisen, sir,’ said Wollendorp. ‘Of Averheim’s Scarlet Blades. We are here at the behest of Graf Osthammar to interview you.’

‘I know, I know, and I have waited so long for someone of your expertise to speak with. I fear few others would understand. I am disappointed it has taken you such time to come to me.’

Meisen and Wollendorp shared a glance. It was they, not Bickenstadt, who had been kept waiting, to the order of several months.

Meisen bent low to Wollendorp’s ear. ‘The man is oblivious to his periods of raving.’

‘I have been waiting, not raving,’ said Bickenstadt querulously. ‘It is you who has done me a discourtesy, not the other way. Still, it has at least given me time to work upon my book,’ said the playwright, and patted the manuscript. A smile entered his voice. ‘I hear very well, you know. It is the damnable darkness of this place. All those places. But it is the dark they like the best, and so I keep it that way, although it is hard on my eyes.’

Krest coughed and gave an understanding look to the visitors. Wollendorp had no idea why. He bobbed his head and left the room, gesturing to the bell.

‘If you need it, sirs,’ he whispered.

Sensing that the matter at hand was coming to the fore, Wollendorp picked up his pen and dipped it into the ink briskly. He was prone to indolence at times, but liveliness was his ruling trait when working. He tried not to let his excitement show. ‘Tell me, sir, are we speaking of the greenskins? Are we talking perhaps here, of the cave goblin or moor boggart? The lesser types? All are known for their love of dark places. Why, the lesser type can often be found in tree hollows,’ he spoke quickly, as he always did when expounding on his favoured subject. ‘Like owls,’ he added helpfully.

When Bickenstadt spoke next, Wollendorp began to set down everything the playwright said in a shorthand of his own devising. Try as he might to still it, his hand shook. Now was coming the revelation, whether or not this man had actually visited with Skarsnik, one of the most notorious goblins in the entire world. At least the dwarfs so reckoned him, and as far as Wollendorp could tell, the dwarfs had a tediously thorough system for categorising their enemies. It was to his disappointment that they had declined to share more with him.

‘Ah, no, no,’ said the playwright. ‘Cave goblins perhaps, for they live in caves, it is true. No, I speak of the night goblin. Do you know it, sir?’

Wollendorp blinked. ‘Why of course, although I prefer the term cave goblin. It is more fitting in my generic classification of the green races, I worked it through myself and–’

‘Well I, sir, can tell you that they do not like the name!’ The playwright’s voice rose to a hard bark. For the first time, Wollendorp heard the fractures of madness in it, like the warning creak seemingly solid ice makes before it gives way underfoot, tumbling the unwary into directionless, freezing blackness.

Wollendorp shuddered. He licked his lips. ‘Excuse my ignorance, night goblins then,’ he said.

Bickenstadt was mollified. ‘I must insist on the name, for he insisted. They find the name cave goblin rather offensive. “Cave runt” is what the orcs call them.’

‘Who insisted?’ The anticipation was an agony to Wollendorp.

‘Why, Skarsnik, of course! It is he of whom I will speak. I am of course working upon my own play about his life, as he requested. It is nearly finished now, but I thought it would refresh me to talk on the matter, especially with so eminent an expert.’

Wollendorp blinked. ‘He requested?’

There was a chink of chain as Bickenstadt shifted in his chair. ‘Yes, requested,’ he said reasonably. ‘First, before I divulge how he came to request this of me, I must tell you a little of myself.’

And so Bickenstadt began his tale. There were digressions, and long moments of silence, and times when Bickenstadt seemed to forget where he was or who he was talking to. In those moments Wollendorp came close to ringing the bell and summoning help, fearing the old man would leap up from his chair and hurl himself against the bars, but he was loath to leave his writing in case Bickenstadt should master himself and continue. This he invariably did, at least until the tale’s conclusion.

To Wollendorp and Meisen’s surprise, Bickenstadt was a lusty storyteller. He spoke with the offhand eloquence of the well-educated, and his metaphor tended to the florid, as one might expect from a habitué of the low theatre. As he became engrossed in his story, he would act out the various parts he described. He was a fine mimic of accents, human or otherwise, his thin voice adapting itself to the cant of an Estalian, or swelling to fill out the grunting baritone of an orc, or shrieking out the ludicrous squeaks of the goblins.

‘Well,’ a shaken Wollendorp would say to himself over and again, striving to rediscover his poise after the encounter had run its course, ‘what should we have expected? He was a playwright, after all.’

What follows here then is Wollendorp’s report of Bickenstadt’s account, tidied and edited by Wollendorp himself, yet otherwise unaltered from the lunatic’s own words, and presented here for your edification by I, Guido Kleinfeld, your humble servant. The passages concerning Wollendorp’s experiences at the Schloss Werdentraum are based on the doktor’s own recollections, related by himself to me, before his unfortunate death last year.

As to the truth of the tale, and the threat posed to our good Emperor’s realm by such a small and insignificant creature as a goblin, the debate on that matter has yet to be resolved.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PLAYWRIGHT

‘I was born to a family of minor Junkers, nothing better than farmers, in truth,’ began Bickenstadt. ‘We tilled the lands around the upper reaches of the Aver, not far from the borders of the Moot. My childhood was uneventful, I was the second son. My brother stood to inherit, whereas I was to be educated. How proud my father was, how he would tell us, day after day, of how important our family name was, that we honour it and cherish it! He would bring down the sword of my great-grandfather, a knight of a minor order, long since fallen. I cherished these stories, but as is the way of youth, I grew to despise them. I saw my father as weak. We were blessed by many years of peace, and when we were not so fortunate, my father’s men would drive away the bandits or beastmen who troubled our lands. He never lifted a sword in anger in his life. Although I left this callow arrogance behind me, it was to have an effect on what occurred to me in Altdorf.

‘I was somewhat ungrateful for the money father saved all my life to send me to the university. On the one hand, I begrudged him the effort and felt the burden of expectation upon me too high. On the other, I thought the money far too little. My lodgings in Altdorf were poor compared to those of my fellows, while the cut of my clothes marked me out for what I was. Not, as my father would have it, the scion of a noble house, but a farmer’s son with a rusty title. As many young men will, I rejected my upbringing and belittled it as often as I could. How I wish I had not.

‘My career at the university was as uneventful as the rest of my life. When I did meet with my parents upon their one visit to the city, I argued with them. How I regret it now. My father’s face was full of pride at my place there, but my heart burned with anger at how lowly I was regarded. I ridiculed his pretensions. I hurt my father, and for that I am ashamed.

‘I was never to see him again.

‘Grimly rejoicing in my cruel victory, I neglected my studies and turned my attentions to the writing of plays. A most disreputable profession for a gentleman, I am sure you will agree; all the better to distance myself from my father, who had hoped I would take up with the merchants of Altdorf and revive the fortunes of my family. Not so, and I was encouraged as I had some modest success with my writing.’

The door to the room creaked open, and the small boy poked his head around. He passed over a flask of red wine as quickly as he could, and was out twice as fast. Meisen, who had been leaning against the wall until this point, sat down in the chair opposite Wollendorp, took up one of the horn cups, and filled it with wine. He offered it to Wollendorp, who shook his head.

‘What fame I did earn was enough to improve my circumstances a little, and more than enough to attract the favour of the ladies. There were many actresses, little better than street doxies, most of them. But there was one. Gertrau, so beautiful, so innocent; like me, she had rejected a life of respectability for a life in dramatics! The romance of it beguiled us both, and soon she had beguiled me. Not long after we met, I fell in love and–’ Bickenstadt broke off. He did not speak for several minutes.

‘It was in the year of 2497 when I heard of my father’s illness. I was twenty-five years old. Bidding farewell to Gertrau, I departed for Averland by barge. I will not dwell overly long upon this trip, but I deem it cursed to this day. The barge I was upon struck a submerged log upon the third day, and was forced to haul over for repairs. I could not find passage on any other. It being close to Sigmarfest, all vessels were thick with people. I, of course, being of humble means, had not enough to convince another to give up their place for me. I headed with some of the other passengers to a nearby coaching station, fearful all the while of the depredations of beastmen. We were at least spared that, but we were not spared the weather. That year’s summer was intolerably wet, and the roads were choked with mud. I could tell you of the carriage that threw its wheel, the other with a drunkard for a driver, the other where the horse broke its leg… The gods were against me.

‘Suffice it to say, forty days had passed by the time I made it to my family’s home. My father had died, and my family, deep in grief, bore me much ill-will for the pain I had caused him. Pain to which I had been selfishly ignorant.’

Bickenstadt paused for a long time. Wollendorp changed his mind and motioned to Meisen for wine.

‘Worse by far was the letter waiting for me. Gertrau had sent it not long after I had departed, and it had arrived some time before I had. She had found another, declared her heart to him, and they were to be married. In the cruellest twist of all, the fellow was a young merchant with a promising start in life and no small means. If I had only done what my father had told me! But such is the lament of all men who lose their fathers, and as we all lose our fathers, so we all lament. The young and old are fated not to see eye to eye and to spend hours in regret over it.

‘Months of aimless wandering followed. I fell in with a band of travelling players. They were grateful for the fresh material I could provide them, and I of their company. Within a short time, I and the troupe leader, a dark, Estalian fellow by the name of Jemencao, became good friends. We resolved to head south into the Border Princes where we were sure, as so many foolhardy men before us have been, that we would make our fortunes.

‘There is much I could tell of our journey through the Black Fire Pass, of the Imperial keep of the Mountguard that hold its northern end, of the even grander dwarf fortress that stands sentinel over the south. The pass is a high defile, carved from ice-black glass, choked in places by noisome vapour. The ancient road of the dwarfs clings to its precipices, carrying the traffic of all nations. Armoured caravans from all corners of the Empire, flanked by ogre guards, bound for far-off Cathay; camel trains of Araby; lines of dwarf carts heavy with barrels and chests and packages of such precise design one can only wonder at their contents… Such things I saw… To be in that place, where our glorious nation was forged in battle! The sides of it are thick with the shrines and tombs of the mountain folk; piles of age-greened orc skulls stand for wayside cairns, each far greater even than that on the Plenzerplatz in Averheim. Such things! My heart, already healing, was lifted. Here was adventure! Not for the first time, I realised how foolish I had been in scorning my father’s plans for me, for surely most of these folk on the road besides us were brave merchants? And yet I felt also vindicated, for my pen had carried me equally far.

‘Down into the Border Princes we went, following the course of the Skull River. The land is rife with danger there, and we were obliged to seek protection in convoy with other travellers. The inhabitants of the towns and villages we passed through were dour and suspicious, yet all we visited opened their hearts to us once they saw us perform. We went slowly, and crossed the river by the dwarf bridge – another wonder – on the road to Barak Varr. We had received a message that a certain Baron Harkov wished to see us perform. And so, by slow degrees, we were drawn east, on to the place where my life would change forever…’

CHAPTER THREE

THE INN OF THE CROOKED MOON

The wagon swayed on the rough road like a ship on the high seas, and I felt wretched. If anything, Esme and Isadora, the troupe’s two actresses, looked worse, and I am ashamed to say I drew some small measure of comfort from that. Rain lashed the cloth sides hard as gunfire. No one in the wagon had spoken for three hours. Only Hodo, our halfling cook, seemed unconcerned. He sat on a millet sack, rosy cheeked as ever, hairy feet out in front of him, munching on a barrelful of biscuits with methodical relish. His face wore that infuriating, slightly lascivious smirk it always had as he stared at the two actresses, as if he had the power to see through their clothes to the flesh beneath and enjoyed the fact mightily. I never liked Hodo, he was verminous even for one of his kind.

Thunder cracked outside. Esme whimpered and huddled closer to Isadora. She was terrified of the noise, poor girl. We were all wet and cold. My clothes were sodden from my last turn outside, walking alongside the troupe’s wagons. I dared not take my sopping boots off, for fear of what the constant wet had done to my feet. ‘What price I would not pay for a warm fire and a bed!’ I said.

The others said nothing. Hodo continued with his infernal leer, Isadora stroked Esme’s hair. The wagon creaked, and the thunder boomed again.

Presently, we halted. Isadora and I exchanged looks of dismay.

‘Why have we stopped?’ said Esme sleepily.

‘I will investigate,’ I replied, earning myself a grateful smile. I admit I was fond of the girl, and perhaps, had we spent more time together, something might have come of it, but it was not to be. The memory of my fair Gertrau was painful still, and Esme would soon be dead.

I stood in a crouch, for the hoops of the wagon cover would not allow me to stand erect. I cast my wet cloak on as best I could, lifted the flap of the wagon and stepped outside.

It was dark and the air was as a sheet of water. Lightning lit the scene for me. All three wagons had stopped. People were jumping down into the sucking mud of the road. A huge shape stood up ahead, directing the troupe to a gate set into a crude stone wall. Upon this wall, a pair of torches struggled against the downpour, spitting and hissing, their flames low.

‘Grog!’ I called. ‘Grog!’ This was not the ogre’s name. His real name was barbaric in the extreme. He was so named by the troupe for his fondness of ale. ‘What happens?’

The massive creature looked down at me. He made no concession to the weather. His shirt was plastered to his slab-like muscles by the water. A pair of giant pistols, as big as arquebuses, were tucked into his broad leather belt behind the round metal plate he wore over his stomach. How he had come by them he was reluctant to say, but I had been told by those better informed than I that such guns were the mark of a renowned ogre warrior. How he had come to serve Jemencao I also had no inkling, but I had been glad on many occasions that he accompanied us, and no gladder than I was that night.

‘Captain says to stop.’ He always called Jemencao so, a force of habit I suppose. ‘Inn,’ said the ogre. His voice was as deep as a well, his Reikspiel heavily accented, and his words went straight to whatever point he was making. He lifted an arm the size of a pig carcass to indicate the rough wall. ‘We sleep here tonight.’

I had given up hope of such a place in so wild a country. There are more men than you might suppose in the Borders, but they live for the main close by one another in fortified towns. To find an inn far into the night in this land so plagued by greenskins was nothing short of a miracle.

We were returning from the easternmost stop on our tour, a dreary little place named Grunnenburg, a town raised on ancient ruins by one Baron Harkov a century ago. The current baron was the grandson of this brave pioneer. He was a sad-looking, fishy man whose face bore an expression of resentment at his ancestor’s boldness. Grunnenburg was a horrible little place, to be sure, grey and underpopulated, a high wall around it as there is a high wall around all towns in the Border Princes, and with good reason.

We had heard from riders on the road that the town had been burned to the ground not long after our departure.

I thought myself blessed by Sigmar that we had not been there for the conflagration, and the thought of sleeping indoors, even in a stable, had tears coursing down my cheeks. To my good fortune, they were lost in the rain and were not seen by the others. Later that same night I would be weeping in earnest.

The inn was rough but welcoming. It was not so remote as I first supposed, being the outlying building in the small village of Bechtersmoln, if village is not too grand a word for that rough collection of hovels. Village and inn both were surrounded by the wall, the inn further blessed by a small tower, and so we felt safe.

It makes me wish to weep once more, as I think of our last performance. The fire was warm, the audience delighted. Esme shone like Myrmidia herself in the candlelight. Relief at comfort, however mean, granted our performances extra passion. We took our bows, drank well, ate our fill, and settled in for the night, happily dry.

Despite my tiredness, I sat up with Jemencao and our provinder, Hergenfeld, for a game of dice. The storm outside had spent the greater portion of its wrath. The wind continued to howl about the eaves of the place, and rain tapped still upon the glass. But the lightning and thunder had gone on their way, defeated by our discovery of the inn, or so I liked to think.

‘We keep this up, we making a lotta money,’ said Jemencao. He toyed with a stack of florins, letting them run through his fingers and clink. It was a pleasant sound to us all.

Somewhere, dogs barked. We paid them no mind.

‘That’s as may be, Hernando, but let’s not count our blessings yet. We’ve got to keep it and get out of the borderlands alive,’ said Hergenfeld.

‘Ever the cheery fellow, Hergenfeld,’ said I. I swilled the wine round my glass. Both drink and vessel were of surprising quality. He glowered at me. ‘I believe it is your turn.’ I waved my fingers at the dice. He rubbed his nose and picked up the dice.

He never made his roll. Jemencao grabbed his arm.

‘What, first you underpay me and now you want to stop me winning a little more?’ grumbled Hergenfeld.

‘Listen! What was that noise?’

‘We’re in worse than the wilderness, dear fellow,’ said I. I intended levity, I heard fear in my voice instead. ‘I have not passed a night without some fright. It will be something, and then nothing.’

Hergenfeld grunted. ‘No, listen.’

‘The dogs,’ I said.

‘Not the dogs. The horses. They are in a panic,’ said Hergenfeld. He got to his feet and downed the last of his drink. He reached behind him for his stout short sword, hanging from the back of the chair by its baldric.

‘Fire? I hear no hue and cry,’ I said. Nevertheless, I also reached for my rapier. We kept our weapons close by as a matter of course.

Jemencao stood looking to the door. ‘Or worse.’

Two others of our party roused themselves from where they slept by the fire. Esme and Isadora had come part way down the stairs from where they shared one of the inn’s few private rooms.

‘We heard a scream…’ said one of them.

‘Get back upstairs!’ shouted Jemencao. ‘Rouse who you can.’ He took up his own sword.

A rolling boom sounded outside. ‘And now the thunder has returned,’ I said.

‘That’s no thunder,’ said Hergenfeld. We looked from one to another, eyes wide.

‘Gunfire,’ I said.

The innkeeper hurried to join us, buckling on an ancient, black iron breastplate. His son and two other men were with him, pulling on rusty hauberks and helmets.

‘We’re under attack,’ he said brusquely. ‘Happens. Raiders. Greenies. All kinds round here.’

‘What are we to do? Wait in here?’ I said.

‘What are you to do?’ He looked to his son and retainers, and they all laughed as if I had made the finest jape of the season. ‘Why, you’re to fight! Fight, or die,’ he shrugged.

We hurried to the door. Please understand. I have never been a brave man. I do not seek excitement through force of arms, yet I attended the sword schools of Altdorf as was common for a young man in my day. I assume it is so still? I knew well enough how to handle my blade. The thought of what might be on the other side of that door terrified me. You must understand that greenskins are everywhere in the Border Princes, orcs with blue faces, most horrid spiders, raiding bands of plains goblins mounted on giant wolves, and they are not the only threat. Terrible things live in the dark, ancient ruins that crown every second hill. Then there are trolls in abundance, giants, and worse.

Jemencao looked to us and nodded. His throat apple bobbed as he swallowed. There was a look to him, and later, as I was led in that stinking hood through endless tunnels to meet my fate, I realised he knew he was about to die. He knew. I wondered how he knew, I still do, but he did, of that I had no doubt.

He pushed the door open onto a nightmare.

The rain still fell, but lightly now. The cloud was ragged. Mannslieb was close to its waxing quarter and lit the scene all too clearly.

The stable thatch smouldered, a half-dozen smoking arrows stuck out of it. The reeds were sodden by the storm, or it would have been ablaze. There was another boom and a flash of yellow fire, as a man on the boardwalk that ran around the wall discharged his weapon. A second of the inn sentries frantically rammed his powder and shot home into the barrel of his firearm, lifted it to his shoulder and likewise fired, the hissing pop of the flashpan igniting followed by the detonation of the weapon’s charge. A woman sat behind them, priming a third weapon. She lifted it to the first man and screamed as an arrow pierced her arm through. One of the men turned to help her. Four more shafts took him in the back. He plucked at them as he toppled from the walk and landed amid a miniature forest of arrows that had sprouted in the stable yard.

A cry went out, the voice unmistakably that of our ogre. ‘Goblins! Goblins!’ Grog stormed into the yard from the stable, one of the greenskins in his hand. His fist enveloped its head entirely, so that it looked like he dangled a black rag. Skinny hands clawed at his fingers. He shook the goblin, there was an awful crack as its neck broke, and it went limp. He threw it aside. In two strides he was by our sides. ‘I caught that one in the stables, trying to set a fire. Waste of good horse meat. Maw curse them all.’

I could hear them on the other side of that crude wall; muted, high-pitched jabbering. I had heard tell that goblins are cowardly creatures, but I could have sworn they were laughing, an awful, childish sound replete with malicious amusement.

Grog scanned the wall with a soldier’s eye. His gut rumbled. He was always hungry. A fight to him was an entrée. I had been told by Jemencao that Grog ate those whom he defeated, if he could do so unobserved. ‘They will come over now. There is no one upon the walls. Hergenfeld! He jerked his enormous head at the provinder. The two had some kind of past together, Hergenfeld too being an ex-military man. The provinder nodded and ran to the stone steps by the main gate, the two retainers of the innkeeper following him. Grog pulled one of his long pistols from his belt. I had never before seen him draw them. My knees went weak at the thought of the threat he saw, and I freed my rapier from its scabbard to steel my nerves.

To the east, over the wall that divided the inn from the rest of the village, came the orange glow of fire, turning the rain into rods of molten steel. There were many more screams now.

‘They are in the village! They have us surrounded!’ said Jemencao.

‘Mother!’ said the son of the innkeeper, little more than a boy. The innkeeper shook his head.

‘Stay here, boy.’

‘But–’

‘Our fight is here!’ shouted Jemencao.

‘Stand ready,’ shouted Grog.

Hergenfeld was on the parapet, his sword stabbed out at something. Impulsively, I ran to join him.

‘Jeremiah!’ Jemencao called after me. I paid him no attention.

I slipped on the stairs, nearly breaking my sword, but I remembered to catch myself with my left hand and, palm stinging, struggled up to the rickety walkway. A pair of glowing red eyes leapt up before me, a spear point whisked past my face. I ran the goblin through without a thought, and continued on to where the provinder leaned over the wall. He and one of the innkeeper’s men were pushing at a ladder. Arrows clattered off the stone and timber of the wall.

‘Help us, man! Help us!’ called Hergenfeld.

I was transfixed. There was a sea of stunted bodies swarming below. Each wore an identical robe that covered all but their faces and hands. And such faces! Vicious snarls on every one, a mix of fear and bloodlust. They had long hooked noses, broad mouths full of fangs, red eyes that glittered with the light of the fire. I was surprised when I met Skarsnik. He is a large personage, with a certain nobility of aspect to him that is completely lacking in his minions. These goblins were small, meanly proportioned, with grasping hands and furtive movements. They had none of the grace or deadly intelligence I was to find in their master.

Small they were, but there were many dozens of them, their officers standing to the back and exhorting them to harder effort with shouts and blows. A mob of the vile things were climbing up the ladder, their weight making it nigh impossible for Hergenfeld to push it away from the wall.

The village was ablaze. Strange, round creatures snapped their jaws as they bounded after the villagers. I watched with horrified fascination as one ran down its quarry, a woman, and gulped her down in two quick bites.

I cast about myself, snatched up the spear the goblin I had killed had threatened me with, and rammed it under the top rung of the ladder.

‘Heave!’ yelled Hergenfeld.

Using it as a lever, I was able to help Hergenfeld push the ladder away. Goblins flapped their arms like wings as they fell to the ground, breaking both their own limbs and those of their fellows as they hit the ground. Hergenfeld turned to congratulate me, grasped my shoulder, and an arrow took him in the throat. Hergenfeld died blinking with surprise. He slid to the boardwalk and toppled into the stable yard.

The last of the inn’s sentries discharged his weapon one final time. Reversing it, he swung the stock like a club before something below grabbed it and pulled hard, taking him with it. A rain of crude arrows was falling all around me, but I was drawn to the edge of the parapet, and peered down.

There below me, face but inches from my own, stood a troll. Have you ever seen a troll at close quarters? I suppose not. Let me describe it to you. This one, I suppose, is the variety referred to as a stone or cave troll. It was as tall as our Grog, if not taller, but not massive like him, nor built to the same proportions. The thing was a gangrel where Grog was stout and fat, but its long limbs were possessed of muscles like corded ship’s rope, the back covered with stony scales. In one of its outsized hands it grasped the dead retainer’s handgun, its fingers tipped with black, curving claws the length of swords.

The troll’s back was stooped. When it saw me, it uncurled, standing upright, bringing its reeking mouth in line with my face. It was twelve feet tall if it was an inch. It roared – whether it used words or not, I could not tell. One terrible claw grasped the parapet, tearing the stones free. It threw the gun down and reached for me with its other hand. I was transfixed with terror, I thought surely I would be dining in the gardens of Morr that night. But its head jerked back. Long chains were attached to its ragged ears, and goblins pulled hard on these. One of the larger greenskins jabbered at it and pointed below me, to the gates.

I ran for the stairs leading down to the courtyard. I stumbled over bodies. Arrows thunked into the wood. Grappling irons clattered onto the wall. Some pulled the stones away, so poorly made was the inn’s perimeter. What had seemed a mighty fortress was revealed in the light of the burning village to be what it was – a poorly fortified, impoverished inn.

By the time I reached the bottom, black-clad greenskins were scrambling over the wall, and the gate shook to the blows of the troll’s fists.

‘The ground outside seethes with greenskins!’ I panted. ‘And there is a troll at our gates.’ The remaining defenders of the inn had gathered in the mean stable yard: the innkeeper, his son, myself, Jemencao, Arturo the Tilean, Gens and Siegfried – three more of our company – and three or four other patrons of the inn. Some of these had bows and were picking goblins off the boardwalk as they came over the wall. We were a motley regiment to stand in the face of such horror. Grog grinned to himself as he swept his beady eyes over us. He nodded to me in comradely fashion, assuming I felt the same as he, relishing this unwinnable fight. I have heard certain widely-travelled ogres become jaded, and seek steep odds to battle against in order to rouse themselves to excitement. Here, this night, he had surely found his ideal melee.

‘Get in a line!’ yelled Grog. ‘Get in a line and keep them back!’

We watched the gate shiver under the blows of the troll, and I remembered all the awful things I had heard said of greenskins. The wood splintered. One of the hinges gave, scattering nails from itself as a pugilist might spit teeth from his mouth. Wood moaned against the gate lintel as it was pushed inwards, but the bar across the gates held. Long, grasping fingers forced themselves through the gap at the top and began to pick at the cracking wood with obscene delicacy.

This way and that, the troll shoved at the gate, plucking at the planks, until it secured a firm grip. The shouts of its goblin handlers outside grew more urgent. The left gate rocked back and forth as the troll tugged it hard, wood splintering and becoming loose.

‘Steady!’ yelled Grog, his ogre shout cutting through the screams, the crackle of fire and noise of fighting coming from the village, the roars of the troll and the infernal tittering of the goblins on the other side of the gate.

The gate gave way, the troll pulling on it and wrenching it from its housing. It reached through and yanked the bar loose, and the other gate flew inwards as a close-packed mass of goblins tumbled through. Our archers redirected their efforts. They could not miss, but their targets were so numerous that each slain goblin was an inconsequentiality.

The troll stepped into the yard, crushing greenskins under its clawed feet. Grog roared, pointing his pistol directly at the troll’s head. He touched fire as he stepped forward, then pulled the second pistol and fired, taking another long stride towards his target as he did so. The troll reeled as the first bullet passed through its forehead, the second into its arm, but its flesh writhed, and closed, and it came on as if it had never been harmed. Grog cast his pistols aside and broke into a run, tugging his huge blade from a sheath on his back. The stone troll met his charge with a roar as fierce as Grog’s own.

I did not see the climax of this battle, for greenskins had swarmed all around me and my attention was fully occupied fending off their attacks. They were half my height; their weapons were poorly made, spears little better than knives lashed to crooked branches. They giggled and shrieked as they jabbed at me. I was a far better swordsman than they, and I killed at least seven, but there were so many, and their morale was fortified by their numbers.

I parried and cut and thrust, my blade snagging on dirty black robes. Soon it was so slick with blood that I could barely keep a grip on it. I was as wet as my blade, covered in sweat; my eyes stung, and I could not afford to pause to wipe them. My breath burned in my throat and my heart pounded. We were all tiring, tripping on the corpses of the greenskins, close to tangling our weapons on one another. Our ragged line was reduced to a knot. One by one we were dragged down until only four of us were left. I saw one of their officers, a hideous brute with a moon-shaped claw in place of its hand, leering at me. It consulted a sheet of parchment and pointed its mailed fist in my direction. I swear it had picked me out.

For a brief moment, the press of goblins relaxed, and I skewered my final greenskin. Then more goblins pushed their way forward, bigger goblins, swinging weighted nets from their gnarled hands. I was snarled by one, then two nets, and trapped. I was pushed over, and my sword snatched from my hands. A crowd of glittering red eyes peered down at me, Mannslieb framed in a circle of their pointed hoods. I heard the sound of breaking glass and the screams of womenfolk. A spear butt descended on my face, my vision swam. I was hit a second time, and I knew no more of that night.

Of the number of our troupe, all but myself were to die.

CHAPTER FOUR

A GENTLEMAN KIDNAPPED

I passed in and out of blackness for the remainder of the night, my dreams as full of screams and horror as my waking moments. My unconscious and conscious existence became one infernal torment. When I regained something approaching clarity, I discovered that I had been dragged inside the inn. My wrists and ankles had been bound so tightly that I could no longer feel my extremities.

It was the least of my worries, for the scene in the inn was one worthy of the worst excesses of the Northern Wastes. The windows had been boarded over or covered by ragged cloaks pulled from the goblin slain. Several goblins were posted as sentries. Surly at being denied the awful amusements their fellows enjoyed, they stood at the doors and windows, fearfully eyeing what few blades of light crept in under the doors or through chinks in the boards. Only later was I to learn that this breed of greenskin has a profound horror of the sun and will only venture out during daylight under dire threat. And so they whiled away the daylight hours with torture and suffering, awaiting the return of the blessed night.

The remaining greenskins were drunk. They had hauled the inn’s barrels out from its cellars and opened every one. Some had unruly lines of laughing greenskins waiting to take turns under the spigots. Others had their tops staved in, goblins scooping jugs into the liquid. Later I saw them do the same with the hollowed heads of the villagers, dirty green fingers hooked into bloodied eye sockets, the hair of their victims dripping beer down their stinking robes as they drank from the open brainpan. The headless corpse of a man, gutted as if he were a beast, turned on the spit in the fireplace. In a cauldron on a fire built in the corner of the room, I saw a seared hand struggle from under the lid; screams came with it as the poor fellow inside was boiled alive. The pot lid was banged back down and, thankfully, the screams died.

They feasted on man and horse alike, gorging themselves on half-raw hunks of meat. The young of the village, squalling infants broiled like chickens…

(At this point it is unclear as to whether Bickenstadt ceased to speak, overcome by the memories of the horror he had witnessed, or Wollendorp could not write down what he said. The original manuscript is blotted terribly in the middle of this passage.)

…they brought the women down later in the day. What they did, I will not speak of, but they understood well enough how to evoke anguish in the hearts of those men watching. When done with poor Esme and the rest, they raked the coals of the fire onto the floor. They dragged in the innkeeper’s son. To the wailing of terrible pipes they made him dance a jig barefoot on the coals. Every attempt he made to escape was met with a wall of spear butts. His screams were a terrible song. The greenskins found it hilarious, laughing and cheering and mimicking his agonised hopping. Eventually he could dance no more. He fell to his knees and howled. They dragged him from the coals, put out his eyes and pulled him away into the night. I never saw him again.

As the afternoon wore on, the captives were tortured to death or eaten until only a few remained. I alone was left unharmed. Greenskins leaned companionably on the bar next to me, gesturing and smiling, elbowing me as if they were sharing a good jest rather than the unspeakable horror playing itself out before my eyes. They gibbered at me in their uncouth tongue, offered me beer, snatching it away and laughing when I attempted to drink. Harm to me there was none, but I was forced to watch my friends and companions brutally murdered and devoured. Gentlemen, I am blessed with a vivid and wide-ranging imagination. As a playwright, I can put myself into the mind of the noblest hero, or the blackest villain. This, I could never have imagined.

They saved their best entertainment until last.

Late in the afternoon, they cleared the floor in a wide circle, removing the spilled coals and the inn’s furniture. They formed a small arena from tables turned on their sides. Their celebration quietened down, and a species of feverish anticipation took its place.

There were three goblins in this mass of more consequence than the others, the officers I had seen the night before. One was a scrawny fellow. He wore a hat that would have been of bright yellow were it not so besmirched with filth. This hat was in the likeness of a grimacing moon, the goblin’s face peering out through its grin of chipped teeth. He wore a bone through his nose and a necklace of fresh fingers. He had spent much of the celebration casting handfuls of dried mushrooms into the barrels, although I did not know that was what they were then, or why he did it. The others gave him a very wide berth. He was their thaumaturgist, or priest, or a mixture of both.

The other two were much larger than their fellows. One, near as tall as a man, was the vile fellow missing a hand. In its place, he wore a hook in the likeness of a sickle moon. His hat was large and ostentatious, more moons, three back to back, each wearing a different breed of wickedness for an expression. The other was only slightly shorter, missing an eye, and had a dirty bandage wrapped around his long nose. He had a wolf fur about his shoulders, even in the sweltering heat of the inn. He wore a lot of red. I realised then that the goblins were of two distinct bands. They were dressed nearly identically, but one group had belts of red, the others badges of triple-faced grinning moons. There were many small fights between these two groups, in the inn and later on our journey. Goblins, I discovered, are as indisciplined as they are despicable.

The two chiefs were grinning at each other, arguing vociferously, although without real anger. They struck me, oddly enough, as the best of enemies. This feeling was later proven correct. I inferred from what I was told that goblins do not have friends and colleagues as we do, only favoured rivals. Skarsnik named Moon Claw as one of his best lieutenants, Long Nose as his most cunning vassal. By that, I think he meant the least stupid. His words were layered with double meaning, and it was not easy to pick truth from his mockery and bitterness.

The chiefs were becoming animated. Both were drunk. Moon Claw held up four fingers. Their wizard seemed to seek confirmation. He nodded confidently. Long Nose counted his fingers painfully, picking out seven, then eight, then seven again. Again, the wizard asked for confirmation. He nodded too. Both then held up their hands, fingers extended.

There followed a raucous cheering.

Hodo, a chain about his neck, was dragged to the ring and pushed in. His goblin guard shoved him hard on the backside with a foot, and Hodo stumbled. The goblins laughed. Hodo was bruised and bloodied, but otherwise unharmed, and he had a look of defiance about him that I found surprising, for I had not thought there room in the sluggardly halfling’s heart for anything other than gluttony and lechery.

There was a shout, a goblin demanded something. Another shouted back. A fierce argument ensued, and a fight promptly broke out. After five minutes of scuffles, in which half the room became embroiled, the shouter bested his challenger. Moon Claw and Long Nose bludgeoned heads until relative peace was restored. The goblin that had made the initial protest righted his pointed hood and walked to the ringside. He made a show of rooting about in his robes and produced something that he handed to the halfling. At first I thought it a weapon, but then Hodo held it up. Again the goblins howled with laughter.

Hodo had been given a fork.

Something small and energetic was ushered into the ring with a combination of gentle encouragement and ringing blows. A tiny greenskin emerged from the night goblins’ skirts. As the goblins were half my size, so this was half theirs. A lesser goblin; a snotling, Skarsnik called them.

Its face was alight with puppyish eagerness. But when its master gestured to the halfling on the other side of the ring, it bared its teeth and growled, a curious, animal noise full of violence.

Hodo was to fight this creature, and it was given a dagger.

Although smaller and altogether of lesser girth than Hodo, the snotling fought like a rabid weasel, inflicting many small wounds on the halfling before Hodo brought it down. He pinned it to the floor with his gut, and stabbed it through the skull with his fork. He relieved it of its knife. He nearly took the fingers off the goblin that went to take it from him.

They let him keep the knife.

And so Hodo was forced to fight one after another of these small greenskins. He had a martial skill to him I would never have suspected, but he was fat, and he was hurt, and the snotlings were in endless supply.

The fifth snotling bit his throat before Hodo snapped its neck. Hodo staggered around, fighting the sixth creature, until the loss of blood caused him to fall upon the floor in a faint, and there he died. Long Nose and Moon Claw argued over whose was the winning wager.

I cried out at this final injustice. I had disliked Hodo, but to make him fight where he had no chance of victory lacked any form of honour. I said as much, loudly. Although he did not understand my words, my outburst annoyed the goblin currently looking over me and he beat me senseless once more

In the evening, they unbound my feet and pulled me outside. The sun was setting, and the goblins cheered when it sank behind the horizon. As if this were their signal, they set out in a shuffling column, heading towards the great grey wall of peaks to the east, towards the Worlds Edge Mountains. What had become of Grog, I never discovered, but the troll that accompanied the goblins had a new necklace of fangs. Of the strange round creatures that had bounded through the village I saw nothing.

I saw little at all after that. A hood of unpleasant pungency was pushed over my head, and we travelled at night. The goblins moved at a stumbling run. Were I not so much bigger than they, it would have been hard on me, for they did not stint on the whip. During the day they rested, hiding in ruins or woods or holes in the ground, hissing at the sun as it passed overhead. They gave me filthy water and unspeakable meat that they spat on and smeared with filth in front of my eyes. For two days I held out, before first thirst and then hunger compelled me to take what was offered.

Naturally, I became terribly ill. Soon I was staggering along, my limbs palsied and my bowels loose. I vomited in the hood several times. Eventually I fell, and they beat me and beat me, until it became clear I could not move.

I can guess what fate awaits most captives who cannot keep pace with these monsters. Not I. The hood was pulled from my face. Their shaman peered at me through his moonhat maw. He jabbered something, jabbed and sniffed at me. He stroked at his moon’s long chin. It was the first time I had seen him so close, and in my delirium I cried out in fear, for his eyes were piercing and cruel and did not look at me, but through me, through my flesh and to the reward I represented to him.

He called to an aide. The creature brought up a leather cup full of foul-smelling liquid.

Their shaman shook his head, put a hand over the cup, and smacked his assistant with the other. He pointed at me, jabbered something in his horrible language. He poured most of the potion back into a gourd and diluted the mixture with water. This was then forced down my throat. At first it burned, and I retched again. The shaman’s green, revolting hands clamped my nose and mouth shut, and the drink stayed down. Within moments, my pains had receded.

After that, my mind walked a different road to my body. Days and nights passed in a blur. I did not feel hunger or thirst. I giggled and sang like the goblins themselves, and they made no attempt to silence me. When I was unhooded to eat I saw a green glow, weak and insipid, around the goblins. The night sky shifted with strange aurorae like those said to haunt the skies of the north. The air swam and two pairs of stars became gimlet eyes boring down from heaven, the eyes of two giant orcs who laughed at me and fought each other, disappearing and re-coalescing like shapes in the mist. Sometimes they looked right at me, or cheered the small greenskins, at other times they appeared to pour derision on the goblin column.

On two occasions I saw the shaman, Moon Maw, looking up at the sky, and I knew he could see them too.

We travelled away from the old dwarf roads. The land began to rise underneath us. Once, during day, the goblins rose in a panic, forcing me into a run. A thunder of hooves came behind us, followed by the reports of pistols and the clash of arms. By this time my delirium had subsided somewhat, although the effects of the potion troubled me then as they still trouble me now. I contrived to shuck off my hood by tossing my head and looked back.

Several dozen horsemen were harassing the goblins. In the distance, I could see a tower I thought I recognised as that of Grunnenburg. The town was black wreckage around it, yet evidently the baron’s seat had survived the burning. A sudden insight struck me – these goblins must have been those who destroyed Grunnenburg, but why? The answer, when I heard it, was too fantastical to believe.

Half the goblins were corralled by the riders. Moon Claw and Long Nose abandoned them to their fate, the remainder of the greenskins running up the hill at a pace I could not match. On the slopes, the goblins were as nimble as mountain goats.

We went higher and higher, keeping to the ridges of the foothills, and turned south. When I could see, and when I was lucid, I realised that all sign of human habitation had disappeared. We passed shattered dwarf forts and towns, but of the living settlements of the better races we saw not a single sign. Everywhere was the mark of the greenskin, defaced monuments, abandoned camps, the sites of skirmishes, fields of bones. We hurried through the night to avoid a towering fortress alive with torchlight. I was later told it was the Iron Rock, an orc town whose inhabitants had not yet sworn fealty to Skarsnik. This citadel was a place of fear to the night goblins, and we ran through day and night to avoid it.

Finally, we came to the tunnels.

The hood was taken from my eyes, and I found myself before an ancient castle of the mountain folk. Two bearded statues stood guard over a gaping gateway four times the height of the Great Gate of the Averburg. The statues were much defaced and worn with time, yet still awe-inspiring feats of engineering.

Moon Maw the shaman came to me. ‘You need see now,’ it said in broken Reikspiel, the first inkling I had that these creatures could converse in the tongues of men. ‘It real dark.’ He chuckled and poked me hard in the chest with a horny nail. ‘You no get away. You unnerstand, pinkie?’

I nodded. He nodded back. There was an understanding building between us, I am sure of it. His eyes were calm today, and free of the malice I had seen spark in them so often. Curiosity was there, and something else.

We passed into the ruined fort of the dwarfs, where we were greeted by another group of goblins, gatewatch vassals of Skarsnik and his Crooked Moon tribe. Here, there was a feast, and fighting, and games – I say games, what I actually witnessed was the organised, fatal bullying of unlucky goblins chosen from the crowds – all on a broad platform surrounded by magnificent dwarf architecture, the faces of dwarf lords long dead looking on impassively.

The goblins were much more active now, the dark was constant and slept for short spaces. The next day, the band divided. Moon Claw and Long Nose embraced. Moon Claw caught a dagger in his claw that had magically appeared in Long Nose’s hand and was about to be plunged into Moon Claw’s back. Moon Claw laughed and hit Long Nose hard about the head. Long Nose shrugged abashedly, he smiled, but his eyes glittered, calculating Moon Claw’s weakness. I have no doubt that for all their apparent friendship, Long Nose would have killed Moon Claw there and then, and would try to do so again in future. Moon Claw did not seem to hold it against him, indeed, he seemed positively amused by it.

The goblins of the red belts, led by Long Nose, departed, taking their troll with them. Any hope I had that the goblins would cease their squabbling and thus lose fuel for their violent impulses towards me was soon dashed. Without the rival tribe to fight, the Three Moons fell to bickering among themselves.

We passed from the dwarf fort and into the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the mountains. By the gods! How little we know of the glories of the mountain folk. The forefathers of the dwarfs must have administered an empire that is hard to credit now. Everywhere under the mountains is evidence of their handiwork. We passed along subterranean highways broad enough to take ten carts abreast. They were much decayed, and probably had not been trodden by dwarf feet since the days of the Ironbeard. In places, they had collapsed entirely or were riven by bottomless chasms, and in these instances, we were forced into twisting, low-ceilinged ways tunnelled by the goblins themselves. The goblins kindled torches, but still it was dim for human eyes.

I began to fear I would never see the sun again. We travelled for days and days with little rest, I longed for every next draught of the shaman’s potion. We stopped in reeking goblin holes where we ate mushrooms and drank water that trickled from the rock. This, at least, was clean. I saw so many marvels on that long journey – the dwarf underways, caverns full of sparkling crystal which, alas, the greenskins took delight in smashing. At times, other night goblins joined us, then left as we passed out of their territory. We ran on through echoing dwarf halls, or crept past sealed gates which led, I am sure, to underground lands still held by man’s allies. We traversed a broke-backed bridge that soared high over a lake of fire. The ground intermittently shook, and rocks pattered down from the ceiling. At those moments, the goblins became very afraid and prayed to their dark gods.

I lost track of time. We came to a place held by many orcs, an underground citadel barring the road. Moon Maw spoke to their guards at length, showing them an amulet, some badge of office I thought. They appeared to respect Moon Maw, or fear him. The other goblins they despised. They snarled and roared at them to scare them, tripping them as we passed into their domain.

Beyond the citadel, the orcs ruled over a broken dwarf city, and it was through this that Moon Maw’s amulet had bought us passage.

We jogged for hours through corridors choked with refuse. My eyes were weary, my legs tired, and my stomach roiled with sickness and the shaman’s potions. The sight of skin that was not green shook me from my fugue. A gang of dwarfs passed across an intersection in front of me. Each was shaven and branded, and chained to his fellows. Their backs were scarred with marks from their orc slavemaster’s lash. One caught my eye, and the look of despair upon his face haunts my dreams still.

I later learned from Skarsnik that the orc city is known as Black Crag. Skarsnik told me that his ally, the orc warlord Gorfang, is king there. Allies they may be, but at all times I felt in great danger in the orc hold. Even the smallest orc was a head taller than I am, and they dwarfed my greenskin captors. If they chose to kill the goblins, what would have become of me then? The orcs poked and slapped at me as we passed. At least the goblins seemed to want me alive. Several times, Moon Maw was forced to show his amulet, or mutter some cantrip at an orc if they refused us passage. Green light glowed around Moon Maw when he did so, and this seemed enough to force the issue in our favour.

The traversal of Black Crag took well over a day, and we did not stop to rest. I stumbled from weariness, all meaning gone from my life save the putting of one foot in front of another.

And then, a strange change in quality began to affect the corridors and halls. Many minutes passed before I realised I was seeing the reflected glimmer of daylight for the first time in weeks.

We emerged into a giant hallway, colonnaded with columns whose tops I could not see, and I cried out in pain as my eyes met daylight in full. It took them minutes to recover, but when they did, I saw statues of dwarf ancestor-gods the height of towers lining high walls, although all were faceless and daubed with centuries of graffiti. Banners hung from every surface, war trophies of the orcs who dwelt there. On the far side of the hall was a magnificent window, and I forgot for a moment how perilous my situation was.

The dwarfs of old had punctured the rock with an angular filigree two hundred feet tall and a hundred wide, bowing out in a half-circle. A regiment of stern orcs, well-armoured, stood within its arc upon chipped mosaic. We approached them, and there Moon Maw was accosted by a massive orc chief. There were words exchanged, and our group was forced to wait. The goblins quailed at the sunlight, and so I took the opportunity to look through the window.

Dirty yellow crystals clung to the corners of the opening, remnants of ancient glazing. Wind blew through the window, and many larger holes had been made in the stonework. Although spoiled, it remained spectacular. I could see a precipitous pass, many fathoms deep. The window’s curve gave clear view from one end of the pass to the other. My grasp of geography is poor, yet I am sure this was Death Pass. The sun was setting in the west, turning the rocky ground below us a bright orange. On the other side, ten miles away at least, reared a collection of high peaks, clustered close together. Moon Maw joined me. He squinted at the sun and muttered at it under his breath, although he did not seem so frightened of it as his fellows. He gestured with a sweep of his hand at the southern part of the pass.

‘Skarsnik,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘All Skarsnik, all belong. Skarsnik!’ he screeched at an orc who had strayed too close. The orc growled, and backed away. The shaman chuckled. His was a gravelly voice, much deeper than those of the other goblins. He looked about him, then said conspiratorially to me, ‘Skarsnik,’ and swept his hand around the orc hall. He gave me a wink, pressed a long finger to the side of his nose, and clapped his hands.

I had no idea to whom he referred. Not then. How I think back to that moment. What a strange feeling it is, to remember a time before I knew of Skarsnik. It is akin to peering into the mind of another man, a man who died many years ago.

The orc chief returned. There was some violent etiquette between the shaman and him on behalf of their masters. Gifts were exchanged, a trio of the weaker goblins were stripped and delivered bound and whimpering to the orcs. Hands were spat upon and shaken to seal the deal. Weapons were clashed together, and the orcs parted to let us depart. We descended a broad flight of stairs from the hall that led to a monumental processional way out of the old dwarf city, went through a great gate, and followed the road to the floor of the pass.

We crossed Death Pass as night fell, making our way over another ancient dwarf road which was as riven and in as poor repair as those under the ground. All up and down the pass, fires glowed and drums beat, welcoming in the night. It was, in its way, an imposing sight.

Some time later, we entered the southern wall of the pass through an unprepossessing door cut into the rock, invisible from only yards away. It led into a narrow, goblin-made tunnel possessed of many switchbacks. Nets full of rocks and suspended logs and pens of the savage round creatures I had seen at the inn waited around the corners, ready to be unleashed on any who might dare the entrance to the night goblins’ domain. Eventually, we came onto another old dwarf way, where a dilapidated building housed a regiment of night goblins. Here we stopped. I was taken inside to a cold cell and locked in. I fell instantly asleep, unknowing that the following day I was to meet Skarsnik, the warlord of Karak Eight Peaks, and the most powerful goblin alive in the world today.

I was so tired, I doubt I would have cared had I known.

CHAPTER FIVE

KING IN THE MOUNTAIN

Karak Eight Peaks is a wonder of the ancient world, and hotly contested. Returned dwarfs hold a portion of the uppermost levels, or did so when I was there; no doubt Skarsnik has winkled them out by now. Beastmen in the form of upright rats hold the lowermost levels. Try as they might, these two races cannot best Skarsnik. His tribe holds sway under and over the mountains, the beard scalps of the dwarfs flap upon poles in the cold mountain wind, while everywhere underground are stacks of giant rat skulls. All the orcs and goblins around the peaks pay obeisance to him.

I was led through the domain of the night goblins, first along the old dwarf road until rockfalls forced us up through the walls of the pass via a warren of rough-hewn passageways. We went from there out into the ruined city. The surface city is cupped between the eight mountains that give the place its name. I wore no hood now, but had scant opportunity to observe it before we went down again, once more through a wide staircase. The city above is large, that below much more so, the extensive workings of the dwarfs vastly expanded by the night goblins.

The goblins became more confident in their own kingdom, swaggering where before they had skulked. They showed me off to whomever they could, chests puffed out with pride.

We descended magnificent stairs and walked grand avenues choked with the detritus of the greenskins. We paused before another gigantic portal. There were three statues here. Two were the work of greenskins alone, tall boulders chipped into the likenesses of the greenskins’ twin orc gods. The other was a giant head, far larger than the totems, a leering goblin face that had been carved from the bedrock. Perhaps it was the work of slaves – I saw many captives of all kinds of creatures whilst there – for it bore tool marks of a subtlety beyond that which I saw the greenskins produce themselves.

A phalanx of large goblins came to our party. They wore yellow hoods each topped with a single, grinning moon. Checks and black flames ran around the base of these hoods, they carried sickle-moon swords, and mail rattled under their cloaks. They ignored the chief of the Three Moons and went straight to the shaman Moon Maw. He spent a great deal of time speaking and gesturing to himself, his chest thrust out, before having me brought forward. The big goblins looked me up and down. They motioned for me to be brought into the hall.

I believe I am one of the few men these last thousand years to have entered the Great Throne Hall of Karak Eight Peaks and lived to tell the tale. I cannot describe it adequately, I, who have lived by the actions of my pen. Where does one start? The forest of a thousand columns? The ever-deepening levels proceeding in geometric perfection? The statues? The principal gate and the grandeur of the steps that lead to the heart of the surface city? The scale of it? Its roof is studded with artificial stars, their light caught in glass by some art of the mountain folk. At its centre a dais rises high, as tall as a hill, crowned by the throne of the king of Karak Eight Peaks. Even with the gate to the outside thrown wide, it is a world of perpetual twilight.

Within the hall is a city within a city, and it is of a far shabbier kind. A winding tangle of tight streets of squalid tents and shacks crowds the floor. Refuse lies everywhere, middens are heaped without thought to their placing. Dry water channels run into pools turned dung pits. Sections of the ceiling are shorn up by ramshackle wooden towers; in other places it has collapsed entirely. Pillars are broken on the floor. Heaps of shattered rock lie everywhere; many of the carvings have fallen away or been defaced, smashed down to reveal raw, dripping rock beneath. A scrim of smoke hangs over the goblin city, halfway to the ceiling such is the depth of the dwarf delvings. The goblin-work is ugly compared to the mountain folk’s. Still, still, every glance holds a marvel to hold the eye for hours.

I did not have hours.

I was shoved through the city’s lanes towards the dais, a pinnacle of storeyed rock rising up from the very centre of the cavern. The dais was octagonal, stairs on every side. Goblin hovels clustered all around it, making it a seething ant mound. Piles of rusting weapons taken from their enemies littered the base of the steps. Only towards the top, where the steps became extremely steep, did the goblins’ dwellings dwindle away, revealing the ruined majesty of the stonework beneath.

The top was flat and surrounded by spikes. Once, the dwarf king of Karak Eight Peaks sat here to hear the petitions of his subjects. Now it is the throne of Skarsnik.

Skins of all manner of creatures were stretched on frames around this platform, as were heads on poles in various stages of decay. Many long strands of braided hair, dwarf beards, hung from the banners and totem poles that crowded the edges.

The original throne had gone. There was evidence that the stone had been hacked away, and no dwarf would sit in the throne of black iron that raises its cruel barbs in its stead. The back of the throne was like a great claw, a thousand tallow candles upon it, flames waving in the subterranean breeze, the dripped fat of their predecessors crusting the iron like flowstone in the caves.

Green potentates of every kind stood around the throne: night goblins, proud and arrogant in this lair of their king of kings; plains goblins, shifty hands on their blades, nervous so far from their own territories; mountain goblins swathed in furs, their eyes even more suspicious than those of their fellows; boggarts, marsh goblins, goblobs, river pirates… Goblins of every shape and size. Orcs there were too, grumbling and angry, and other evil creatures. Off to one edge a tent sat,;iron bowls held fires. The dais was as grand as any count’s throne room, differing only in its occupancy, its squalor, and its lack of walls.

Upon the throne sat a goblin of prodigious size. He was so much larger than his fellows as to appear of another breed entirely. His long, pointed hat, threaded through with bone spikes, made him appear the larger. But he exhibited the same features as his lackeys, the same sharp teeth, the pointed chin, the long hooked nose, although they were of altogether more noble a cast. Here was a lord of power, I could tell that the moment I saw him. By his feet slumbered an enormous example of the bounding creatures I had seen so briefly in the village and in the tunnels. Chains led from rings piercing its hide to the throne, where they were wrapped around a spike upon the arm. About Skarsnik’s waist was a belt made from the snowy white beard of some unfortunate dwarf. In a rest at his side was a huge trident, its shaft painted a brilliant red, its blades hung with fetishes. When the torchlight caught it just so, its edges glimmered green with magic.

There was little order to the crowd atop the dais. They milled about and squabbled, this gaggle of chiefs in ridiculous hats, whose bewildering range of spikes and horns and towering crowns and adornments went higher than my head. The big goblins who had led me thence were forced to shoulder their way through the gathered lords to allow passage for Moon Maw and myself. Moon Claw and his goblins had been stopped at the foot of the stairs, much to his annoyance.

When I first saw Skarsnik, he was being lauded by a stout goblin chief who had a pile of gifts of dubious quality to present to his overlord. Skarsnik was ignoring him. His eyes were fixed on exactly that part of the crowd where we emerged, as if he had accurately guessed where the goblins would part and I would appear. He grinned like a reptile, his tongue darting along his lips, dark and long. He leaned forward upon his iron throne. The big goblins hit me in the back of the knees, forcing me to kneel.

Moon Maw rushed forward, and threw himself down on the floor before the throne. He jabbered in the language of the greenskins, head bobbing all the while, flourishing gestures in my direction. Skarsnik did not take his eyes from me, his long chin resting in his hand, but he nodded at this thing or that that Moon Maw said.

Skarsnik’s eyes were arresting. Other goblins were jittery and easily distracted, scared of their own shadows. Their eyes rolled, as if they could not keep their minds concentrated. Not Skarsnik. His eyes were still, and thoughtful. As Moon Maw went on and on, no doubt telling his king of his achievement in bringing me there, he appraised me coldly, as a cat might appraise a mouse.

Skarsnik grew bored with Moon Maw. He waved his hand. When that did not silence him, he nodded to his big goblins, and they kicked him hard in the ribs. Moon Maw looked up, grinning madly. Skarsnik spoke. The hard syllables of the greenskin tongue hissed through his teeth. His voice was more nasal than I expected. Not the servile whine or excited squeak of many of the smaller greenskins, but not the commanding baritone I half thought to hear either.

Moon Maw was evidently happy with what was said to him, and bowed and scraped his way so far back he left the throne’s steps and bumped into the assembled crowd. Still grinning madly, he darted through the rancid cream of goblinhood. What his reward was, I do not know. I never set eyes on him again.

Skarsnik leaned forward and spoke directly to me.

‘Welcome to my kingdom, ’uman,’ he said.

I did not know what to do. I blinked. I was terrified. What was to become of me? Why had I been brought here?

‘Huh,’ Skarsnik said. ‘You a bit quiet, incha? I fought you might be more the speaking type. Did dose idiots take your tongue? I tole ’em not to. Pity. Could do with a nice chat.’

‘I… I… can speak. I can speak, my lord,’ I added. It was an affront to me to address this creature so.

‘My lord, is it?’ He laughed and nodded, looking at his cronies. ‘My lord!’ He held a ringed hand out towards me.

They burst out laughing in a forced manner. ‘Mah lor! Mah lor!’ they dutifully repeated.

Skarsnik jerked his thumb over his shoulder at them and sneered. ‘Lissen to dat. Lissen to ’em “mah lor, mah lor”, he parroted. ‘Zoggin’ idiots. They don’t have no good idea what they is sayin’. They is all stupid.’ He sat back on his throne, and tapped at its arms with his talons. ‘But you, you is not stupid, is ya? “My lord”, bet you don’t like that, bet you don’t like calling me dat at all, smelly little goblin like me. But you do it, don’t ya? Not like some of dem uvvers wot come in here though, are ya? Good know-wots you have. You aren’t stupid. Oh no, I sees dat. I always know, me.’

‘I-I like to think not, my lord.’

‘Nah.’ He sat forward very quickly. ‘Do you think I might be stupid, ’uman?’

I looked at him, this hunchbacked lord of uncountable goblins. I looked deep into his red eyes. Whatever he was, it was certain he was no fool. ‘I do not think so, my lord,’ I said, and I meant it.

‘You sure? I’m just a little goblin,’ he waggled his fingers in front of his face, voice high and mocking. It abruptly switched to disgust. He snatched a goblet of rich dwarf gold from a goblin attendant and drained it.

‘I am very sure, my lord.’ I was finding it hard to stand, I was ill and cold. My stomach cramped.

‘Good, good,’ Skarsnik placed the goblet back in the goblin’s hands with great care and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Iron vambraces beaten into the shape of howling mouths adorned his forearms. He did not move like the others. He was inelegant, as all greenskins are, but there was a precision to his movements the others lacked. ‘Then maybe we can come to a deal. What do you fink? Would you like to make a deal, humie boy?’

‘I would very much like to live, my lord, if that is what you mean.’

He laughed long and hard at this, his head thrown back, the moon medallions, ornaments and teeth hanging from his tall hat clattering against one other. His minions chuckled half-heartedly, their laughter dying long before the king’s. They stood around him as he laughed like a maniac, only their glinting eyes and noses visible in the deep shadows of their hoods. They shuffled from foot to foot, peering at each other in confusion. The smell was overpowering; if I were not so dirty myself and had not spent so many nights in foul tunnels, I fear I might well have retched.

Skarsnik stopped laughing. ‘We’ll see what we can do about that, ’uman. We’ll see. I tell you what. You do me a favour, and I’ll see you get home nice and safe like.’

‘What would the favour be?’

‘Ahaha!’ he said, and wagged a finger. ‘You need to say yes. Or no. If yes,’ he smiled evilly. ‘If no, well.’ He cocked his head, then lashed out a foot at the giant beast by his throne. It made a sound like an inflated pig’s bladder being kicked. The monster snorted. ‘Gobbla is hungry. He’s always hungry, and he likes men-meat as much as the rest. He ain’t fussy.’

‘What choice do I have, my lord?’

Skarsnik grinned at me. ‘Exactly. See, I knew you was clever. We got a deal then?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. How may I serve you?’

He broke eye contact with me and leaned back in his throne. ‘S’ crooked moon soon,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in the sky. My moon. S’good omen. Gork tole me it’s time. There’s a big fight comin’, a big fight with da stunties.’ He gestured up with his eyes, as if to indicate the dwarfs penned in their citadel above. ‘If that King Belegar’s been feeling sorry for hisself, he’s got anuvver fing coming.’ He broke off this line of conversation with a shake of his head. The trinkets that festooned his enormous hood swung as he did so.

‘You know, ’uman, you ask any greenskin for ’undreds of miles round here, dey all know who I is. I is Skarsnik! Skarsnik the great! Skarsnik! King in da mountain!’ He stood and shouted this out. The other goblins caught on and took up a chant of his name. The goblin king shushed them. ‘But you. Do you know who I is? No lyin’, I will know, I will.’

‘No, my lord,’ I admitted.

‘Right.’ He pointed a finger at me and bobbed it up and down, punctuating his words with its movements. ‘Right. Didn’t fink so. And dat’s no good is it, you not knowing who I is. I’s not very ’appy about dat. I mean, I could just call up a Waaagh! March meself norf and do some mischief in dat Empire of yours. And maybe one day I will.’ He sighed expansively. ‘But I got me ’ands full ’ere, in I? Dwarfs and skaven an’ uppity orcses.’ He pointed to a heap of orc skulls. ‘Coming in here, “Oh, we’s not lissning to no stoopid gobbo!”’ he bellowed in a deep voice. ‘“We’s gonna kick you in, so we is.” Well, says I, we’ll have a little word wiv Gobbla about dat, shall we?’ Dey don’t like dat much at all, oh no.’ He laughed again and rubbed at his chin. ‘Anyways. Busy. Very, very busy. Being king of dis lot is hard work. So I fought I might get meself a poet, so all da pinkies will know who I am, so dat when I’m done with da stunties and dose stupid ratboys they’ll know who I am when I come to burn down dere cities. Be a bit rude, if I’s doing dat, and dey don’t know who I is! Eh, eh?’ He sniffed and inspected a long, dirty claw. ‘I hears poets is wot pinkies like youse like. Pretty words an’ that.’

Maybe the potion had destroyed my preservative instinct, but I became so very annoyed at being compared to a mere poet that I forgot for a moment I spoke not with a gentleman of the Empire, but a dangerous foe of all men. It could have been the journey. I was not at my best. ‘Sir!’ I protested. ‘Poets are low people, minds full of nonsense and hearts full of foolish romance.’ I had known several poets during my time at Altdorf. One whose attitude I found most repulsive was an arrogant pup a couple of years younger than myself. He attended a few blade lessons at my salle before declaring himself of far too high a level of skill to continue training with us. His name was Junker, or Jaeger, I think. I trust he came to nothing. Most poets do not amount to anything much at all.

Skarsnik’s eyes narrowed, and I realised I had made a grave error. He sat forward on that iron throne of his. ‘You don’ do pretty words? Cos pretty words is what I want, and if you can’t do me pretty words, you’re not much use at all, is ya, and I’ll ’ave to get someone else!’ He looked very annoyed at the prospect. Gobbla grumbled in its sleep, eyelids twitching as if it could sense its master’s displeasure. ‘I sent ’em for a pretty word man. Red Belts tole me there was one in da man town near dere mountain. If dey were wrong, you’re gonna die right now— in nasty little bitses. And den I’m gonna have a word wiv Niknok. Red Spears gonna need ’emselves a new boss.’

Panic rolled through me like a black wave. ‘But of course! I merely seek to correct your majesty, if I may. I am a playwright! I write drama for the entertainment and edification of the masses.’

Skarsnik’s brows drew together.

‘I tell stories to many people at a time,’ I explained. ‘It is much better than poetry, which garners a limited audience at best.’

‘Pretty words? I said I want pretty words!’ he shouted, his fists clenched.

‘P-pretty words!’ I stammered. ‘Oh yes, the finest of all words, my lord!’ It sickens me now how pleading I had become, a sycophant to a green monster. Please forgive me, for I was in fear for my life, and of a painful death.

Skarsnik nodded. ‘Good, good! Dat’s what I want, a good story. Because I am going to tell you a good story. An’ I want you to take it wiv ya, and I want you to tell all da uvver ’umies out dere who the biggest and meanest and bestest goblin in the world is, you got dat? And if you don’t do it in pretty words den I’ll come and eat your liver while you watches, got dat?’

I nodded vigorously. ‘And that mighty warlord you speak of is obviously yourself, my lord,’ I said. I was terrified, sick, drugged, dazed, and tired. A hundred pairs of red eyes were fixed on my face, all others there utterly silent.

‘Exactly,’ said Skarsnik. ‘You is a clever one.’

He waved two fingers at one of his guards, who came forward and produced a big knife. My heart quailed, but he slipped the iron into my bonds and cut my hands free. I gasped in relief, and then bit back a scream. My hands had been tied so long they had become entirely numb, and the sensation of the blood rushing back into them was as if they had been set afire. ‘You, you are untying me?’

Skarsnik looked about him, his eyes and mouth wide. ‘Oh yeah, I ’adn’t fought of dat! Gor! You could kill me or run off, couldn’t ya?’ He held up a finger to his lips in mock thought. ‘Oh no, ’ang on a minute. There’s a lot of nasty gobboes all arounds ya, and you’re a long way from ’ome. What ya going do, ’umie? Where’s ya gonna go? Sing up a dragon and fly off wiv da wind? Nah. I fink I’m gonna be all right.’ He shook his head at my idiocy and pulled a face of irritation. It was a look I was to grow very familiar with, for he deployed it often when talking with his subjects.

Skarsnik sat down again. A table was brought to me from somewhere, and a chair. A candlestick was thumped onto the table, a greasy tallow in it. Badly cured parchment, a bunch of dirty feathers, and a skull full of dark liquid were dropped in front of me. Skarsnik tutted and shook his head. The big goblin quivered as he tried to pat the pile into something approaching neatness. Skarsnik rolled his eyes. ‘Dey don’t unnerstand. Ya got to be organised! Organised!’ He slammed a fist into his throne’s arm. Gobbla growled and snuffled. The goblin guard shook so hard his armour rattled. Skarsnik’s rage subsided as quickly as it had come, and Gobbla went back to snoring. ‘Uvverwise, ya don’t get nuffink done, does ya? I keep tellin’ ’em, I do. Be organised. I try. Rule one, dat is. Rule one!’ he said. There was an underlying weariness to Skarsnik’s voice. Again, it was something I would come to know well.

I would also hear many more of these rules.

I remained kneeling on the floor as the goblin guards withdrew.

‘I got somefink for you ta drink ’n all,’ said the lord of Karak Eight Peaks genially. He was mercurial in character; one moment he was welcoming, almost human, the next vindictive. I had no doubt he could be as spiteful and cruel as the next goblin, if not more so. A large snotling, or perhaps a small goblin, it is impossible to be sure, with an exceptionally snooty expression brought a bottle of Bretonnian wine to the table, presented it with a flourish and set it down. Food, the most edible I had seen for days, came with it. Skarsnik nodded in approval, then frowned at me. ‘What? You gonna sit down or what? You ’umies are as fick as dem stunties up dere! Sit down! Sit down now!’ He stamped his foot.

I stood slowly, my hands and feet pained from their cramping. The chair was made of tarnished metal, as was the table. Both were suited to a being shorter and broader than myself, and I was forced to sit with my legs to one side.

‘Go on den, ’ave a drink,’ said Skarsnik, gesturing to the bottle.

I pulled the cork with my teeth and sipped the wine. It was of tremendous quality, and I greedily sucked half of it down. My stomach rebelled, but I clamped my jaw shut until the roiling within subsided.

‘Right den,’ said Skarsnik, rubbing his hands together. ‘Youse gonna write, gonna write now.’ He pointed at the feathers. I picked one that seemed most suitable. It was uncut. I raised an eyebrow. Skarsnik barked something at someone, and I was given the world’s least offensive knife to form my quill nib. I cut quickly so as not to anger the goblin king with further delay. Skarsnik was well acquainted with the habits of writing, I thought. I looked at his hands; sure enough his fingertips were black with ink, and I noticed papers peeking out from behind the seat of his monstrous throne.

‘Ready, ’umie? So here we go den.’ He leaned back, took a deep breath and looked upwards, bending his hat against his throne back. ‘It all started a long, long time ago, in a smelly little cave…’

CHAPTER SIX

A RUNT SPAWNED

Dark. Cold. Damp. A slick membrane gave way, and soft hands found wet soil. There was nothing thinking in the little mind that worked the hands, not yet, nothing except the impulse to dig, to go upwards.

The soil was moist and full of rocks that scratched his hands. The goblin runt struggled hard, lungs burning. Spots flickered in the black. His life was done almost as it had begun.

A hand broke the surface, flapping madly in the air. The second followed, then a bald, pointy head. Were there strong light in the cavern, the newly spawned goblin would have appeared a whitish green. But there was not. Only the weak blue shine of glowshrooms held back the dark, and all was dingy.

The Runt pulled himself up out of the hole. A huge mushroom stood above his birthing-hole, wilting and black now it had served its purpose. The goblin lay on his back, panting. Scrabbling noises came from the cave all around him; other runts, pulling themselves out of the earth.

The Runt was feeble. The soil in the cavern was thin and rocky. The light was too dim. No orclings would be born there, only runty goblins and snotlings and squigs. These lesser animals flapped and slithered and snarled and bit their way out of the dark earth into the cold air of the cave.

The new-spawned were hungry. The Runt heard the flap of flat feet on stone approach him. The other goblin breathed raggedly, a fresh-sprouted stomach grumbling above the Runt’s head. The Runt lay still. Already his mind filled with things he did not understand. One of those was a deep and pressing urge not to die.

Thin, grasping fingers moved down to the Runt’s throat, wrapping themselves about his scrawny neck. The Runt waited until the goblin had bent over him. The fingers tightened, and the Runt struck.

Sharp teeth dug into a fleshy nose. They ached to their roots in their newness, loose in their gums. The Runt pulled back, ripping the nose off the face of the other goblin.

‘Waaggh! Waaagh!’ the goblin bleated. Blood pattered onto the Runt. He lunged up and knocked the other spawnling to the floor. A brief flurry of blows, sharp teeth closed upon a throat, and it was all over.

The Runt, who would one day be called Skarsnik, ate his first meal. His stomach ached with the newness of it. All the mushrooms in the cave were wilted. He had been among the last to emerge. Five more goblins sat on the far side of the cave, hunkered down around another corpse, wolfing down the flesh of their fellow.

The Runt regarded them warily.

A long journey upwards, from cave to crevice to crevasse the goblins went. One slipped hard and jammed his foot in a hole in a rock. His pleas were ignored and he was devoured alive by his fellows. This could so easily have been Skarsnik, and how different the world would have been then, how different my life. But it was not, and chance, or the gods, spared the future king as it would time and again. Another goblin was snatched away by a cave squig that burst from its burrow and vanished, leaving but the clack of jaws on the air and a terrified squeal to mark its passing. A third member of their party wandered towards whispers in the dark and was not seen again.

The remaining three spawnlings grew wary. Fear filled their heads. They milled about, wailing.

‘Up!’ said the Runt. ‘Up! Up!’ Words were coming to him. His skin was hardening, losing its slackness, the green of it deepening. He was smaller than the others, but his eyes were sharper, his mind quicker. His difference was there from the very beginning. He looked up and sniffed the air. ‘Up!’

They went up, following the Runt. He was small and weedy, but they listened.

Noise. Banging, a horrid wailing. They approached a broad crack in a wall. Cold blackness gave way to warm yellow light. Winds carried new scents to the goblin spawnlings. Their large noses sniffed the air, their ears wavered with uncertainty. The other spawnlings cowered, but the Runt pushed at them and scratched at their tender new skin with his nails. ‘On, on!’ he hissed.

They went through the crack.

They were on a stairway. The Runt recognised it for what it was, his feeling for the world instinctive, much about it uncoiling unbidden in his mind. The stairs stopped at a landing by two big stone bowls. The landing was choked with boulders, the way blocked further down entirely by rockfall debris.

Above them, torchlight glimmered. There was the sound of many voices, and music. ‘Come on! Come on! This way!’ The Runt gestured upwards. He was cold, but though he knew of warmth, he had yet to experience it first-hand, and so was not unsettled by his shivering skin.

The sound of drums and squigpipes battered their sensitive new ears. In the Runt’s birth-mind, there were no words for these things; of these, and so much more, he would have to learn, much as a human child does.

From cracks along the ruined stairs came other new-spawned runts, flopping onto the flat stones, out from the dark of the deep mountain roots as if born a second time. They came into the half-light of the stairs, and screwed their eyes up tight against it. Their faces were slack with wonder and fear. Mostly fear. Some bands, like Skarsnik’s, followed bold ones among their number, others skulked and prodded the smallest among them to the fore, instinct telling them to sacrifice the weak to save their own hides.

Soon scores of young goblins were creeping up the steps towards the noise.

Firelight flickered, casting crazed shadows that wheeled and danced on the ceiling. As he reached the top of the stairs, the Runt stopped. He slunk back behind a rock. His companions followed, not knowing what else to do.

A bonfire blazed on the landing. Some of the spawnlings bared their teeth and hissed at its hateful light, others of them shuddered in pleasure as its warmth hit their skin. Around the fire, goblins capered and leapt, long hoods capped with jingling bells or skulls whipping though the air as they danced.

The grizzled boss of the Backstairs Boys, Tarkit Fing-Finger, clapped, casting nervous looks to the giant goblin who sat upon his stone throne. The throne was the clan chief’s, but not today. Today Ibrit Dungstrangler, chief of all the Crooked Moon tribe, was touring his domains, and so Boss Tarkit stood.

‘Ibrit! Ibrit!’ sang the giggling, dancing goblins. Their eyes spun. They jumped high over the flames. ‘Ibrit! Ibrit! He is the best!’ The giant goblin grinned. He was huge, he seemed as big as a mountain to the Runt. He leaned on his double-headed axe, whose blades were wrought in the semblance of crescent moons mounted back to back. His hat was bulbous and vividly coloured, a patchwork of leering moons and grimacing suns. Ibrit’s nose bore the start of a fat scar that continued across his face, one eye white and dead, and his hands were stained deep brown, a result of the unpleasant habit that had given him his name.

The Runt watched as the other sproutlings staggered shivering towards the fire. At first, the adult goblins did not see these children, but then one and then another caught sight of them milling around at the edge of the landing. The Runt did not like the look in their eyes.

‘Lookee here!’ one squeaked. ‘Look at that!’

‘Runts! Fresh runts!’ shouted another. All the goblins on the landing had seen the runts. Their faces lit up.

The new-spawned were poked and prodded. Their ears were tweaked and noses were pulled. One was pushed into the fire, another was snatched up by an arm. ‘This one’s for dinner!’ called a goblin. Two more were plucked up from the floor, their necks wrung. They were swiftly gutted and prepared for roasting.

‘The moon! The crooked moon is out and shines on the rocks above! Runts come from da caves!’ screeched a goblin. A strange aura hung about him, as did the stink of mushroom liquor and fungus beer. ‘S’good, boss! It is a good fing! New runts!’ The goblin was as swivel-eyed as the maniac dancers. He pawed at the mail-clad sleeve of the king. ‘Oh yus! New runts for Ibrit Dungstrangler. From da Backstairs Boys, a gift, see, to fight the ratboys and the stunties!’

Dungstrangler stood and growled. He strode across the landing, sweeping new-spawned and adult night goblin alike aside with the shaft of his axe. ‘What use is runts? You lot is no good to me at all!’ he bellowed. ‘Look at you, skulking down here like a bunch of snotties. I need boys! I need mobs! Not… squig food!’ He plucked a squealing spawnling from the floor and threw it against the wall. It died with a wet crunch. ‘I want four mobs of good strong lads to fight with the ratboys by next two moon, or I’m gonna come down here and give these stairs to a bunch of greenies that know how to treat their chief!’

Ibrit Dungstrangler swaggered off up the stairs. His own boys, big, hard-headed Moonhat boss goblins armed to the teeth, took up their crescent swords and spears and grinned nastily at the Backstairs Boys as they went after their chief.

Tarkit Fing-Finger, Big Boss of the Backstairs Boys, picked at the thing on his finger that gave him his name. He scowled at a goblin that looked like it might try a quick back-stab, and punched him in the face. He glared at the ragged drunken goblin.

‘Oi, Duffskul! Now where the zog am I gonna get four mobs of boys to fight the rat-things?’

Duffskul shrugged. He looked at the sea of spawnlings cowering on the floor. They were being tormented by older goblins and clan snotlings alike.

Tarkit followed Duffskul’s gaze. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Oi! Gosgob, put that runt down! How’s he gonna fight dem ratboys if you eat him?’ He looked around his boys with incredulity. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Someone get Grobskab the runtboss in here! Now!’

The time of two moon came and went. Ibrit returned. He was angry that Tarkit did not have four mobs, but Tarkit wheedled and pleaded and showed Ibrit his new runts, and weren’t they coming on well? And won’t they be big and strong come the next fight? Ibrit let him live, and took two mobs of Tarkit’s big gobboes with him instead. Although, truth be told, Tarkit’s biggest were not so very big at all, for the Backstairs Boys were a poor clan. Food was scarce, and their birthing caves deep and mean.

Ibrit beat the ratboys, so they said, but an ambush after the battle by the Cave Clobberers, the Crooked Moon’s main rivals, did for most of them. Only five of the boys returned.

The Runt, as he became known – goblins are not terribly imaginative – was put into a runtgang with other runts, misfits and scrawny little ones that were neither snotling nor goblin but somewhere in between.

Weeks passed. The other runts became big and strong, for goblin young grow quick, and many were taken away to become real boys.

Not the one that would be Skarsnik. He stayed small and weak. For a long time, it looked like he’d never be bigger than a spawnling. That happened, sometimes, damning the greenskin in question to a halfway life. But still he lived and came to no harm. This was a most unusual state of affairs in the greenskins’ violent world.

Grobskab, the clan’s old slaver, noticed this scrawny little creature coming back to the pens night after night, at the head of his gang despite his diminutive stature, his followers’ arms straining under heaps of mushrooms, and he got to thinking about it. ‘Something funny about that one,’ Grobskab said. ‘Something strange.’ No one listened. ‘Runtbosses’, as Skarsnik called them, are notorious mutterers, their heads full of strange affections for their charges and other ungobliny ideas.

This affection was not exhibited by the runtboss’s two apprentices, Barfik and Snotruk – runtboys, Skarsnik translated their title, although I doubt the accuracy of all these names. Barfik was lazy and greedy, but Snotruk was by far the worst. From the first day he seemed to have it in for the Runt, indeed, it was he who first named him such. All spawnlings are called ‘runt’ until they have earned themselves a proper name, but Skarsnik’s growth was so retarded, he was simply ‘The Runt’, and it was not a term of affection. It may be Snotruk picked on the Runt because he had noticed Grobskab watching the scrawny goblin with approval, and that kindled a feeling akin to jealousy in his black little heart. Or it might simply be that the Runt’s size made him a target, as is the way with the goblins; they prey on the weak.

Under the command of this sadistic runtboy, the Runt’s team were made to gather mushrooms in the most dangerous of places, venture down burrows to haul the fierce creatures therein out by their tails, and other noisome jobs, jobs snotlings are too foolish to do properly, and other goblins will not. The Backstairs Boys were too poor to have slaves, and it fell to the weakest of their own kind to perform these menial tasks.

‘Sometimes,’ Skarsnik told me, ‘da ratboys would come out ov holes and get one of us, or wild cave squigs would chomp us up, or one of us would fall down a big hole. But I survived.’

By this point in his tale, Skarsnik had sent most of his cronies away from the dais. The wild-eyed shaman remained in his tent, two large goblins stood either side of the warlord. These were merely for show, for what has a goblin that has a giant cave squig as his constant companion to fear? It had grown cold up there on the pinnacle of rock without the press of dirty green bodies, and I was grateful for the iron firebowls. More chilling was the sense of loneliness. I wondered if the dwarfs who built the place felt that way; perhaps not, for they are a stoic folk. But I wondered if Skarsnik felt it. Perhaps he did.

‘I was different, see,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Oh, dey called me da Runt and dey beat and hurt me, but I was always quicker than them, up here.’ He tapped a finger on his temple. ‘You know what I mean? Da chains we had,’ he rattled Gobbla’s chain, ‘dey was so easy to get out ov. When da runtboss told us to work, I’d set me gang up and sneak away. We’d be down dere days, sometimes, and as long as I came back wiv da goods, it didn’t matter. I’d see fings… incredible fings.’

Skarsnik told me of how he clambered out of a certain crack in the wall in the mushroom caverns, the closest things these greenskins have to farms. The crack was hidden behind a rill in the rock and became his secret door to a world far greater than the other goblins were aware of: a door that led everywhere. ‘I had dis snottie... Snottie, I called him.’ A faraway look came into Skarsnik’s eyes. ‘He was my best pal. I found him, one time, he was gonna be eaten by cave scorpions. I fought dat was well funny, and I sat back to watch, making bets wiv meself. But den I fought, why? Why should I watch the little tyke get et? The runtboss, he had snotties, and dey did all sorts for him, and I fought it’d be good to have me own to go ’n do all sorts fer me. So I dropped some rocks on da scorps, and saved him. First fing he did was bite me, little sod.’ He rubbed at his hand. ‘I wanted to smash him so bad for dat, but I didn’t. And he became me pal.’

The Runt took Snottie under his wing, keeping him safe at night and feeding him morsels. He trained him to find the best fleshrooms, the meaty kinds most prized by the night goblins, or sniff out hidden squig holes and keep the Runt safe.

Skarsnik’s face grew soft at these reminiscences. ‘We got a system, me and da boys,’ explained Skarsnik to me. ‘We got Snottie to sniff out da best of da fleshrooms, not ones they uvvers’d find, nah, ones up little holes and in nasty dank cracks. Den I’d send in Snottie or some of da littler lads to get ’em out. Diglit, who was me best boss in dem days, small gobbo, but he had da smarts.’ Skarsnik tapped his head again. ‘Not fick like a lot of uvvers. He or me took the ’shrooms den, to our little stash. Shifted a rock, back of a hole, wrapped ’em up in old cloth to keep ’em fresh. We’d start a ruck wiv da uvver gangs, the runtboss or one of his boys’d have to come and sort it out, and Diglit could go on to da stash, safe as you please. Snotruk and da uvver runtboys’d be none the wiser. S’mazing what you can get wiv a bit of fleshroom. Get you anyfing, if you ask da right person.’

From early in his career, Skarsnik was scheming. Goblins are wily as a rule, but Skarsnik took it to heights undreamt of for one of his low status. His secret wares gained him a new job, feeding the Backstairs Boys’ sole pair of prisoners, an old dwarf and one of the rat beasts that so infest the depths. Skarsnik would sit for hours by the cage of the dwarf, listening to him rave, wondering why he was not the same as the others, for by then it was clear to the Runt that he thought differently to his fellows. The rat said nothing, either glared at him from the depths of its cage, or ran round and round the cell until the Runt felt obliged to pelt it with rocks and shout at it to stop.

Other times, he’d creep out of the runt pit or the mushroom caves with Snottie. Snotruk the runtboy was wise to his comings and goings, but there was always something to distract him, something to draw him away. And if he ever did make it to where the Runt’s gang laboured, he’d find a grinning crew, the Runt at its head, a pile of mushrooms worth a chief’s ransom heaped about them.

Together, Snottie and the Runt explored the vastness of the under-mountain, although it was some time before he braved the city proper. They traversed old goblin delvings, ventured into the dwarf mines, some sealed for long years, or skirted nervously around the outskirts of the ratmen’s homes, and the Runt began to get an inkling of how vast the ratmen’s holdings truly were, and also how small those of the night goblins were.

Time went on, and Skarsnik grew bolder. Fleshroom payments to Barfik got him out of the cave at night. He began following parties of the ratmen in the dark. They never knew he was there, for few things are more adept at hiding in the caves than a lone night goblin. They searched and dug constantly, and the Runt realised they were looking for something.

‘That could be useful, eh Snottie? To know what they is after…’ he whispered in the dark. He resolved to find out, and began to follow their foraging parties with redoubled interest.

Only once, Skarsnik told me, was he nearly caught. A breeze was blowing over him towards a party of scavenging ratmen. A ratman, bigger and more muscular than the rest, watched over a group of wretched slaves as they laboured, moving piles of rock in pursuit of their mysterious prize. Its nose came up, whiskers quivering in the blue gloom. It skittered towards his hiding place with surprising suddenness, but by then the Runt had already gone.

He did not make the same mistake again, staying downwind of the ratmen from then on.

He was rewarded some time later, when he witnessed the ratmen recover large nuggets of some glowing material from a buried well that made them very excited. This, then: wyrdstone, this was what they searched for.

This piece of information joined all the others in the Runt’s unusual mind, linking themselves together like the labyrinthine tunnels under the mountain. Crooked ways that wormed through his brain, never going where you might expect, but all ultimately joined into one. By now, he had a good understanding of the comings and goings of everyone from the Backstairs Boys’ tiny domain. He had explored the territory around them, save for those passages he was sure were further on down the stairs, on the other side of the rockfall. He could find no passage to lead him past the blockage. When he tried, he became confused and lost, ending up where he came from without really knowing why. He became somewhat obsessed with it, returning night after night to the choked-off stairs, venturing deep into the ratmen’s territory, but to the other side of the rockfall he could not go. No tunnel or way seemed to lead there.

He grew bolder and began to wander the abandoned dwarf city. The Backstairs Boys’ realm was near the bottom of the dwarfs’ old kingdom, and its true glories were found in the levels above. At first, he dared only those lower parts, close to hand. Much of the Eight Peaks was entirely empty, stripped of treasures and left to the dust and silence. Goblins or skaven might live here or there, and in some places in near permanence, but many territories were periodically emptied by their endless battles, or simply left unoccupied, inhabited only sporadically by drifters and outcasts.

The city was a frightening place for a night goblin, the marks of its builders everywhere. The Runt knew that there had been no dwarfs for a long time, but their works looked as if they were waiting, the statues and the doors, the long avenues and soaring halls, waiting for their masters to come back.

Most impressive of all was that place named the Abyss of Iron’s Dream, a vast, river-carved cleft that divided a quarter of the dwarfs’ city from the rest. The chasm cut through seven levels of the city, those which the dwarfs call ‘deeps’, or so Skarsnik told me. The dwarfs had squared it and smoothed the river’s way and incorporated it into their city’s design. The ceiling was shaped into angular sculpture; large rectangular lights in the ceiling let the day in from outside. The river they had trammelled in a channel of dressed stone, its many tributaries pouring not from flowstone tubes, but the stern faces of dwarf heroes. A hundred there were of these titanic effigies, or so Skarsnik said, each one sporting a waterfall beard, crusted now with flowstone and stalactites.

The Runt had chanced upon the sound of the subterranean river, and being curious, followed it. It had led him onto a broad platform near the base of the Abyss.

‘Wowser,’ he said. ‘Wowser.’ Skarsnik told me that was his reaction, as he gazed at this unimaginable space for long minutes, so huge no night goblin would dare live there. He explored the first few levels of it. He found ancient bones – dwarf, goblin and ratman – scattered on the platforms that jutted from the sloping walls. Always, that tall space hung over him, terrifying him with its openness. It had him thinking of the sky, that terrible place where the bad moon and its pale twin lived at night, and that during the day played host to the burning malice of the Evil Sun. A world without a lid. He became fascinated by that concept, obsessed by it as much as it scared him.

He thought to himself, the places he had heard were full of death and fear were not quite so full of death and fear as the other goblins supposed. He thought, perhaps the same was true of the surface too.

One day, the Runt decided to go all the way up.

‘I spent ages looking for a way out. Days. One day, Snottie found a fing, like a chimney,’ Skarsnik said. ‘He was leapin’ about and squealin’ and pointin’ da way I’d got him to when he found a big stash of fleshrooms. It was through me secret tunnel, the one in the mushroom caves. There was dis bit I must’ve been past an ’undred times, but he found sumfink there. Behind this soft and crumbly rock, I found dis hole, a crack. Dere was loose rocks bunged up in it, so I pulled ’em away. I stuck me head in, then me arms, then me legs, and sort of crawled in. I was gonna give ’im such a beating for distracting me, but it got me interested, dis hole, so I gave him a little treat instead, bit o’ rat toe. It was his favourite, dat. Da hole went up and up, all the way, and a little ways in, down and down the same. I didn’t even fink about it, it was safe, see, no one knew it was dere, no stink of ratboy, gobbo, or squig to it, and dere int much more dan dat dat could have fitted in dere. I stuffed Snottie in me robes, and I started to climb.’ He smiled and nodded, his charms jangling on his hat. ‘Gork’s teef, it was a long climb dat! I fought me arms would come off they hurts so bad. Nothing but gobboes in the upper levels them days, and not many at dat cause we was always fighting each uvver and da ratboys, not like now, so’s I had to be careful. But I wasn’t afraid. Not me.’

The Runt went higher than any other Backstairs Boy had ever been, passing corridors untouched by living creatures since the fall of the dwarf empire, isolated chambers closed by rockfalls or hidden by the efforts of the mountain folk. He rested by sealed dwarf tombs until the feeling crept back into his arms. He pulled food from pristine fields of mushrooms. The chimney changed, becoming lined with fine blocks of stone. The air grew colder, losing its staleness. Snottie whimpered, and the Runt shushed him as best he could while he climbed.

A wind blew, growing stronger and stronger, bringing with it strange smells and a sharpness that made the Runt’s ears quiver. He mastered his fear and pressed on. For long hours, he’d been in near total darkness, his way lit only by glowing fungus and flickering dwarf rune lamps. Now, a dimness permeated the chimney, a bluish light the likes of which the Runt had only glimpsed through the ceiling of the Abyss of Iron’s Dream. His eyes narrowed. He nearly stopped and turned back.

But he did not.

The chimney turned a corner, levelled out, and led into a cave.

The cave mouth was open to the outside, a circle of light blinding to his eyes.

‘I sat dere like a frightened snottie for a long, long time,’ Skarsnik said to me. ‘I daren’t go on, not into all dat light!’ He shuddered at the memory of it. ‘Den I fought about all dem bosses and boys what called me Runt, and what pushed me around and hit me and took me mushrooms and laughed when it hurt. I fought, “I’m better dan dat, I’m better dan dem!” They’d be scared, they would. So I won’t be. Snottie shook hard, and I fought “Am I a snottie? Am I?”’ He looked at me defiantly; he was angry, reliving the slights of the past. ‘No! I is a gobbo, not a shaking snottie! So I went towards the light, and now I is a king.’ He chuckled to himself, deep in his throat, and kicked his legs over one throne arm, lolling there. He squeezed his eyes closed. ‘At first me eyes hurt, but then I could see, and I sat down and looked out.

‘It wasn’t a cave, not a real one. Stunties made it. I was in a hole like a carved stunty mouth. Underneath me feet was da whole of the old stunty city! Spread out, like wot’s on a map or sumfink. All da buildings old and fallen in, wiv plants and green bits. Dere were fires and stuff down dere, orcses and others camping out under da stars. Big mountains, lots of ’em went round it in a big circle like, like really big Big ’Uns all standing to attention. Dere was this fing, like a big circle.’ He held up his forefinger and thumb in a ring, and peered with one red eye through it. ‘And I fought, “What’s dat?” And I said to Snottie, who was whimpering and squeaking all the time. “Look at dat! Dat’s the Evil Sun, it’s da sun, all bright an big and bad.”

‘But I looked at it. And I looked at it. And I wasn’t scared. It’s just a big fire in da sky, I fought, that’s all it is. Nuffink there to frighten me. Is dat what all dat lot down there are scared of? It’s just a light! So I laughed at it, and it ran away and hid behind the mountains and I knew it was scared of me. So I was feeling all brave. Mork spoke to me den, and not for the first time. He said “You is gonna be a boss!”, that’s all, “You is gonna be a boss!”, but what words, ’umie!’ He swung his feet back to the floor, and stood, his hands held high in fists, like he were challenging the sun again. ‘Oh, I stood up and I shouted, and my voice bounced all around the old city and dere was nuffink there to say anyfing to me. And I fought to myself, I fought, and I stood up and said: “One day, all dis will be mine, by Gork or Mork, or possibly both, one day it will all be mine!” And you know what else? I knew it too.’

He hissed and stared hard at me. ‘That’s the truth of it, ’umie. That’s the truth of it.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

TWO HEADS ARE WORSE THAN ONE

‘Where the zog have you been?’

Snotruk. This was the worst luck possible for the Runt.

The Runt was awake instantly. ‘No-nowhere Snotruk!’

‘Oi! Barfik, where’s he been?’

Barfik pursed his lips. ‘The Runt? Right there, I reckon.’

The runtboy tugged at the Runt’s chains hard. ‘What’s this then, Runt?’ he said. His squigskin apron creaked as he knelt down and pointed at the Runt’s knees. ‘All scabbed and scratched. You get that in the cave? I don’t think so.’

‘I ain’t done nothing, Snotruk!’ The Runt had seen Snottie raise his tiny head over the stone that concealed his sleeping place. Should the runtboy see him, there would be trouble.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Snotruk. His ears fanned out aggressively, and he clicked his teeth together. ‘You’re always up to something, Runt. I don’t like you. One day I am going to find how you get out of these chains, because I know you do! You are sneaky, too sneaky by half. Runtboss says leave you alone, but I don’t like you, I really don’t.’ Snotruk sniffed and hitched up his belt. ‘I got a replacement for your gang.’ He nodded to the irons where Naffgrot had been chained, before he’d annoyed Snotruk one too many times and felt the whip bite too deep. The Runt’s old gang were all drifting away, either dead or grown. The Runt remained. He was still too small to be a boy, he hadn’t grown right. Skarsnik confided in me later that when he went up the chimney and sat, hands clasped about his knees to ward off the cold, he worried about his size; although he hurriedly insisted he always knew he would grow. I did not believe him.

New runts were coming in from fresh sproutings, taking the places of the Runt’s old gang. Snotruk’s name of ‘The Runt’ for him was becoming ever more apposite. ‘You going to say thank you?’ he said evilly.

The Runt swallowed. ‘Er, ta?’

‘Ha!’ shouted Snotruk. ‘Don’t thank me yet, you haven’t met him… them… er… it.’

He swung his whip carelessly as he walked out of the runtcave, clouting runts on the head as he went. ‘Whoops,’ he said. ‘Oh dear,’ and, ‘I didn’t see you there, sorry.’

A short while later, while they were eating their mouldering mushroom porridge, they brought in the Runt’s new gangmate. Snotruk and Barfik led him in. The old runtboss Grobskab was there too, watching over them.

‘Watch out! He’s an interesting specimen, Snotruk, don’t you mess him up! Two heads! Blessed by the gods!’ shouted the runtboss.

‘He’s too stupid to be blessed, boss,’ said Barfik wearily. He tugged at a leather strap leading out of the door.

The goblin they brought in was fully grown, bigger even than fully grown. It was the way that, besides young spawnlings, the biggest snotlings, the undersized, the feeble-minded, and slaves caught from other tribes and races, the odd genuine freak would be brought to the runtgangs to labour in the mushroom fields and beast pens.

This was such a freak. The new goblin’s skin was a pasty grey, not any one of the vivid green shades a proper goblin’s skin should be. Its legs were short and stumpy, its arms were too long, and its shoulders unnaturally broad. It waddled as it walked, bumping its barrel-shaped body into everything – the walls, the door, the runtboys… It did not help matters that it had two heads, and they argued forcefully with one another as to which way they should go.

‘No, Urk go this way! This way!’ shouted one head.

‘No! No! Ur-hur, er, no! Durk go that way!’ shouted the other. And so it staggered violently from side to side. A collar around each neck led to two straps, one held by Snotruk, the other by Barfik. They swore and tugged, trying to get it to go in one direction.

The runts stopped eating and stared. A two-headed goblin was a sight beyond compare.

‘What the zog is that, boss?’ said Diglit.

‘It’s a goblin with two heads, you idiot,’ said the Runt.

‘Sorry boss.’

‘Don’t be sorry, don’t be an idiot.’

‘Sorry boss.’

‘What did I just say?’

‘Sor–’

The Runt hit Diglit around the head.

‘Ow!’

The shambling goblin was prodded and tugged over to the Runt’s gang.

‘He’s all yours, Runt,’ chuckled Snotruk. ‘And now your gang is full up again, I’ll be wanting more mushrooms from your lot, get it?’

The Runt’s lip curled. There was no way he could get his boys to work harder, they were already working far harder than everyone else. It would be impossible if they were having to deal with this directionless monster, and Snotruk knew it. He was setting the Runt up for a beating.

Work down in the caves proved harder than ever. The new goblin Urkdurk, or Two Head as they dubbed him (I have mentioned, have I not, that goblins lack a certain imaginative capability?), stood around arguing with itself, or eating the crops they were supposed to be harvesting, or became so confused it stood there dribbling. The Runt’s runts beat and berated their new companion, but he was stolid and immovable, and as strong as an ox. Snotruk watched them the whole time, a look of smug amusement on his face. This was bad enough, but it also meant that the Runt could not pull off any of his tricks.

‘What we gonna do, boss?’ asked Diglit. ‘He’s eaten as many mushrooms as we’ve picked! And with that zogger standing there,’ he narrowed his eyes at Snotruk, ‘there’s no way I can get down to our stash.’

‘Yeah,’ said the Runt. Urkdurk was doing something interesting, staring at a patch of bright lichen amid the mushrooms, both heads grinning idiotically. ‘Hang on a mo’, I think I’ve got an idea.’

‘What, forming in your head?’ said Diglit.

‘No, in me dangly bits. Of course in me head, you idiot!’

‘Sorry, boss.’

The Runt kicked his underling, although in truth Diglit was now taller than he, and therefore more of an overling. ‘Don’t be sorry. Get me a glowshroom.’

Diglit went to do as he was told. Minutes later, the Runt stood in front of Urkdurk with a shining mushroom that gave off a sickly yellow light. ‘Here! Here! Hey Urkdurk! Urkdurk! Look at the pretty light, look at it, hey, pretty pretty!’

Two pairs of eyes, devoid of intelligence, focused on the glowshroom.

‘Me Durk,’ said one head.

‘Me Urk,’ said the other.

‘We Durkurk,’ said the first.

‘Nah! Urkdurk!’ said the second, and they fell to arguing again, the left hand slapping the right head, and so on.

‘Mork’s teeth,’ said the Runt. He pulled a hand down his face. ‘Let’s try again. Hey! Look at the pretty light!’

Snotruk was by now incapacitated with laughter, slapping his squigskin-clad knees. The other runts and spawnlings worked on in the mushroom fields, but even though they were frightened of the runtboys’ lashes, they stole many glances over to see what the Runt was doing with his freak and grinned with undisguised glee.

The Runt made the mushroom dance on its long stalk, sprinkling glow spores all around, until he finally had the attention of both Urkdurk’s heads. ‘There see, look, pretty?’

Urkdurk’s heads nodded together. ‘Pretty!’ they said.

‘Do you want it?’

‘Yeah! Oh yeah!’

‘Well, you can have it, and as many more of the same as you like, but you both have to do what I say, you got that? No more arguing! You got to be organised!’

Two sets of frowns confronted the runt. ‘Huh?’ said one head. ‘Duh?’ said the other.

‘Never mind. Do what I say?’

Urkdurk nodded. His hands reached out for the mushroom. At the same time.

The Runt snatched it back. ‘A-a-a-a!’ He admonished. ‘You gotta work to get paid. Pick up that pile of rocks there, and put them there. Then the other boys can use ’em to get to the top, all right, and pick them big mushrooms up there what no one can reach.’ He pointed to the mushrooms, high on a ledge.

Urkdurk lumbered off to pile the rocks, the heads talking rapidly about the pretty lights. The Runt nodded with satisfaction. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Snotruk glower. This made him glad.

‘Nice work, boss,’ said Diglit. ‘Nice trick. How’d you know about the glowy rocks then?’

For a perilous second, the Runt’s world tilted onto its side. Had Diglit been spying on him? The Runt reined in his emotions. Another goblin would have lashed out there and then, but not the Runt. He would give nothing away.

‘What do you mean?’ he said neutrally.

Diglit took on a frightened look. He was finally growing into a proper boy – helped, no doubt, by the fleshrooms the Runt had had his crew hiding away – and was now a head taller than the Runt. But despite their size difference, Diglit was frightened of his gang boss. There was something… ungobliny about him. ‘Nothing, boss! Nothing! I thought you knew already, I should have told you, like you’re always saying.’

The Runt felt the tension within him dissolve. Diglit hadn’t been spying on him. He did, however, know something the Runt did not. He kept his face stern as he tried to force it out of Diglit. ‘What? What haven’t you told me? I told you to tell me everything, Diglit! You got to be organised! How can we be organised if you’s holding out on me? We’re mates, right?’

Diglit’s ears flexed up and down. The Runt grabbed one between his thumb and forefinger and tweaked. Diglit squeaked. ‘I know! I know! I’m sorry, boss!’

‘Spit it out!’

‘It’s Two Head, Urkdurk, he’s… Ow, boss, it’s hurting! He’s said he comes from a cave with a glowy rock in it, that’s all. I suppose that’s why he likes the glowshroom, that’s all! Ow, boss, let go, please!’

The Runt released Diglit, and the bigger goblin skulked away, rubbing at his ear, the other pressed tight against his head in submission.

The Runt’s head exploded with possibilities. He strode towards the mutant goblin and grabbed its thick shoulder. ‘Tell me about the glowy rocks, Urkdurk,’ he hissed in an ear.

‘Durkurk.’ Insisted one head.

‘I’m just going to call you Two Head,’ said the Runt, in exasperation. ‘You’ve got two heads. The only difference is I can’t make my mind up which is thicker! Now, tell me about the glowy rocks!’ The Runt was aware that Snotruk was coming down the slope of the shroom cave, his whip out. The Runt had given Snotruk all the excuse he needed to whip him hard.

‘Glowy rocks, like in the cave what we was growed from!’ said Urk, or maybe Durk.

‘Yeah,’ said the other. ‘Pretty green!’

The Runt was smiling as Snotruk spun him round and started to whip him hard. He didn’t stop smiling, not even when he was criss-crossed in lines of blood and Snotruk was panting from the effort of beating him.

Goblins are tougher than they look, sharing the hardiness common to all the green races. The Runt hurt for a while, but the hurt faded. Five days came and went, and he was ready. Much planning had gone into this venture, and he had to pick his moment well.

It was after the day’s harvesting time. The goblins slept. The Runt waited an hour or so before he picked the locks on his chains, crept from his patch of cave floor, still stiff and sore from his beating but mobile nonetheless, and kicked Diglit and Two Head awake.

The Runt held a finger to his lips and freed his comrades. Then he went over to Snottie’s hole and pushed the sleeping creature aside. He pulled out a piece of fleshroom he kept there for emergencies and walked over to the cave mouth.

The runtcave had once been a set of dwarf-hewn rooms, the door to them one of those the Runt had first seen on the landing the day he had arrived at the Backstairs. Over the years, the goblins had enlarged and upset the original architecture until it looked nothing like it once had: the rooms were all knocked into one, and the space much bigger. A goblin-carved tunnel led down from the back into the shroomcaves beyond. It looked like any greenskin’s lair. Only the little stairway leading up to the landing doorway, barred with heavy bands of iron, hinted at its origins.

The three goblins crept up the stairs, Diglit and the Runt swearing quietly and hitting Two Head every time the mutant goblin made too much noise.

Outside the door, Backstairs Boys slumbered around their firepit’s embers. Everyone was asleep, everyone except the mad old dwarf in the rooms across the landing, whose muttering and wails drifted up and down the Backstairs.

Him, and Barfik the runtboy.

Barfik straightened up and stretched out his arms when the Runt approached. ‘I don’t like this at all. Three of you? Grobskab’ll have me hide if you gets caught.’

‘Fleshroom, Barfik,’ said the Runt. ‘Tasty fleshroom, nice and fresh, not likes the old leather you gets.’

‘I can eats a lot.’

‘I can see that.’

Barfik patted his fat belly, bulging under his robes. ‘Don’t get cheeky. I could turn you in, Runt,’ said the runtboy.

‘Yeah, and then you’ll never get no more fleshrooms for your very own self, will ya?’ said the Runt. ‘You haven’t done it yet and you won’t do it now, will you? You likes what I got.’ The Runt slapped a big piece of fleshroom into the runtboy’s hand. ‘There’s extra there for letting Two Head and Diglit out.’

Barfik weighed the slab of mushroom in his hand. ‘All right, I will lets you out. No promises mind if you’re noticed. And you keep the good stuff coming or I’m going to “catch” you one day when you escape, you understand?’ Barfik waved his spear meaningfully. ‘Then it’s meat, not mushrooms, I’ll be having for breakfast.’

The Runt nodded. Barfik looked around. All the Backstairs Boys remained asleep. Light glowed from the doorway leading down to the prison cells opposite. The dwarf’s cries increased in intensity; he shouted a long stream of words in his own tongue, and screamed. The guards were up, tormenting their charge.

Barfik peered about, checking the coast was clear. ‘All right,’ said Barfik, ‘off with you, back by night, all right?’

He pulled back the iron bar holding the gate closed and let the three goblins out.

‘You better be back before they all wake up.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the Runt. ‘Like always. Trust me.’

Barfik pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Not if me life depended on it, Runt.’

Shepherding Two Head around the sleeping night goblins, Diglit and the Runt went looking for the glowy rocks.

‘All right Two Head, show us the way! There’s some tasty squig in it for you, nice and fresh, you want it?’ said the Runt once they were safely down by the rockfall.

‘Yeah-eh!’ said Urk, or perhaps it was Durk.

‘This is never going to work,’ said Diglit with a whimper. His ears were flat and he was sweating with fear.

‘It’ll work,’ said the Runt.

And so it did. Urkdurk led them through one of the fissures that riddled the walls of the Backstairs towards the rockfall. Rather than going down, whence the Runt had come, they took a crooked passage upward. The Runt had been that way many times before, but eventually they came to a turn in the passage he’d not noticed before. The ways under the mountain were numerous, and many were hidden behind pillars of rock or stands of mushrooms.

They went a long way, and Diglit began to whine and became fearful they would be gone too long, but the Runt would not listen. They pushed on. Soon scents and sounds came to them that the Runt recognised as being of the surface. He slapped Diglit, whose whining had become somewhat burdensome to his ears. ‘Calm down, you an elf or something?’

They came to what looked like a blank wall, but Urkdurk did a little step to the left, and disappeared. At the wall, the Runt saw that the rock overlapped itself, hiding a fissure which led into a square cave.

‘It was a stunty hole,’ Skarsnik described it to me, slapping a fist into his palm. He folded the palm over the fist, and leered at me. ‘Sumfink had opened it up, and then closed itself over da top. Dere was a trickle of light out da top, a square hole, but da rest was dark and glowy green, from da big rock in da middle of da cave…’

‘Glowy green rock!’ said Two Head.

‘Hur hur!’ said Two Head’s other head.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the Runt. He craned his neck at the light coming in from above. It was a well, he reckoned, long dry. The bottom of it had cracked and the water had rushed out. Some days later, he explored further up and found that the well had served a dwarf fort on the shoulder of the mountain overlooking Mad Dog Pass, long since collapsed into rubble.

‘I don’t like this, boss,’ said Diglit, his ears flat against his head as he stared fearfully at the daylight and the rock. ‘I don’t like it! It stinks funny.’

‘Shut up, Diglit, let me think.’

The wyrdstone was so deep-green as to be almost black. Strange lights swirled over its facets, and a dim glow that was neither green nor even true light seeped from it. The stone was very large, as big as three orcs at least, thought the Runt, and if the ratmen had become so excited by the tiny fragments he’d seen them collect, imagine what they might do for one this size…

He hit upon an audacious plan; it had but one flaw.

‘Now, how we going to shift it?’ he murmured. ‘That’s the thing…’

‘Shift it? Shift it? Have you gone mad? Look at this place! It’s a stunty hole. They’s made it, I don’t like it!’ squeaked Diglit.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Diglit, who do think made them stairs we live on?’

The Runt took in the rest of the cave. Warped birthshroom stalks bent at odd angles all round the fringes of the wall. There was a pit dug out of the loose shale at the foot of one blackened example, presumably where Two Head had pulled itself from the floor. The other mushrooms had borne no fruit; all save one, but the twisted thing that lay dead at its broad foot was not worthy of the name of goblin.

‘This is real bad, boss, real bad.’

‘Go, Diglit,’ said the Runt, as he gestured at the wyrdstone boulder. ‘Go on, give it a heave.’

‘No.’

‘It’s just a glowy rock.’

‘No. I’m not doing it.’ Diglit’s ears flared up from his head and he hissed. He was defying his boss, a move that could not end well.

The Runt produced a bent knife from somewhere within his robes. ‘I got this for a pair of puffballs. Bent as a squig foot, but it’s nice and sharp and will slip into your snivelling guts nice and easy. Now–’ He licked his lips. ‘Give it a heave.’

Diglit scowled at the Runt, judging his chances against the smaller goblin, but Two Head towered protectively behind the gang boss, and so Diglit went to the rock.

‘All right!’ He spat on his hands and bent low, hooking his fingers under the stone. ‘Feels all funny, like tingly,’ he said, puffing and heaving. ‘I can’t shift it.’

‘Didn’t think so,’ said the Runt.

‘Then why ask me to try?’

‘I wanted to see what happened. Glowy green, Gork or Mork’s work that. Magic. Want to see what it does.’

Diglit held up his hand and shrieked, his ears standing near upright with terror. ‘Boss! Boss! Me fingers has gone all funny!’ His fingers writhed as if the bones were melting and the nails wished to dance. ‘Boss! We got to go back, tell Duffskul about this! Got to!’ Diglit whimpered as his fingers turned into writhing worms. ‘He can put it right, can’t he boss?’

‘No. We ain’t going to no Duffskul.’

Diglit’s eyes narrowed, his ensorcelled fingers forgotten for the moment. He growled and straightened up. ‘I think I’m going to say no now.’ He walked over to the Runt and looked down at him. The Runt gave him a mild stare in return. ‘You really are a runt. I don’t know why I let you boss me for so long.’ He slapped the Runt hard on the face with his good hand, forcing him to stumble. ‘What you going to do? We got to tell Duffskul and the chief, then they’ll let us out of the runtgang and we can be proper boys.’

‘I got plans for that rock, Diglit.’

‘Well I ain’t going to let you do them.’

The Runt showed his teeth. He had known that this day would come. Diglit was bigger than he by a head, and to greenskins, size is the only measure of power.

‘Oh, Diglit, me old mate.’ He held his arms out wide. ‘Let’s just talk this out? I didn’t mean it. I’d never stab you, specially not in the guts.’ The Runt offered his friend a hand. Diglit drew back into his robes, ears quivering with uncertainty.

‘Come on, Diglit! I want you to help, be rich! Be strong with me! Haven’t you always been my best boss?’ The Runt moved forward, shifting his footing as he came, face wide and friendly, knife gripped tight in his hand.

Diglit snuffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Maybe it’s time I was the boss.’

‘I knew you was going to say that.’ The Runt threw himself at his friend, sharp nails scratching for the eyes. They fell to the floor. Diglit was stronger and bigger, and angry, but the Runt was possessed of a cool certainty and purpose Diglit could never know. Urkdurk watched them with confusion, dismay creeping over his twin faces. Rotten mushrooms collapsed under them as they rolled around, and then Diglit had the Runt on his back, smacking the knife from his hand. Fingers and things that used to be fingers wrapped around the Runt’s throat. The Runt choked and gasped, his hand scrabbling around the floor. It closed around a rock, and he brought it up with force into Diglit’s head. There was a crunch and a scream. Diglit’s hands flew up to his head, which now sported a large dent. The Runt bucked and thrashed underneath him and flipped him off, as he scrabbled for his knife. Diglit stood and keened as he staggered after the Runt.

The Runt stepped behind his friend and brought up the knife to his neck. Diglit’s noise reached horrible heights as the Runt sawed the knife across his throat. His squeals abruptly became a choking gurgle. Blood sprayed. He clutched at his neck and collapsed to the floor.

The Runt kicked him.

‘Rule number two,’ the Runt said. He spat on the corpse. ‘Ain’t no one more important than me.’ He wiped his knife on his robe. ‘I said I got plans,’ he said. ‘Idiot.’

‘What happened to Diglit?’ asked Two Head’s Urk head (or perhaps it was his Durk head).

‘Him, ah, don’t worry about him. He’s having a nice little sleep,’ said the Runt. ‘I can’t shift it.’ He tapped the bloodied knife on his teeth. ‘But I needs a bit, a little itty, bitty bit. How do I get a piece of this back down to the stairs?’

He managed, after a time. He threw rocks hard at the wyrdstone boulder for a long while. He dared not touch it, not after what had happened to Diglit’s hand. He grew frustrated, for the rock was as hard as rock is. ‘Zogging glowy rock!’ he shouted. He threw the biggest, sharpest stone he could carry at it as hard as he could. He was rewarded with a bang that came from more than stone hitting stone. Green sparks pattered onto the floor of the cave, bringing with it the stench of rotting eggs and latrines, and the metallic taste of magic.

Several splinters of the wyrdstone rattled to the floor.

‘Aha!’ he shouted with glee. He rushed to scoop them up, but stopped himself as his fingers came within a hair’s-breadth of the stone. Strange sensations washed from the fragments, and it was warm in a vile way.

He looked about the cave. His eyes narrowed as he took in Two Head. He had an idea. He took Two Head’s birthshroom down. It was stiff and dense as leather now, dried hard in the mountain air. He cut it with his knife into strips, and chewed these until they were pliable. He wove a little pouch from these strips and, using it as protection, picked up one of the glowing green pebbles. He grimaced as he reached for it, his body leaning back instinctively. His ears flattened themselves.

He plucked up a fragment and danced back. Quickly he inverted the pouch, sealing the wyrdstone inside. ‘Hehehehe,’ he chuckled, and did a little jig. Then stopped. He pushed out his lower jaw, rubbing the sharp points of his teeth on his top lip. The rock was still warm, even through the pouch, and it still didn’t feel right, although he was not experiencing the tingling Diglit had reported. He had another notion.

‘Here, Two Head. How would you like to carry this nice piece of glowing rock back home for me? It’s all lovely and warm, and there’s a nice piece of fleshroom in it for you.’

‘Hurhur,’ said Urk or Durk. ‘Fleshroom. Hur. Yummy.’

The goblin closed a big, grey fist around the stone in its pouch.

‘Now,’ he said nodding to Diglit’s corpse. ‘How’s about a little something to eat before we goes home?’

It was something of a miracle that they returned without incident, and the Runt resolved never to take one of his colleagues with him on his adventures again. They had to wait for the Backstairs Boys’ sentries to turn around and head back up the stairs before dashing for the runtcave. Barfik let them back in. Some of the other runts stirred and blinked as the gate drew back, but none of them said anything. They were rather enamoured of the condition of life, no matter how hard it may have been.

‘You’re cutting it fine, ain’t you?’ Barfik hissed. ‘And where’s the other one?’

‘Don’t know,’ lied the Runt. ‘Wandered off.’

‘Yeah, right. What if he comes back?’

‘Oh, he won’t be coming back. Got too near the rat tunnels. We’ll say he got et by the runts, shall we? You squeal on me, Barfik, you’re for the lash too.’

‘Lash?’ scoffed Barfik. ‘They’ll smash your head in with a rock.’

‘That lash stings real bad, Barfik,’ said the Runt. ‘Them teeth, ooh they bite deep.’ The Runt poked a finger up his nose, pulled out some crusted filth, and bit down on it by way of demonstration.

Barfik, who often used the whip but had felt its kiss but rarely before, quailed and shoved the Runt back to his sleeping place.

So they did say Diglit had been eaten, and that was the truth. Who was to gainsay the Runt? They were goblins after all, and goblins will get hungry in the night.

CHAPTER EIGHT

RUNT NO MORE

The Runt set down the filthy water and rotten mushroom porridge he’d been given to serve to the prisoners, and settled himself cross-legged outside the dwarf’s cell door. The old dwarf sat on the floor, head shaking, muttering to himself. His hair had been pulled to tufts, shiny bald where his scalp had been yanked free with it; his chin was a patchy mess of scar tissue, his beard carved away long ago. The knife that took his beard and moustache had taken part of his lower lip, and his teeth were on permanent display. Saliva ran down his face. His nose had been slit open and one of his eyes burned out. All the injuries were inflicted by the Backstairs Boys out of malice, for they had no questions to ask the dwarf, and he had no way of telling them what they might wish to know.

Doubtless the Runt enjoyed staring at the wounds of his kind’s ancient enemy, but he also marvelled at how tough the mountain folk are. This one had been tortured and beaten so many times that it would be impossible to count; he was fed foul food, when the goblins remembered to feed him at all. And yet here he was. How long he had been there, no one in the Backstairs Boys really knew. A goblin’s life is short, and they keep poor count of time, but the old dwarf was a permanent feature of their mean domain, as unchanging as the rock above their heads.

The Runt liked to sit there, not to torment the old dwarf as the others did, but to think. He found the ravings of the dwarf comforting. Sometimes he just listened, a few times he’d pull his hood down to cover his long nose and ears, and put on an old beard scalp he’d stolen from a pole on one of his wanderings; the sad evidence of an unsuccessful dwarf treasure hunt. His disguise seemed to calm the dwarf and, at those times, he would talk to the goblin as if he were an old comrade. The Runt listened and listened and found, to his surprise, that after a time he could pick out some of the dwarf’s words, having learned their meaning through association and deduction. He was certain ‘grobi’ meant goblin, and he gathered a stock of phrases he was sure were entirely offensive.

‘That’s anuvver rule,’ Skarsnik said to me all those years later. ‘You gotta listen, see?’

That the sounds made by other creatures could carry meaning, and that those meanings could be learned, would not have occurred to most goblins. Some, as I witnessed myself, know the speech of others, but to figure this out all by himself, well, that meant Skarsnik was special indeed. And he knew it. By now, Skarsnik was convinced of his own unique nature. He would spend the days there, or up on the mountain in the mouth of the ventilation shaft, wondering why he thought the way he did. I learned from my times with the greenskins that they do not suffer from self-doubt. Their world is as their world is, what they cannot change by violence they deem beyond alteration. But they are afraid of many things, and the shadow that crossed the Runt’s mind as he dwelled on the differences between himself and his fellows was a cousin to fear. Time and again he asked himself, ‘Why am I different?’ That shadow flickered across his mind, that twist of terror in his guts that set his bowels to water. But they were sensations that did not last. Always, his doubts fled before a smile, as the voice in his head answered, ‘Because you is better.’

That night, he had not come to speak with the dwarf. Nor had he come to ponder.

He stared at the old dwarf, but from the corner of his eye he watched the ratman, who in turn watched him from the far side of its cage.

Tonight, the dwarf muttered to himself, rolling back and forth on the floor of his cell, oblivious to the world around him.

‘I wonder what he’s saying? Do you know, rattie?’ The Runt didn’t look at the ratman, but talked to him just the same. ‘You have been in here a perishing long time, how long is it now? Longer than I’ve been around that’s for sure. You must like it here.’

There was no response. The ratman’s eyes were black marble in the dark, and points of light came and went as it blinked. Otherwise, it sat immobile as a statue.

‘But you know what? I was asking about you, and the other boys say that you was caught snooping around here looking for something.’ He turned to look at the ratman. ‘I know you boys understand proper speaking, even if you’re always squeaking at each other like stupid mices. And I know what you are looking for.’ He reached into his robe. This was the perilous part of his enterprise, and not only in showing the wyrdstone to the ratman, for carrying it under his robes made his skin crawl with magic. ‘I got something in here that might be of interest to you.’ He tossed the pouch into the ratman’s cage, and went back to watching the dwarf. His life hung in the balance. If he could achieve his aims tonight… But then someone could come in at any minute, and kill him for taking too long, or for giving the ratman the pouch, or because they were bored and required a little meaningless violence to hurry the hours along.

I doubt that these things truly bothered the Runt that would be Skarsnik. When I knew him he was of a most self-assured character, and seemed, with occasional reservation, convinced of his destiny to rule the Eight Peaks. He insisted he had always been that way. How much of this was bravado on his part, and how much of his courage he had attributed to himself in later days is debatable. One thing is certain, and that is Skarsnik was no coward when I met him.

The ratman sat still for long minutes. The Runt became nervous, fearful that he would not take his bait and his plans would come to nothing. All he had to do was look in the bag!

Finally, just as the goblin’s nerve was giving out, the ratman crept forward on his hands and knees. It sniffed at the pouch. Its head snapped up, looking right at the Runt. Its hands went for the pouch and it tore it open.

It chittered excitedly, its face lit up by the green glow of the rock within. ‘Where you get this? Where you get warpstone?’ it said, in rapid, squeaking greenskin.

‘Ah, I knew you’d be interested,’ said the Runt with deliberate casualness.

‘Very-very!’ It looked back and forth. It stood and limped to the barred door of its cage.

‘You can keep that, call it a favour.’

The ratman blinked. Its fur was matted and unhealthy looking, not glossy like the ratboy warriors he’d seen in the caves. Scars crossed it and scabs crusted it. ‘Take-take?’

‘Yeah, take, er take. Whatever you like. Just keep it from the other gobboes, if you know what I mean.’

The ratman looked nervously around itself again, as if someone would materialise to snatch its prize from its hands. To the Runt’s surprise it bit down hard on the wyrdstone. Half of its teeth had been pulled, including both of its fore teeth. Skarsnik told me that this was the normal practice with imprisoned ratmen, because they can gnaw their way through steel, given time. The ratman chewed at it with his side teeth, his long muzzle working with difficulty to grind it up. In a few seconds it had gone, and the beast was dabbing sparkling grains of it from the floor.

The Runt took a step back. ‘Gor, so that’s what you do with it!’

‘Not pure. Safe-safe.’ The ratman’s eyes glowed bright with an inner light, a quicksilver sheen that flashed and then was gone. It dragged itself to its feet and limped forward. Goblins had taken pleasure in breaking its leg and tail, and neither had set properly. ‘Yes-yes, good, good!’ Foul breath gusted from its mouth. It regarded him curiously, then shivered. ‘What you want, green-thing? What you want from Skreekrit Yellowtooth?’

The Runt forced himself to the gate. The cell smelled peculiar to his goblin nose, the aroma around the rat tunnels where no goblin but he dared go amplified a thousandfold. Like spoiled straw and a sweetness that was not altogether wholesome – ratstink.

The Runt grasped the bars of the cage door. His nose poked through the gaps in the iron, bringing it to within inches of the ratman’s twitching muzzle. ‘I think we might have a little deal, you and me. You want more of this?’

The ratman cocked his head and blinked. Lips twitched back, exposing the pink gums where his fangs had once been.

‘Don’t go all shy on me, furry boy. I knows this is what your lot spends an awful lot of time looking for. I can get you more. Lots and lots more.’

‘Good-good. Free me. Show me where-where-where! We make deal then.’

The Runt tipped his head back and looked behind him. ‘You hear that?’ he said to the old dwarf. ‘This ratboy here wants me to give up me secrets!’ He faced the ratman again and clucked his tongue. ‘Nah. I’ll get it to you all right, but don’t you be telling me what to do.’

‘In exchange? What for warpstone?’

‘Ah, now that’s the tricky part. How do I know you are boss enough of the ratboys to make it all work out nice like?’ He cast his eyes down at the ratman’s infirmities. ‘I hear your lot don’t like cripples much.’

The skaven drew himself up. He was taller than most goblins, his black-furred arms rippling with hard muscle that his incarceration had done little to diminish. ‘I no cripple! I am Skreekrit Yellowtooth, Fangleader of Stormvermin! I fight good leg, bad leg, nomatter!’ He winced, and stooped again, panting hard. ‘Get-get warpstone. They listen plentygood.’

‘Right.’ The Runt licked his lips. ‘I’ll want as many mushrooms as you can find, specially big ones, and I’ll want them every week. Forty sacks. And I don’t want any more ratties around the Backstairs unless I say.’

‘Backstairs?’

‘Here.’ The Runt waved his hand back towards the stairs. For that you’ll get…’ How much? The Runt had spent several nights trying to calculate the wyrdstone’s worth to the ratmen. ‘A bag.’

‘How much-much is bag?’ said the ratman suspiciously.

‘A lump. Big as my fist.’

‘Goblin fist small.’

‘That’s what you’ll get.’ The Runt scratched his behind, feigning indifference. ‘If you don’t want to get out of here…’

‘Yes-yes! Get out, yes!’

‘And another thing, this is between you and me, don’t tell the other gobboes… Greenthings.’

The ratman’s eyes narrowed. He understood. ‘How-how? How get me from here if not tell green-things?’ The ratman looked around the door, whiskers twitching, searching for a way out he might have missed.

‘Let me worry about that. Have we got a deal?’

The ratman nodded hesitantly. ‘Deal-deal. We lock tails.’

‘I haven’t got a tail, furboy.’ The Runt hawked hard and long and spat a glistening gobbet of phlegm onto his hand. ‘We’ll do this the goblin way.’

He held out his hand. Hesitantly, the ratman took it.

‘Deal.’

‘Skaven deal-deal with green-friend.’

‘Yeah. Right. And don’t even think of squealing or it’ll be bad for you.’

The Runt left the cells, shouting violently at the ratman as he left. ‘And don’t let me catch you cheeking me again!’ He called after him as he kicked the door that led to the stairs that led back up to the Backstairs (from what I saw of the intermingled domains of goblin, ratman and dwarf under the Eight Peaks, there are a great many stairs under the mountains).

‘What you mean, cheek?’ said Bugfat suspiciously. He was the surliest guard goblin who ever had the job of guarding prisoners anywhere in all the goblin realms, of this the Runt was sure.

The Runt set the prisoners’ tray on the guard table. ‘Oh, he didn’t say nothing. He just looked at me, all insolent like.’ He grinned his best grin. Bugfat growled and pulled out his keys.

‘What they got a runt like you serving food to them down there for, I don’t know.’ He unlocked the door. ‘I got my eye on you, runt.’

‘That makes me feel all happy,’ said the Runt, and stepped out onto the landing.

He hurried across the landing back to the runtcave, through knots of goblins sat around playing dice, cheating every throw. There was little occurring in their underground realm today, nothing except the endless task of gathering food from the caves, and that was runt’s work.

‘To tell da troof,’ said Skarsnik to me, ‘I ’ad no idea at all ’ow I was gonna get dat ratboy out ov dat cell.’ He leaned back on his grand iron throne and began idly kicking the slumbering bulk of Gobbla. He held his goblet in his hand. His servants were attentive to him, and it seemed he lacked for little. They took care of my needs, as best as their green minds understood. They had replenished my food and thrown a mouldering wolf pelt around my shoulders as the temperature dropped. The only indication I ever had in Skarsnik’s hall that night had fallen outside, and that was only when close to the surface; further underground the air maintained a constancy that was neither hot nor cold, but which contrived to be both muggy and chill at once. Large logs burned in the iron firebowls. The wine had quite gone to my head. I believe that in other circumstances I would have been drowsy, but here, in the dark, Skarsnik’s face wavering daemonically through the fire as he spoke his story, I paid rapt attention. I was, in short, entranced. So relaxed he seemed in his power, and yet I had learned already that the life of a goblin is harder than that of the lowest pauper in our cities.

‘Fing is,’ he continued, ‘I is a special gobbo. Chosen by da gods to be king in da mountain!’ He sniffed. ‘Duffskul dere says so, ain’t dat right Duffskul?’

The wizened shaman in the tent door looked up from the dung he was poking around the floor and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh yus.’

‘And when you is special, like I is, just when you gets stuck and a scheme gets all knotty, ole Gork and Mork come along and help ya out a bit…’

This help he spoke of came, unexpectedly, in the form of Snotruk…

The runtboy stood in the doorway to the steps of the runtcave.

‘Where you been?’ asked Snotruk. The Runt pulled his lips back from his teeth. He was about to retort that Snotruk ought to find himself a new question to ask, so often had he asked it of the Runt, when he saw something was amiss with the runtboy’s hand. He held it protectively against his breast. Blood caked the bandage wrapped around it.

‘I been looking into your doings, Runt,’ said Snotruk. He smiled nastily, exposing gums pale from blood loss. ‘And you will never guess what I found.’ He brought his other hand out from behind his back and threw something. Snottie’s tiny, headless corpse flopped sadly onto the stone in front of him. ‘Nasty little thing, trying to stab me with a sharpened nail. So I bit its head off.’

The Runt felt a stab of some unknown emotion, a welling of loss rising up from deep within his little heart. The something, he had no name for it, proceeded into his throat where it threatened to choke him.

‘You…’ He tensed.

‘Ahahaha!’ Snotruk planted his uninjured hand in the Runt’s chest. ‘The boss is here to have a word.’ Snotruk’s face shone with malicious glee. He stepped aside to allow the runtmaster of the Backstairs Boys up from the runtcave.

Old Grobskab was, as his name suggests, an old, old goblin. His black robe was so faded with age it was brown. He wore no hood, and on his head a small clump of three mushrooms grew. They were glowshrooms, spotted things as high as a finger that gave off a dappled blue light. One could always tell where Grobskab was. He prowled the caverns like a deep-sea fish, headlights bobbing. Woe betide the runt who headed towards that light at the wrong time.

Headshrooms are not that unusual for a night goblin to sprout, but unusual enough for it to be regarded an honour, and so Grobskab was one of the clan’s better-respected elders. His robe’s neck came up high, swathing his mouth to the bottom of his nose. The runts dreaded what might be behind there, for none had ever seen Grobskab’s face uncovered.

The runtmaster grumbled deep in his throat. ‘What’s this then, Snotruk? What’s all this bother?’ He held a snotling as ancient as himself in his arms, one of the tiniest snotties the Runt had ever seen. It clung to the runtmaster’s robe. Grobskab tickled it under its chin with the point of a nail, causing it to purr in delight.

‘It’s this runt, boss, he’s been sneaking off. Him and his mate Diglit. Always sneaking about!’

‘You ever catch him at it?’

Snotruk looked at his feet. ‘I just knows, boss!’

‘Hmmm, and where is this Diglit?’

‘He got et,’ said the Runt helpfully.

‘Shut it, you!’ said Snotruk. ‘He’s been keeping this snottie here.’

‘That dead one?’

‘That dead one.’

‘He’s not keeping it any more then is he?’ said the runtmaster.

Snotruk’s ears flexed down then up. ‘Boss! He’s been hoarding fleshrooms, down there in the big cave. I followed one of his gang, he had a stash there in a secret hole. I figured it all out, me. I did!’

‘Figured it out before you fingered it out, eh?’ The runtmaster sniggered at his joke.

Snotruk’s ears fell, and he hunched himself around his injured hand. ‘I put me hand in, and snap! Something took two of me fingers off.’

‘Ah, you found me shroomsnap then,’ the Runt said.

The runtmaster looked at him quizzically, ears rising with interest.

‘Facebiter squig. Boss,’ he added hurriedly. ‘In the hole with the shrooms.’

‘I see.’ The runtmaster set the little snotling down at his feet, where it skipped and gibbered, plucking at his robes and squalling to be picked up again. Grobskab’s hands strayed to his belt. The Runt could not help but cringe. Upon the old goblin’s left side hung a cruel squig-hide whip, twisted and gnarled and studded with teeth plucked from the mouths of the runts he had beaten to death.

Grobskab did not take out his whip. Instead his hand came to rest upon his big bunch of keys. He unhooked it and knelt by the Runt’s feet. ‘Well worn, these locks are,’ he said as he twisted the key in the manacles. The Runt shrugged and gave a broad toothy grin. The runtmaster laughed again, and the mushroom clump sprouting from his head waggled.

‘Whu-whut are you doing?’ said Snotruk. The fingers on his good hand curled and uncurled. ‘He’s been hoarding! He’s got a massive stash of fleshrooms! His zogging squig bit me fingers off!’ Snotruk waved his bandaged hand around. Blood spotted the floor of the runtcave.

‘Aye, and he’ll be punished for that, he will.’ The runtmaster turned on Snotruk. ‘And so will you, for letting this runt get the better of you. Less time with the whip, or more with the smarts.’ He slapped at Snotruk’s whip and then poked him hard in the face with a warty finger. ‘Herding runts ain’t all about beating. Course,’ he sniffed, ‘you got to have a good beating arm, no doubt of that, but that’s not all there is to it! No, course not. Like being a goblin, it ain’t all about size. Mostly, but not all.’ He kicked the Runt. ‘You’re still small and nasty, little ’un, but you’re more cunning than Mork hisself.’

The Runt looked at his feet, then at the runtmaster.

‘I’m not a runt no more?’

The runt master farted and hooked his fingers into his belt. He was as flatulent as he was old. ‘No, you is not a runt no more. But only because I says so, all right? And I is the runtmaster of the Backstairs Boys, so I knows what is a runt and what is not a runt better than anyone else. I says it’s a runt, it’s a runt, I say it ain’t a runt, well, then it ain’t no runt, got it?’

‘Course.’ The Runt stood up.

‘But he’s a thieving git!’ said Snotruk, his voice rising to an outraged squeak. Spittle flew from his lips, his ears quivered in anger.

‘Nah, he’s not. He was keeping them mushrooms all safe for me, weren’t you, runt?’

‘Er, yes, boss! That’s right, boss!’ agreed the Runt.

‘So you’re going to go and get them for me nice and soon, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, boss! Right, boss!’

‘Boss!’

‘Shut it Snotruk. Clever runt this. Had my eye on him, I have. And I knows me runts. Got his team going, picked his load and more besides, and with that two-headed thing you lumbered him with. He worked him, and he didn’t damage him, that’s a good thing because he’s Mork and Gork blessed that one, if you don’t count him being an idiot. Good work that. Good runting work.’ The runtmaster scratched the cloth covering his chin. ‘You got to have a proper name and all. ‘The Runt’ just ain’t right.’ Grobskab sniffed hard twice, the second one turning into a long snort. He hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and chewed it a moment, his unseen mouth working away behind his mask. He swallowed. ‘You can be Runtgit, because you is still little, but you is also a right little git, Snotruk’s right about that, at least.’

The newly dubbed Runtgit smiled, his sharp teeth glinting in the blue light coming off the runtmaster’s headshrooms. He did a little jig.

Grobskab held out his hand, palm face down. ‘Hey, hey, steady there, Runtgit. You got to prove yourself yet. You too Snotruk, because you have been very shoddy in your work. Very. Shoddy.’ The runtmaster poked his runtboy hard in the chest. ‘There’s a little job you both got to do.’

Snotruk’s ears flattened themselves against his skull. ‘Job?’

‘Yeah. Boss Tarkit Fing-Finger’s been talking to that fing on his finger again. Apparently it told him he needs to get tough.’ Grobskab snorted hard, once, twice, and coughed. ‘He wants to get himself some cave squigs, chomp up some ratboys, make Chief Ibrit all impressed. Some of the boys seen squig spoor in the south caves. He’s got some hunters coming to catch them. And you’re going to help them. Then, we’ll see. Might be an opening for a new runtboy, you never know.’ He stared meaningfully at Runtgit and Snotruk. ‘Or it might be I needs one less.’

CHAPTER NINE

NO JOB FOR A GOBLIN

‘This is all your fault, you thieving git,’ said Snotruk. The mournful song of squigpipes blared in the tunnels behind them. Cymbals clashed, horns hooted. The hunters were a way behind them, nets and squig pacifying clubs ready; it wouldn’t do for them to get in the way of the bait. Far off in the winding corridors ahead of Snotruk and Runtgit, squig hounds bayed and snuffled.

‘I’d save your breath for running if I was you, Snotruk,’ said Runtgit. He flexed on his toes, bent his knees and stretched out his calves. He started to roll up his new robe, all black and proper as a night goblin’s robe should be, not like the tattered thing he used to wear while he was simply The Runt. He thought better of it, shucked it off and rolled it up neatly, and jammed it behind a rock.

‘Yeah?’ said Snotruk. ‘What are you doing with your legs? Why are you taking your clothes off? Stupid runt, they should never have made you a boy.’

‘I’m doing it, you three-fingered idiot, so’s I can run fast, aren’t I?’

Snotruk snorted. ‘You ain’t going to outrun a cave squig, is you?

‘Don’t have to outrun no cave squig,’ said Runtgit wickedly. A slow smile split his face.

Snotruk’s eyes widened as understanding dawned. He fumbled at his belt and tugged off his runtboy’s apron and then his robe. They both stood shivering, naked but for their loincloths. The cave was dark, so dark even night goblin eyes strained to see.

‘I am going to mess you up, runt. I am going to get you.’

‘Not today you’re not,’ said Runtgit. He hawked up something nasty and spat it on the floor right by Snotruk’s feet.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ said Runtgit. He tugged at the rope around his waist, making sure it was nice and tight. At the other end was a round ball of small beasts gathered from the goblins’ cesspool – their ’drops – all tied together by their tails. Snotruk had a baitball just the same. The animals’ flesh had been sliced, so their juices left a trail upon the floor wherever Runtgit and Snotruk went. They mewled and struggled pathetically, half dead.

‘Who says?’

‘I do! You ain’t got time matey, because here they comes!’

The baying of squig hounds grew louder. Runtgit turned on his heels and took flight as a trio of cave squigs burst from a fissure. The round balls of their bodies sailed through the air, bashing into one another as they came. They bounced off the far wall and hit the ground with a series of loud slaps. A pack of squig hounds came hurrying from the opening after them, twisting over one another and snarling. The nails on the squig hounds’ six feet rattled out a rapid drumbeat of pursuit, and they barked and nipped at the horny heels of their bigger cousins. The cave squigs turned this way and that, claws clicking and clacking, trying to bite down on these annoyances, teeth as long as goblin swords clashing as they snapped their rubbery mouths. The squig hounds darted under the cave squigs’ globular bodies, always out of reach. Then squigpipes honked close behind them, and the cave squigs turned in fear at the sound of the music.

Snotruk gaped in terror and fled after Runtgit.

The two goblins ran along twisting tunnels carved by who knows what. Stones reached out to snag them, crevasses in the rock gaped before them. The squigs bounded after them, their short but powerful legs propelling them in a series of hopping leaps, richocheting from the tunnel walls as they came. The bay of squig hounds and the dread noise of the squigpipes hooted behind the cave squigs, the swift shapes of tasty goblins trailing even tastier squigs behind them ran in front. Their small minds needed little encouragement in which direction to go.

Runtgit and Snotruk ran as fast as their legs could carry them. The squigs’ bounding motion would bring them dangerously close, only for them to fall behind as they gathered their feet in for their next jump.

‘We’re not going to make it!’ shouted Snotruk. He tried to grab at Runtgit, to throw him back into the mass of leathery flesh pounding after them.

‘Gerroff!’ shouted the ex-runt. ‘Come on, this way!’ He pointed to a smooth hole leading off the main tunnel, diving into it head first. Snotruk dithered. He looked at the charging squigs, and threw himself after Runtgit. The hole was just big enough for him. The tunnel beyond led upwards, the rock slippery with slime. He banged his head as he went in, and slid backwards. Cave squigs called, bass harrooing noises, their vicious white teeth snapping. For a terrifying moment, Snotruk thought he would slip right into their jaws. Impelled by terror, he scrabbled up the tunnel, leaving the spherical creatures thrusting at the tunnel mouth impotently, claws and spines rasping on the rock.

Runtgit sat in a cave, knees up around his chin, in the middle of a crowd of inch-high mushrooms. Bigger, leathery fungi filled the cramped space behind him. ‘Nearly got you, eh? Told you I was faster,’ he said smugly.

‘I’m going to kill you, runt.’

‘Runtgit,’ said Runtgit. ‘I’m Runtgit now, and no you’re not gonna kill me, is you?’

‘Oh yeah, who’s gonna see me? I could do you in and no one would be wise to it.’ Snotruk strode towards the other goblin, long arms out, hands ready for a strangling. Runtgit was undeterred.

‘Know where we are, Snotruk?’ said Runtgit. His conversational tone set alarm bells ringing in Snotruk’s mind. His ears twitched.

‘See them there, them big old shrooms? Them are squigshrooms, cave squigshrooms. Found these a while back. See the shroomheads? All droopy ain’t they? I knows a lot about mushrooms, me. They’re just waiting for something to feed on. Oh look!’ Runtgit picked up his baitball. Blood dripped onto the earth. ‘I reckon they should be ready to sprout right about… Now!’

A chirruping and scrabbling came to their ears. Snotruk paused. ‘Whassat?’

‘Squiglings, see?’ Runtgit pointed to a patch of soil heaving under a mushroom. Small round bodies pulled themselves out of the ground, blinking and cheeping like birds. They waddled about, wide eyes quickly taking on the piggy viciousness common to all squigs. Their cheeps became snarls. ‘We take this lot in, we’ll get loads of teeth, what do you say? Deal?’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Snotruk. The ground boiled as a flood of cave squiglings burrowed up out of the dirt. ‘And let you take all the credit? That’s how you work, runt. I seen it.’ He stamped hard on a squigling and popped it wetly, a fan of guts spread across the dirt. ‘I’m not falling for that! No teeth or glory for you!’ He began stamping with gusto, turning the young cave squigs into a smeary paste.

‘What you think you’re doing?’ shouted Runtgit. ‘These squigs’ll make us both bosses!’

‘Nah, make you a boss you mean.’ Stomp, stomp, stomp went Snotruk’s feet. He snatched an uncommonly large squig-ling up from the ground. He waved it at Runtgit. ‘I’m not falling for your double-crossing, runt. I knows you, and don’t you forget it.’ He drew a nail hard across the squig’s face, cutting its eye and skin. It squealed piteously. Fluid leaked from its ruined eye.

Runtgit slapped it out of his hand. The tiny squig bounced from Snotruk’s grasp and rolled across the floor. Snotruk shoved past Runtgit, but Runtgit hooked a foot under his leg and pulled. The runtboy skidded on the mess of guts and fell hard. The little squig, blind in one eye, snuffled its nose at Runtgit, and took a step forward.

Runtgit smiled at it. Perhaps it was the memory of Snottie, or maybe he was simply being capricious as goblins can be, but he felt like sparing it both Snotruk’s feet and the iron prods of the squig herders. ‘Nah, little fella, off you go then, off you go.’ He shooed it away.

The squig snuffled, hesitated, turned and hopped down a hole at the back of the cave.

Snotruk squealed as other squiglings worried at him with their teeth. He was fortunate, for the teeth of a fresh squigling are soft and dull, and yet still they bite hard.

Runtgit backed towards the hole they’d come from as Snotruk batted and swatted at the squiglings swarming up his legs.

‘Do you know much about squigs?’ Runtgit said. ‘Another thing I’ve learned, Snotruk me old mate, is that when the squiglings hatch, daddy squig is never far away.’

Snotruk stood, panting and furious. ‘Yeah, so? Not going to get us in here, is it? Not getting up that chute, is he?’

‘Ah, yeah, I should’ve said, there’s two entrances to this cave, Snotruk.’

A low growl sounded behind Snotruk. His mouth gaped, his ears fell, his knees knocked together and his shoulders slumped. ‘He’s behind me, isn’t he?’ he whimpered.

Baleful yellow eyes opened. The adult squig was so big they glowed either side of Snotruk in the dark.

‘Oh yes, oh yes he is, my friend,’ said Runtgit. He waggled his fingers in a wave. ‘Byesy bye. I’d say I’d miss ya, but I ain’t gonna!’ He hopped out backwards down the tunnel. He slid quickly, tumbling out into the passage where they’d fled the stampeding squigs. He slid on his belly down the wet stone and shot out into the main tunnel.

Out in the tunnel the squigs were trussed and helpless, pinned down by weighted nets. One was being dragged away by a sweating team of hunters. A trio of burly goblins battered at the other two with huge squig pacifiers. One such club came quickly towards Runtgit’s face.

‘Rozzla! Stop!’ said a goblin.

The club stopped a finger’s-breadth from Runtgit’s nose.

‘Eeek!’ said Runtgit.

‘See? It’s one of them boys what got sent in as bait, Rozzla.’ The goblin herder who spoke was covered in scars and tattoos. His arms bulged as he pointed.

‘Oh yeah, so it is, Fuggrak,’ said the goblin with the club. ‘Thought you was a squig,’ said the goblin to Runtgit. He smiled in a way that suggested he did not much care one way or the other if Runtgit’s brains were smashed from his skull.

‘I thought you got et,’ said the one named Fuggrak. The squig he was minding barked and whined, shifting in its net. ‘Quiet down you!’ he yelled, then walloped it with a squig pacifier the size of Runtgit. ‘Yeah! Don’t like that do you?’ Fuggrak cupped his hand to his mouth and called out, ‘All bagged and ready to go! Good job lads.’

Runtgit accepted Rozzla’s hand and pulled himself up. He began to laugh, quietly at first, but soon he was squeaking with amusement like a snotling on a fungus beer bender.

Fuggrak and Rozzla looked at each other. They shrugged. Rozzla spun his finger around his temple. ‘Mad,’ he mouthed.

‘What’s so funny, little runt?’ asked Rozzla.

Runtgit shook his head, gulping for air. ‘Timed to perfection!’ he said. ‘Timed to perfection!’

Snotruk they dragged from the cave, missing an ear and scared witless.

He’d found a cleft in the rock to hide in, where the squig couldn’t quite take off his head. It took five squig herders to subdue the large brooding squig he and Runtgit had disturbed. He’d soiled his robes in fright. A peculiar smell followed Snotruk around for weeks afterward.

Much to Snotruk’s annoyance, he had been right. Runtgit did get all the credit for finding the squiglings.

‘You can’t have everyfing,’ said Skarsnik to me, years later. ‘I wanted him to get et. He didn’t get et. I was going to regret that, oh yes I was Bickrystad me old mucker. Rule free, y’see, always have another plan what can go if your first plans go wrong.’

‘A plan B?’ I timorously offered.

‘An’ what’s bees to do wiv it? Stupid humie, anuvver plan! Not bees.’ He rocked his hand dismissively. His favourite servant topped up his goblet from a pitcher of fungus beer. ‘But den, s’gods, innit? Gork and Mork, they do fings in ways wot I can’t understand, and I understand stuff better dan any uvver gobbo. I was not happy at all dat Snotruk did not get all et up. But, if it hadn’t been for ole Snotruk,’ he looked around his domain, holding up his hand, indicating that I should do the same, ‘I wouldn’t be here at all, an’ all this, well, it wuttn’t be mine, would it?’

Runtgit was taken on as third runtboy by the runtboss. In no time at all, he had Grobskab’s approval. He was given two teams to oversee. They were well-marshalled, each gang equipped with snotlings he trained himself to sniff out the best fleshrooms. His stature grew among the other goblins, if not his actual size, at least, not at first. So impressive was the harvest his gangs brought in he was soon put in charge of a third runt team. Snotruk grew insanely jealous of Runtgit’s new measure and would watch the diminutive runtboy, always clad in a robe slightly too big that flopped over his hands and eyes, directing his runts in ways Snotruk could never hope to emulate.

As goblins will, Snotruk plotted the downfall of his rival. There is nothing unusual in this. It is simply the way of life among the greenskins. It was, however, very unfortunate for Snotruk that he was plotting the downfall of the wiliest goblin to have been spawned in generations.

Runtgit knew what Snotruk was up to, but did not move against him. Instead, he entertained himself by foiling his rival’s every trick. Everything Snotruk tried went awry, every good thing he did was attributed to his hated rival, and every time he thought he’d got one up on Runtgit all his runts would get mysteriously eaten, or he’d come down with a terrible case of the drop-trots that laid him up for days; when he was not running for the drops clutching at his backside, at any rate.

Runtgit was not satisfied. He wanted more. When the others slept, he would stay awake, scratching in the dirt by the ancient firebowls on the lower landing. He would not waste his time at dice, not unless he could rig it so that he won for sure and squeeze favours out of the other boys. Runtgit had more time to think. He had always been thinking anyway, so his additional time spent in cogitation meant he thought a prodigiously large amount for a goblin, more perhaps than any goblin to have ever lived. He took to eavesdropping on his betters and listening to the stories the old skargobboes and Little Big Un’s told around the fire, ingratiating himself with them with the special fungus ales and choice foods his growing piles of mushrooms bought him. As his wealth of mushrooms and orc teeth accumulated, so did his knowledge grow.

Runtgit had a taste of power, and he wanted more. His mind returned to the ratman, Skreekrit, languishing in the cells off the landing. He planned, he wheedled, he put words in ears and ideas in the minds of his elders and betters. The other young goblins thought him a lickspittle, so deferential he was to the likes of Duffskul, Tarkit and Grobskab, but he had his plans, and he did not care.

After many weeks of scheming, one of those plans was ready for execution.

‘Fing is,’ Skarsnik said, ‘Dem skaven are a tricky bunch, they’s always wanting to make deals and do this and then that. And then what? They try and stab you in the back, and den I ’ave to teach ’em a lesson and dis happens.’ He gestured to a rat skull on a spike and gave a wicked grin. ‘Don’t matter, mind. Gobboes is no better. In some ways, we’s da same. In uvver ways not, but there’s one fing I didn’t know back den and wots I know only too well now.’ He looked at me with a half smile, as if he were sharing a good joke. ‘There’s farsands of the hairy bleeders, farsands and farsands of ’em.’ He stamped his foot on the ground. His brows knotted and he sneered. ‘Down there. Place is crawlin’ with ’em, even after what I did to ’em, but that came later…’

Skreekrit Yellowtooth limped ahead of Runtgit who, for once, was feeling nervous.

‘Where-where we go?’ said Skreekrit.

‘Down here, and then that way,’ Runtgit pointed.

‘I cannot see-see! Stupid green-thing!’ chirruped the ratman, ‘I have blindfold, no eyes!’

‘Yeah, that’s cause I don’t want you to know where we is going, do I?’ He prodded the ratman in the back with his spear. He pulled a lump of dried mushroom out of a pocket and bit down on it. The ratman stumbled. ‘Watch out there, gets a bit bumpy, you might say,’ he said, spraying crumbs.

‘Stupid green-thing!’

Runtgit kept his eyes on the ratman. The story he’d spun to get the ratboy out of the cage had been an outrageous lie, even by his standards. No one believed it, some nonsense about a trip to the mountainside, a wyvern egg and an orc named Nork with a gimpy leg and a bag full of teeth, but he was high in the clan’s esteem. Both Grobskab and Duffskul the shaman pressed Tarkit Fing-Finger to allow Runtgit to take the skaven, if only because they wanted to see exactly what he would do with him. Tarkit had been swayed and, after the fing on his finger had been properly consulted, had assented to let Runtgit take the ratman away.

With all that out of the way, Runtgit’s biggest worry was that he might be followed, for if his true intentions were uncovered, he would be killed. Trading with the ratmen was a step too far for the Backstairs Boys’ elders, he knew that; they would not understand what could be gained from it. But they, as he told himself often, were idiots, not at all special like he was. Had Mork spoken to them? No, he had not. To his mind, that settled the matter.

They went out of the Backstairs Boys’ territory, the least of all the Crooked Moon tribe’s domains. Runtgit was heading right for the burrows of the ratmen.

Skreekrit came to a halt, and Runtgit narrowly missed spearing him.

‘Oi!’

Skreekrit’s nose twitched. ‘Smell-smell! Under-Empire close. Home-home!’ he said.

The ratman limped faster following that.

Runtgit took them to a tunnel that lay right on the outside edge of greenskin territory, a stately dwarf avenue lined with exquisitely carven stone trees. Runes Runtgit could not read ran along the tops of the walls, glittering with faded magic. A few of the crystal fruits descending from the stone trees’ branches still held power from the old times, and the corridor was lit with their cold light. One end of the avenue was choked with rubble, the other led off, who knew where, into the distance. Below were the deepest deeps of the dwarfhold, unknown lands occupied by the ratmen. Round, burrow-like holes punctuated the stonework, some appearing as if they’d been gnawed, others melted or chiselled through the stone by arcane powers and machines. They punctured the wall like the cells in a beehive, crowding out a well-dressed door made by the ancient mountain folk that led onto another broad roadway.

‘All right furboy, you can take your blindfold off now,’ Runtgit said uneasily. Dust lay thick on the ground, ancient trails of paw and tail blurred by time. He had chosen this spot carefully. These were the tunnels of the ratmen all right, but the smell of the creatures on them had faded to nothing. They had been unused for a long time. From what Runtgit had heard, the ratmen spent as much time fighting each other as they did the greenskins.

Skreekrit wiped at his arm with a paw. Just being here seemed to make him healthier and more upright.

‘You stay close-close. You not speak! You not move! You say nothing or you die-die! You understand?’

Runtgit swallowed hard. He was beginning to think this whole plan a bad idea, but then he thought about Snotruk and how many mushrooms he was going to get out of it, and how much power. He nodded within his hood, his assent a pathetic rustle of coarse goblin cloth.

‘Good-good.’ The skaven sniffed at the air. ‘Sickness here. Many bad tunnels. We no go this way. Death there! And Death there!’ He pointed to two of the tunnels. ‘This way, beard-thing way.’ Skreekrit pointed to the dwarf tunnel leading off the avenue. ‘Come-come, this better.’

Trailing ever so reluctantly behind, Runtgit followed the limping ratman out of his own world and into another. For the first time in his life, he felt as small as he really was.

Skarsnik found it hard to describe what he saw in those tunnels. By the time I had met him, he had fought the ratmen very many times and had become inured to the wonder of their strange machineries. But from the look that crossed his face, a series of expressions – chief among them wonder, fear, amazement and annoyance, annoyance being by far his most favoured mien in general – I surmise the things he saw in this ‘Skaven Under-Empire’ that first time had made a deep and lasting impression upon him.

The road they trod was dwarf-made for much of the way. Then they came to a wall built of scavenged stone blocks across the road. It filled the corridor, floor to ceiling, a walkway running along the back, halfway up its height. Ratmen in leather hoods rested long guns in its loopholes, alert to some threat or other. Their way blocked, they turned left into a warren of rat-gnawed tunnels.

What did he see? He spoke of tunnels that twisted in and out of the old dwarf city, tunnels where few ratmen were to be found at first, but then encountered in ever-greater numbers. Skaven slavemasters whipped gangs of scrawny ratmen, construction teams drilled at the rock with whirring devices. Piping was being laid along the floor and bonded together with machines that shot flame hot enough to melt metal. He was cuffed and kicked along when the overseers caught him looking at these. Only Skreekrit’s size and black fur prevented his death. The other ratmen looked at this battered returnee to the Under-Empire with open suspicion, but none at first dared challenge him.

Tunnels that began bare and unadorned gathered strange contrivances: more pipes that hissed and leaked scalding steam, roughly wrought lanterns that burned with a greenish haze, and everywhere the rank, acridly sweet stench of the ratmen. They went through caves filled with clanking machines, passed over fathomless caverns on swaying catwalks. Green lights glowed and lightning crackled far beneath their feet. Strange, snuffling monsters shoved past them, driven on by slavemasters. Were he not so deep in enemy territory, Runtgit would have turned tail and fled.

As they went deeper, Skreekrit was stopped numerous times. Runtgit attracted large amounts of attention at checkpoints and from patrols of ratmen warriors. But Skreekrit, bereft as he was of uniform, badges, weapons and teeth, stood tall. He was bigger than the other ratmen, far more heavily built, and his black fur appeared to intimidate these others. He chittered at them as if ordering them. They ducked and twitched and a stink filled the corridor that stung the inside of Runtgit’s nose.

‘They not want to let us pass-pass!’ said Skreekrit. He slapped at his chest. ‘But I am fangleader, stormvermin black-fur! They listen or they die.’

Runtgit followed the ratman, no longer sure who was the captive and who was the captor.

They came to a crooked tower on the side of a crooked way. Bronze chains and bells streaked green with verdigris, skeletons in gibbets, and smoking lamps festooned it on all sides. The skaven stopped before its doorway and looked it up and down. ‘This mine-mine. My post. Guardway!’

They went in.

What exactly happened next, Runtgit could only guess. There were more of the black-furred ratmen in there, these heavily armoured. Their equipment, unlike nearly all that Runtgit had seen so far, was well-forged and well-oiled. Some of it looked dwarf-made. The other black-furs were very surprised to see Skreekrit. Tails swished uneasily and paws went to swords.

A conversation of rapid squeals ensued between Skreekrit and another black-fur, whose helmet bore an elaborate crest. The black-fur chirred a laugh and went for its sword.

There was an explosion of movement almost too fast to follow. Skreekrit leapt forward. His left hand closed around the other’s wrist, stopping its sword from leaving the sheath. Yellow teeth snapped at Skreekrit’s face. There was a squeal, and the other ratman fell to the floor, its own dagger sticking out from a gap in its armour.

All but one of the other black-furs froze. This other made its challenge, hefting a heavy blade. Skreekrit’s crooked tail whipped forward. In one sinuous movement, Skreekrit’s tail grasped the dagger, pulled it from the dead ratman and flicked it across the room. The knife whirred through the air, pinning the other black-fur’s hand to the doorway with a thump. His sword clattered to the floor. It squealed and tugged at its hand.

‘He say-say I dead, then he say I cripple, then he say how I be Fangleader with no fangs? In any way, I not in charge.’ The ratmen snuffled rapidly at the corpse, its nose twitching violently. ‘He wrong-wrong! This post of Skreekrit Yellowtooth before, this post of Skreekrit Yellowtooth again. I servant of Lords of Thirteen. He traitor, not I.’ He pointed and chirruped at the other black-furs. They hurried to obey, freeing the challenger’s hand from the door, removing their erstwhile commander’s corpse. A sword was pressed into Skreekrit’s hand by a black-fur that bowed. For a moment, Runtgit thought he had overreached himself and would be struck down. Skreekrit was excited, his bent tail swished through the air behind him, fur bristling all over his body. ‘Now we remake deal-deal, green-thing. Twenty sacks these mush-rooms, for two fists warpstone.’

Runtgit looked stiffly to the left, he smiled worriedly to the right. Elite ratmen stood, huge and armoured, all around him. ‘Er yeah, hur, yeah. That sounds like a good deal, Skreekrit, me old friend. Twenty sacks, two fists, no problems.’

Skreekrit’s tail wrapped around Runtgit’s hand. ‘This time, we agree skaven way.’

He was escorted back to the avenue. When the black-furs left, he fell limp to his knees. Fear had sapped his energy.

After a while, he started to laugh.

The deal was put into action, and so Runtgit’s influence grew. He was awarded a fourth runt team. ‘Best runtboy I ever had,’ Grobskab was heard to say. As for Duffskul, Runtgit often caught him smoking his fungus cob, staring through the smoke at him or peering thoughtfully over the top of a skull full of fungus beer. Runtgit thought this a good thing. Even the fing on Tarkit Fing-Finger’s finger agreed Runtgit was a boon to the clan, and so he was left to his own devices.

Runtgit had one team of his runts set to carving up and bringing the glowy rocks down out of the mountainside. Another was employed carting it to the ratmen’s labyrinth.

‘Course, when I was Runtgit, quite a lot of them runts went a bit, well, funny,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Glowy rocks is dangerous rocks, ya know. But if they did, well, dey was only runts, weren’t dey? Dey went down a big hole we found. Had no bottom, you could hear ’em squealing for ages, hur hur.’ He coughed. ‘Well, da ones dat still had mouths.’

Runtgit went to pains to ensure this was all kept secret. Anyone caught spying on him by his squig hounds or snotling alarm callers vanished. Anyone he thought might be thinking about spying on him, for Runtgit was developing a healthy sense of paranoia, had a little accident. Or maybe two little accidents. Or as many little accidents as were necessary until they were quite dead. He told me about some of these.

Uksmak. Ran into a ratman patrol, on his own.

Gibble. Fell down an old dwarf well.

Dubbin. Tripped and went into the cookpot.

‘Now what are da chances of dat!’ said Skarsnik of this one, as he laughed and rubbed his hands together. ‘Still, made da stew better, eh?’

And so on. Of course, Urkdurk was never far away either, and if he failed to prevent outright attacks upon Runtgit’s person by intimidation, he generally halted said attacks mid-execution by bludgeoning use of his fists.

Snotruk – who had instigated many of these attempts to uncover Runtgit’s secrets, or kill him, or both – became more and more frustrated. And Runtgit laughed at him, but otherwise left him alone. Why, I could not discern. Was it a matter of pride, of humiliation? For all the time I spent listening to the greenskins, I understand little of how their minds work. When I thought I had a grasp of it, Skarsnik would tell me something wildly improbable or contradictory. The green races will forever remain a mystery to us, I fear, Herr Wollendorp, despite your good offices in attempting their solution.

‘Dat’s when I realised rule number four of bein’ a sneaky git: a frustrated enemy is the worst kind,’ Skarsnik said. ‘So bad dat I almost never learned that rule.’ He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I almost never did.’

CHAPTER TEN

FIGHT-FIGHT

Duffskul the shaman ambled over to where Runtgit was tallying up his tribute of mushroom sacks and handing them over to an impressed Tarkit. ‘Wotcha Runt,’ said Duffskul. ‘How’s it going?’

‘I ain’t a runt no more, Duffskul, I’s a boy. A proper boy. Me name’s Runtgit now.’

Duffskul eyed him speculatively. ‘Nah,’ he said at last. ‘That’s not your name. I’ll tell you what your name is.’

‘What is it then?’ said Runtgit. Duffskul drove him to distraction with his impenetrable pronouncements, and besides, his constant scrutiny of Runtgit unnerved him.

The shaman pursed his lips. He belched and took a swig of fungus beer from a squigskin gourd. ‘It’s a secret, until I says otherwise.’ The shaman took another swig. ‘Maybe, if you’re real good, I’ll tell you. Not today though.’

‘You’re talking rubbish, Duffskul,’ said Runtgit.

‘I’m talking gods’ stuff, little runt. I’m talking words from the Great Green!’ He jabbed a finger at Runtgit, the gourd swishing in his hand. His eyes flickered with arcane power, and Runtgit’s ears twitched with fear.

‘Something special about you, little gobbo, something big. Gork told me, Mork says so too, oh yus.’ He took another drink. Duffskul was always drunk. ‘So, seeing as you so special, I want you to do something for me.’

‘What?’ said Runtgit. He stopped counting a moment. That he could count over four was something of a miracle, as to most goblins anything greater than this is simply ‘lots’. Runtgit could keep on going ad infinitum if he tried very hard, but it made his head hurt.

‘When a shaman gets all old, older than me, he needs to set his roots down, you know what I mean?’ Duffskul winked.

‘No,’ said Runtgit. ‘No I doesn’t.’

Duffskul looked upward, and put his arm around Runtgit’s shoulders. Runtgit stiffened, expecting a knife in the ribs at any moment.

‘Runts! Born with nothing in their heads these days, I tells ya. Look, there’s these special mushrooms. Good for the magic. They are perishing rare and you never see them. They’re bigger than a gobbo and usually have a face on them.’ He circled a dirty finger around his own face. ‘They was shamans, see, long ago. Now that shaman has growed into a mushroom, his mind gone off into the Great Green. But his body see, that stays behind, along with some of his power. I eat that, I get more power, good for bashing up us enemies, see?’ Duffskul took another swig. ‘There used to be this special place, a special cave, where shamans went when they got old and tired. Some of the older ones say that it’s still there, hidden away. They is right, I reckons. I hears it, calling to me, calling me into the Great Green!’

Duffskul waved his hand across the air and looked up at the ceiling of the Backstairs again, like there was no rock there, just the throbbing orcish energy that made Mork and Gork so quintessentially Morkish and Gorkish, for want of a better phrase. That there were older shamans than Duffskul, who was as wrinkled and scabbed as a month-old mushroom, Runtgit found hard to credit.

‘Thing is, this cave is lost. You can’t get there, ratties took it a long time ago. Shamans in the old days’d go down there, and pick the shamanshrooms, but they can’t get there now, not until it’s their time, then Gork…’ His brow furrowed. ‘Or is it Mork? He guides them in nice and safe.’ He belched and rubbed at his belly. ‘Ooh, that’s better,’ he said happily. ‘Look, you can get anything, I been watching you. I know you seen me watching you. So, you get me one of them shamanshrooms, and we can make some kind of deal, you and me. What do you think? You never know when you might need the gods on your side, and they listens to me well.’ He gave a lopsided smile and tapped his nose.

Runtgit thought for a moment. Was this a genuine request, or was the cunning old devil seeking to uncover his pact with the skaven? He thought the former. Duffskul was too addled to care about the ratmen and greenskins trading, or maybe he was not, and was clever enough to see the advantage. Runtgit nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do, boss.’

Duffskul leaned in close, his breath hot and rank on Runtgit’s cheek. ‘Good lad, good lad.’ He patted Runtgit on the shoulder and walked away. Runtgit’s eyes slitted and a wily smile played on his lips. Duffskul was an ally worth having. An ally like that, he could make you chief.

His enthusiasm for the task soon turned to despair. He looked and looked, but he could not find the shamans’ cave, nor could he find a shamanshroom anywhere else, not in the deepest deeps, not in the mountainside caves, not in the surface city, and not in those rat tunnels he dared go down himself.

Frustrated, he set his mind to asking Skreekrit. If it was in the rats’ territory, then by Mork and Gork (or perhaps by Gork and Mork), the rats could go and get it for him.

‘Beard-things. Beard-things coming,’ Skreekrit told Runtgit as they stood at their meeting point. ‘Coming soon-soon.’

‘Stunties? Here? How do you know that?’ said Runtgit dubiously. The skaven lacked a certain credibility in roughly half the things he said to Runtgit, or so the clever goblin figured it.

Skreekrit gestured expansively. ‘Hear in stone. Sniff in air.’

‘Spies,’ said Runtgit. Runts and ratslaves bustled around them, exchanging piles of goods. The business between Skreekrit and Runtgit had grown complex. Crates of wares taken from Sigmar-knows-where were piled with sacks of various mushrooms taken from caverns in the ratmen realm no greenskin could gain. These items would be traded with other goblin clans. On Runtgit’s side, stacks of dwarf treasure looted from sealed chambers sat by pouches of wyrdstone.

The Backstairs Boys were becoming rich, and so was Runtgit. The bosses of the clan never saw anything but the mushrooms, naturally. He wore a shirt of fine dwarf mail under his robes now, and carried a sickle sword so well made it did not bend when he hit things with it, and it held an edge too. His hood was tall and sharply pointed, making up for his lack of stature, although this was increasing as his power grew. His arms were thick and strong in the folds of black that swathed him, and slowly he was getting taller.

Skreekrit chittered. ‘As you like-like.’ The Fangleader’s fur was a glossy black again, his limbs clad in articulated plate armour. His tail had been rebroken and reset straight. His limp was less pronounced, a brass contrivance on his leg helping it bear his weight. ‘Is true! I have seen!’

‘I ain’t seen nothing, mate,’ said Runtgit. ‘No one has said anything to me.’

‘Suspicious little green-thing! You no believe me? You see too, soon-soon. In upper levels, at top, past goblin clans. They come, they go, quiet-quiet and sneaksy. You no see? You no look! We have beard-thing drink, see! We take-take from them. How else Skreekrit get such beard-thing things? How much? Tell me! Is yours.’

‘And them stunties!’ he said to me, digressing from his narrative. ‘Gork! They fight harder for dere beer dan dey do to protect dere gold!’

Runtgit looked at the pile of dwarf ale barrels. It was a small pile, only three kegs. Doubtless this had been taken by stealth, he had heard nothing from his own network of know-it-alls and tattle-tales among the other clans and tribes in the Eight Peaks about a fight between dwarfs and the ratmen. That he had heard nothing of any dwarfs in the peaks worried him, because Skreekrit was right, that was dwarf ale right before him – in new barrels too, not the ancient stuff they sometimes uncovered cached deep underground. How could that be? The mountain folk came periodically, trying to retake their kingdom, but there had been no dwarfs come there for several sproutings.

Maybe they were coming back.

Runtgit narrowed his eyes and pulled at his chin. The barrels were almost certainly poisoned, he doubted the rats would pass up on the chance to do that. Still, he could always sell them on, the Cave Clobberers were being troublesome again. See how they liked a couple of bellyfuls of bad beer, he thought. ‘One lump and a shard,’ he said finally.

‘Deal-deal!’

They linked hand and tail.

‘I got a question for you, Skreekrit. Good trade.’

‘Speak-speak! Trade good!’

‘I’m looking for a special kind of mushroom,’ he began. And so he described the shamanshroom to the ratman. As you might expect, he left out the fungus’s mystical properties. ‘Not small,’ he finished. ‘Them are mushlings and snotrooms, sometimes the little ’uns eat too much puffball and go a bit shroomy. Nah, this has to be big. Has to be as big as me and bigger.’ He held his hand out flat as high as he could above his head. ‘Y’understand?’

‘Yes-yes!’ Skreekrit looked about him, and pulled Runtgit away. ‘I know-know where is to be found. Yes! Yes! Big cave. Many mushrooms, many-many! I get-get. But you, payment…’ A quick finger darted out on the skaven’s paw. He waved it through the air, inviting an offer.

Skreekrit made sure no one was listening, and laid out what he wished in return. ‘I have bad-bad trouble with warrior pack. Longtails, their boss Gronskwee no good-good. See beard-things come back. They think there be war, we think there be war. When beard-things come to old places, they always want take back what is now ours. Longtails want-take power before big war start, win rights-seize many beard-thing treasures after fight-fight. Make war on my chief, try to take over our pack territory. Want look good to War-Chieftain Skruk Spittletail! Mighty leader of all Clan Esk. My Clan. Warrior Clan.’

‘Then why don’t you just bash him with your black-furs then?’ said Runtgit. The ratmen had many clans, too many to keep track of, all at each other’s throats.

‘Nononono!’ The ratman shook his head. ‘This secret war, poison and night stab, alliance and cunning! No fight-fight. Bad. War-Chieftain Skruk be angry! But you, you,’ he pointed at Runtgit. ‘Well, you fight-fight, no problem for you.’ The ratman swallowed. His pulled fangs had been replaced with two shovel-like steel blades. ‘You bring me many warp tokens, you make me strong. Make me stronger, and you get this… shamanshroom. I tell you where Longtails be, certain time, certain place. Hmmm? You kill-kill. Green-thing attack, Longtails dead, Gronskwee dead, big pity. What to do?’ he tutted. ‘Skreekrit safe. Skreekrit know nothing. What you say-say?’

Runtgit thought about it. As I understood it, night goblins have a strange relationship with war. They adore violence, and to fight, but are terrible cowards at the same time. Even Runtgit, who was bolder than most, would only fight if there was no other option.

Then again, Runtgit didn’t actually have to do any fighting, did he?

‘What’s in it for my boys?’ he said finally.

‘Weapons, gold, warp tokens,’ Skreekrit shrugged. ‘I care not. Kill-kill, take what want from them, I want Longtails warriors and Clanleader Gronskwee dead, is all. Deal?’

‘Let me see first. I have to do some work. Check it out. Think on it. I’ll let you know. Two days’ time, you have a ratboy here, take a message to you. Then we deal?’

‘Very well,’ said Skreekrit. ‘Two days, then we deal.’

That morning, as the night goblins’ day was winding down, but the sun’s rising was just a promise, Runtgit returned to the surface to sit in the ventilation shaft. He had not been there for some time and found the going hard for he had increased in size and the way had become tighter.

Panting, he pulled himself into the sculpted cave made aeons gone by dwarf hand.

‘Let’s see what we can see, eh?’ he said to himself.

He looked out over the bowl that cupped the surface city of Karak Eight Peaks like a palm. The lights of both moons shone tonight, and the city was lit up in stark white and pale, eerie green. Wind whistled drearily through the place. There was no activity at all that he could see, nothing whatsoever. No fires, no noise, no sound of anything at all.

‘Lying git,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll bet that fight he wants me to have is a trap.’

He slid backwards on his belly, just in case something was watching. He’d reached the top of the shaft when a noise made him stop. It was a noise like he’d never heard before, similar to the sounds the rat-machines had made, but different, like a knife chopping quickly over and over into puffball meat.

He inched his way back. The noise was coming from the sky. He looked up. He squinted. Something small was moving quickly across the night, flickering wings blocking out the stars as it passed. It was high, so high up he had no idea how big it was, this noisy moth. Skirling orange sparks trailed after it. It banked around, swinging across the old dwarf city, and slowed until it hovered uncertainly over the top of the old citadel. It held position, wavering back and forth, forward and back.

Runtgit drew in a sharp breath. There were lights coming from the tallest tower of the fortification. Quick blinks, red-white-green. Stop. Three white flashes. Two green flashes. A red flash. A pause. A quick flicker of white. The lights stopped.

‘Signals,’ said the goblin. ‘Light talk.’ He’d heard the skar-gobboes speak of this, some cleverness of the dwarfs.

The moth-machine spun on its axis and puttered off into the night, briefly silhouetting itself against Mannslieb. Blessed to us Mannslieb may be, but the goblins call him the Evil Moon for his brightness, and Runtgit quickly looked away.

There were no fires in the city. None at all. Surely there should be something? There were orcs there most times, and some of the upper clans of goblins went out at night. Every night. But there was nothing.

Come to think of it, when had he last heard from his spies in the Broken Spears, or the Gnashas? A week, maybe, not long, but long enough for something to have happened.

He cursed himself for not staying appraised of such important tidings. ‘Zog me!’ He said. ‘The stunties are coming back! The stunties are coming back!’

He would, of course, tell no one about this until it suited him. Pleased with this new information, he scuttled back down the shaft into the underworld of the Crooked Moon tribe, back to the increasingly prosperous lair of the Backstairs Boys clan.

‘What’s the picture, boss?’

Runtgit rubbed his hands over his face, pulling his nose painfully out of shape. ‘It. Is. Not. A. Picture!’ he said through gritted pointy teeth, punctuating his words with slaps around the head of the little goblin. ‘It is a map! A thing what shows you where things is! You and the other runts stay here, you understand?’ He jabbed at the paper.

‘What, on the paper boss?’

‘No! Behind the pointy rocks.’

‘Oh, right you are boss.’

‘Then you lot there,’ he pointed at his second lot of runts, ‘will come round and get them from behind. Do you understand?’

‘Er, no,’ said the lead runt of the second team. He earned a smack on the ear.

‘You lot stand here,’ said Runtgit, with as much patience as he could muster.

‘Where? On the paper, boss?’

‘No! Zogging Mork’s pointy ears. Not on the paper! By two tunnels, south of the stunty road, near the big shroom cave, near three up, four down ways? All right? The other runt team, that means them,’ he sliced the blade of his hand at the other gaggle of undersized goblins, ‘they come up from the side and do them hard when you’re fighting their front.’ He punched the goblin leader of runtgang one hard.

‘Yes boss! Sorry boss! Ow boss!’ The little goblin rubbed at his pointy little head through his pointy little hat.

‘Runts, runts and more runts.’ Runtgit shook his head as he inspected his army. He had rounded up as many snotlings as he could to augment his pitiful force. They giggled and cried in the corner, endlessly trying to escape from the cage he had them in. ‘It’s all I got, you little ’uns, but you’ll do. We’ll fight them ratboys good, eh? We’ll kill ’em dead!’

There was a squeak of approval. Worn spears and blunt swords were waved in the air.

‘Here!’ said one runt by the name of Bok. ‘How comes there’s more of them to go fight at the side? Won’t us at the front gets all chopped up like? And how come they’ll be in that tunnel, when the fight will start back there? And where are you going to be?’

Runtgit stuck out his bottom lip. He thought about Bok. Bok was quite clever, a quality in his goblins Runtgit alternately sought out and ruthlessly suppressed, depending on his mood. Either Bok was going to get a promotion, or he was going to get made into dinner. He had not yet quite decided. Bok’s fate rested on how ambitious Bok was. ‘No, stupid. Them ratties are all big and brave in a big bunch,’ he said, some other wisdom he had gleaned from the skargobboes and Little Big ’Uns, ‘but get them in a panic and they’ll scurry off nice and quick, see? Rule five! Get them in the side. We won’t be fighting long! What you lots need to do is to lure them in. You pretend you’re running away, see? And then they’ll all get chewed up. And I’ll be directing. S’important, being a general. Too important for the likes of you!’

Bok should not be too harshly judged for believing Runtgit’s explanation. It was plausible, and in the main true. Runtgit had, however, neglected to tell them that the ratmen would most probably slaughter them all.

‘What’s a rule?’ asked one runt.

‘What’s five?’ asked another.

‘How do we do it, boss?’ asked another runt.

‘Yeah, I hear them ratties are well fierce, not like picking shrooms, is it?’ said Bok.

‘Funny you should say that. Twohead?’

‘Hur, yeah, boss?’

‘Get the sacks!’

The mutant goblin dragged three huge sacks out of the shadows.

‘Tip them out!’ said Runtgit.

A stream of brightly coloured mushrooms fell to the floor.

‘Cor!’

‘Well, would you look at that!’

‘That’s right, boys, stabspore, gutshroom, even a few madcaps in that lot. Get it brewed up, and you’ll be as brave as orcses!’

The runts were brimming with excitement. They had never been allowed the battle mushrooms of the bigger boys before. An iron pot was set upon a pile of dried-out fleshroom stalks. Giggling runts filled it with water. Duffskul got up from where he had been sitting and commenced mixing a potent brew for the runts.

Soon, the cave was full of smells that are delicious to a night goblin, but that would turn the stomach of an honest, civilised man. Duffskul inhaled the fumes deeply and nodded, his eyes wide and staring. The little runts formed a scuffling line, cups and skulls gripped in eager hands. They gibbered and squeaked with excitement.

They drank. The cave filled with the ear-splitting sound of goblins singing.

The little runts were herded from the cave, laughing and hallooing. Five of Runtgit’s most trusted lieutenants, hard-headed goblins he’d raised up from runthood over the preceding months, went with them, nodding to their boss as they followed his happy charges from the cave. They knew what to do.

Runtgit sipped at the mushroom soup. The world seemed inexplicably amusing now that he had a few draughts. Bright spots winked in front of his eyes as he turned his head. He felt bold, big as the world and quick with it.

Duffskul sniffed at the cauldron. ‘Better in beer, this, but soup’s just as good when you’re in a rush.’ He took a massive slurp from a ladle. ‘Oh yus. Nice. Now, you sure this gonna get me my shamanshroom?’

‘I told you I would, didn’t I?’ Runtgit fought a burst of giggles. ‘It’s all me plan. Fuggrak! Fuggrak! You there?’ called Runtgit.

‘Yeah, bait-boy, I’m here.’ Fuggrak the squig herder stepped out of a side-passage, twirling his squig pacifier nonchalantly round his wrist by its thick leather cord.

‘You get your squigs in that passage like I told you. I want them ready for when me runts break and run.’

‘You got payment?’

‘Course I have,’ said Runtgit.

‘Then we’re already there. I’ll get the lads to unpen the squigs now.’

Fuggrak took a slug of the soup and pulled a face. ‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s better brewed.’

With that, he went away, whistling a squig-scaring air as he went.

Duffskul sniffed. ‘You’re taking a big risk not telling Tarkit about this. He’ll be angry, and you could have had a couple of mobs of proper boys for the job.’

‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’ said Runtgit.

‘No, I didn’t. Clever Runt.’ The shaman tittered.

Runtgit tittered back. ‘Good. No point telling old Tarkit about it, then he gets first pick, don’t he? Now come on. Me and you, we got to go down there and all.’

Goblins shrieked as they ran down the scree slope in the cavern, waving their makeshift weapons, some of them laughing so hard they fell over their robes. No matter that they were a pathetic bunch, the ratman column was very surprised to see them. The goblin charge hit home, sending the side of the marching line into disorder and surrounding its front. Ratslaves bearing heavy boxes panicked, pulling at their chains, biting and thrashing at anything within reach as they struggled to escape.

Their leader, Gronskwee, squeaked and chittered. The goblins were undersized and poorly armed. He put a warpstone bullet through the face of one, and his sword was in his hand an instant later, slashing at the little creatures. They fought poorly. What did he have to fear? His clanrats formed around him. Within the forest of stalagmites, goblins died quickly. Even with their reactions sharpened by the fungus brew, the skaven were quicker still. The goblins’ confidence started to fail.

It was when little Durrit had the top of his skull taken off so viciously by a serrated skaven blade that his brains got in the eyes of half a dozen of the other runts that they decided they had no more stomach for battle.

The runts broke and ran.

Chittering excitedly, Gronskwee ordered five of his clanrats to remain behind, whip the slaves back into shape and then set off in hot pursuit of the fleeing goblins.

They went at speed from the cavern, following the worn trail of an ancient river. Gronskwee did not know these caves well, but was gratified to see the tunnel split in two. In front of the fleeing runts was a pair of dead ends, both branches closed with walls of shadowed rock some way back from the main way. There was nowhere for the runts to go.

Squealing with bloodlust, the skaven leapt upon the remaining few runts.

‘Right then,’ said Runtgit, stepping forward. ‘Now!’ Runtgit tore down the painted cloth hanging over the tunnel entrance he and the other runts hid in. He shouted at his diminutive army, gesturing rapidly, kicking them and forcing them down towards the ratmen. In truth, they did not need much encouragement. The mushrooms emboldened them greatly.

The runts charged into the flank of the clanrats, shouting madly, jabbing and poking with their scavenged weapons. The clanrats – fur, teeth and weapons smeared with bits of dead runt – turned to meet this new threat. For a moment they panicked, and the narrow passage filled with the unmistakable scent of frightened ratman. Gronskwee himself pushed through his troops and leapt into the second runt gang. Seeing that this band of goblins was as puny as the first, the ratmen rallied and pressed their attack. But there were more runts this time, and the ratmen were pinned in a narrow passageway. The clanrats were mired in a press of squeaking, undersized goblins. Urkdurk waded in, a club in each hand, both heads laughing, bashing skaven skulls to a bloody mess of fur and brain and bone.

‘Duffskul!’ shouted Runtgit. ‘The signal!’

Duffskul muttered under his breath, and a cascade of green sparks sprang from his waggling fingers, higher and higher. Each detonated with a loud crack and a flash. The other supposedly blind tunnel opened up too, another painted rock face flipped back to reveal a wall of pointy white teeth in round red bodies. The terrible wail of the squigpipes struck up and the squig herders goaded their monsters towards the rear of the ratmen’s line.

The squigs bounded in at speed, knocking skaven down as balls knock down skittles. The clanrats panicked. Squig teeth snapped and squig bodies bulged as shrieking clanrats were gulped down whole. Many runts fell to the snapping jaws too, but Runtgit did not care.

Gronskwee realised things were lost. Seeing the goblins as the lesser challenge, he urged his few remaining skaven to hack their way through the runts. He made it into Runtgit’s tunnel mouth.

‘Ahahaha! Not so fast, furboy.’ Runtgit stepped into Gronskwee’s path, and his sword slipped into Gronskwee’s gut. He gave it a twist and grinned. ‘That’s from your mate Skreekrit.’ He twisted it again, more viciously. ‘And that’s from me.’

The skaven’s eyes widened. His weapon clattered to the floor. Its whiskers twitched and blood frothed around its chisel-teeth. Runtgit wrenched out his sword, spilling the thing’s viscera upon the floor.

Gronskwee dropped and Runtgit fell upon him. He squatted on Gronskwee’s chest, cackling madly, as he sawed at the neck with his blade. With a grunt, he pushed his sword through the ratman’s spine and the head rolled free. The two last skaven made a break for it. One was dragged down by triumphant runts and bludgeoned to death. The other hared off up the tunnel.

‘Oi!’ called Runtgit. ‘Get that, would you?’

Duffskul pushed himself up off the wall and pointed a finger. A jet of green fire shot from his hand, and the skaven vanished in a puff of smoke.

‘Nice one,’ said Runtgit. A squig bounded over to him, teeth gaping wide. The would-be boss goblin punched it hard above the nose, just where the squigherders had told him. Its beady yellow eyes rolled back in its head and it slapped into the wall. ‘Zog off,’ he said.

Runtgit went into the main tunnel, Gronskwee’s head dangling from his hand. Squig herders battered squigs back into passivity, tossing them the odd luckless runt to distract them if a clubbing was not enough of an incentive to calm down. His remaining runts were happily carving themselves trophies from the dead clanrats, laughing madly and uncaring that only half of them had survived.

‘Gather up them weapons, you lot!’ shouted Runtgit. ‘Get a good bit of steel, you can be proper boys next fight out. Now come on! We got some stuff to grab.’

Five minutes later, the remaining members of Gronskwee’s column were fatally surprised to find their leader was not coming back after all.

‘Hello, furry boys,’ said Runtgit evilly. ‘I believe that stuff you got there is mine.’

‘Yeah boss, yours boss,’ said Bok, and gave his most ingratiating smile. ‘That’s right, boss!’

Promotion, decided Runtgit.

Boxes clattered from furred backs. Rats backed away slowly.

They all died anyway.

At the head of a triumphant column of runts, Runtgit marched home. He felt as big as the biggest orc, a feeling that was only partly attributable to Duffskul’s mushroom stew.

‘And this!’ he said later, as he stood before Tarkit Fing-Finger’s mean throne, ‘is a dozen ratboy pelts from the ratboys what was saying all kinds of things about you. And thirty ratboy skulls.’ Runtgit smiled and wiped his bloody hands on his robes. ‘I thought we could pile them up in a pile like, make the place look nice.’

Tarkit nodded as the furs were laid on top of the heap of scavenged weapons and the skulls piled with wet clicks at his feet. About half the material being carried by the ratmen had found its way to the goblin boss. He knew it, and Runtgit knew Tarkit knew it, and as long as both knew the other knew what he knew was what they knew, then they were both happy.

‘Well done, Runtgit,’ said Tarkit. ‘Duffskul here and Grobskab too, they is always saying good stuff about you. Maybe they is right.’ Tarkit’s eyes narrowed. ‘Me fing on me finger now, he’s not so sure, but this is a lot of shiny stuff you’ve brought, so I’ll let it pass.’

Snotruk piped up. ‘How did he know?’

‘Who said you could talk, Snotruk?’ said Grobskab.

Snotruk was not to be dissuaded. ‘I mean, how did he know where them ratboys were going to be? And how did he get all the stuff to pay for them squig herders? And what about his runts? That’s bad runting that what he did! They’s all dead!’

‘They’s only runts, Snotruk,’ said Tarkit. ‘We gots loads of runts. And if they all died, so what? We’ll have more runts next week. And look at all the shiny.’ He scratched under his massive boss hat and thought a moment. ‘Nah, shut it. Shut it right now. Runtgit did good. What you ever done for me, eh? Nothing! So shut it!’

‘Bu–’

‘I said shut it!’

Snotruk’s remaining ear wilted and he cringed. But underneath his cravenness, his heart filled with resolve. He was going to bring the ex-Runt down.

‘And so he did,’ said Skarsnik to me, as we sat upon the dais in the dwarf kings’ throne room. ‘So he did.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EXIT THIEVING GIT, ENTER THE MOUNTAIN FOLK

‘Beard-things is coming,’ said Skarsnik. I was exhausted by this point, the long march to the Eight Peaks and my terror having taken its toll upon me, but I still wrote. I could feel the pen gripped hard in my hand, but it was as if the limb belonged to someone else, or worked under its own volition, a foreign organism grafted to my arm. I had finished the first bottle of wine. Another had been provided. I had soiled my breeches, for I dared not ask for a pot to relieve myself in and my bowels were still not mine to command. In spite of this, and of the draughts atop Skarsnik’s lofty perch, fire and wine warmth seeped into my core. There was no danger of my sleeping; to have fallen asleep then would surely have meant my death. Skarsnik was a kingly goblin, mightier and more noble in his way than some Imperial lords I have known. And yet he was still a goblin.

But oh! How similar we were, yet so different. I saw in his life a parallel to my own. He, like I, had been set apart from his fellows by his talents, few understanding him, many abusing him, as I had been misunderstood and abused. At first, I chastised myself for such fancies, but as he continued his tale, telling me of his exile from his people, I saw that fate or the strange, brutal gods of the orcs had conspired to bring us together. There was no chance element to our meeting; none at all, of that I remain convinced.

‘Beard-things is coming, that’s what he said. And I’d seen it wiv me own eyes too. Lights in the night! Dey do that ya know, blink blink flash flash, long-distance talking. I figured it out, ages back. I knows what they is saying, it’s all here, I wroted it down somewhere.’ Skarsnik flicked the corner up on a pile of parchment on a table low to the floor. ‘Tried to get me gobboes to learn it, but can dey? Mork’s ’urty bits no dey cannot. Idiots.’ He fell to grumbling to himself awhile in a mixture of languages. He stirred his wine with a long jewelled finger. He was drunk and becoming maudlin.

‘S’what ole Skreekrit said. ‘Beard-things.’ Things, wiv beards. Course he meant the stunties. I didn’t know how close dey was. Lucky for me too. Like I says, I is special, uvverwise, how do you explain all dis?’ He looked around his vast throne hall as if seeing it for the first time, his eyes widening with wonder at the glowing stars set in their stone firmament by the ancient dwarfs. His face creased with puzzlement when he took in the smoking goblintown that sullied the floor, annoyed at the blemish on his kingdom. He snarled. His quick hands played over his goblet, turning it back and forth, back and forth, as he looked past me deep into a past I could barely comprehend.

‘I’d been to see Skreekrit. He was well pleased with what I had done. I gave him da head, he gave me da shamanshroom. Everyfing was going to plan, everyfing! And den dat sneaky git Snotruk rumbled me, dint he?

‘They was waiting for me when I got back. Him, and anuvver boy, one ov Tarkit’s own lads. Sneaky beggar had smeared himself all over in nightsquig oil. Blacker dan black dat, and stinkier dan da drops. Me snots and me squiqhounds and me boys would never ov seen or smelled him. He were a sneaky one!’ Something akin to admiration came across Skarsnik’s face. ‘He really had it in for me he did, and I never knew he had it in ’im. He must ’ave been desperate, nightsquig stinks well funny. You never can get rid of da smell, know that? Stays wiv ya forever. So,’ Skarsnik sniffed hard. ‘He stands dere, shivering and dripping stinking gunk all over da place, pointing his finger. “I sees him boss! I sees him! He was dere, speaking wiv da ratties! He was dealin’ wiv dem! Our enemies!’’

‘“Er, no I wasn’t,” says I. But I sees it in Tarkit’s eyes. I sees it in da eyes ov da uvver boy what is also all black and slimy too. He’s seen it too. Tarkit’d never believe just Snotruk, would he? Clever Snotruk, taking anuvver of da boys. ‘Where’s da proof?’ I says. Den I know me squig is cooked. A nasty look comes over Snotruk, he smiles all broad and evil like and frows dis little bag on da floor. “Here’s ya proof,” he says. “Here’s ya proof, I gots all da proof ya needs…”’

The leather bag landed lightly on the floor. Runtgit did not need to pick it up to know what was inside. A weird feeling he was all too familiar with was coming off it, the one that made his nose prickle: magic.

‘Er, I never seen that before,’ said Runtgit. ‘Oh no, I hasn’t.’

‘Liar!’ shouted Snotruk. ‘Liar!’ His voice was a hysterical, piercing shriek. His remaining ear vibrated with hatred. ‘You always was a lying little runt, and you is still a lying little runt!’

‘He’s right, Runtgit.’ Tarkit looked stern, and feverish with it. When a goblin looks like that – rolling eyes, slick skin, twitching lips – you can be sure the potential for hideous cruelty is emerging from the situation. All the goblins felt it. Runtgit looked around the circle of goblins surrounding him. They all stared back at him hungrily, and a couple shuffled closer. Their fingers wiggled in anticipation. The praise and boisterous good cheer that had accompanied his victory just a few days before had gone. They wanted to hurt him, and they would. He was an outcast now, and thus fair game for their wicked appetites. ‘I should have listened to me fing, me fing on me finger!’ said Tarkit. ‘It’s always right. Nah, we’re going to eat ya. You is a thieving git!’

‘Thieving git! Thieving git!’

‘Yeah yeah, all right Snotruk, calm down, you is beginning to get on me nerves,’ said Tarkit.

Runtgit looked about for support. Grobskab was nowhere to be seen, while Duffskul stood behind the throne, shroomstem pipe clamped between his teeth, mad old eyes watching thoughtfully, just like he always did. Only this time, they were going to kill him.

Doesn’t he realise they’re about to roast me? thought Runtgit. Won’t he help me?

Rough hands grabbed him, ripping at his clothes. ‘No! Stop! I was going to tell you about it! I was! Who do you think kept the ratties away! Who–’ A skargobbo loomed into view, huge and gnarly, and punched him in the mouth. Blood gushed over his tongue as he spat broken teeth. ‘No! No stop!’

The goblins laughed.

For long the master of his own destiny, Runtgit was reduced, become again a frightened little goblin.

They stripped Runtgit naked and hoisted him up on their shoulders, giggling madly. Fingers poked him in the eyes. They tweaked his ears and bit his nose, they punched him hard, shouting as they beat him. ‘Tenderise the meat! Make it soft, make it sweet!’

Tarkit got up from his throne, standing tall over the other goblins. ‘By the power vested in me by being bigger and stronger and meaner than youse lot, I pronounce you Runtgit a “Thieving Git”,’ said Tarkit. ‘Take him away!’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now, er, Snotruk, now you can starts with the shouting of “Thieving Git”, if you wants,’ said Tarkit begrudgingly.

The whole crowd of them erupted into cries of ‘Thieving Git’ and ‘Toast the Runt!’ for Runtgit’s hard-earned name had been stripped away. They tossed him up into the air and caught him, whooping and laughing and hurting him all the while. ‘To the barbecue pit!’ one shouted. Many shrill voices took up the cry. Nagbad, who passed as the clan’s cook, snatched up his favourite spoon. ‘For basting!’ he cried, brandishing it like a war hammer. ‘For basting!’ the others tittered.

A black tide of over-excited bodies spilled down the Backstairs, towards the firebowls on the lower landing where the rockfall choked off the clan’s domain.

Barrels were rolled down the steps. Axes cracked them open. Fungus beer was passed out in cups made from skulls, and the festivities started in earnest.

Runtgit was dragged to one of the old firebowls. Stupefied by his beating, he recoiled from the grim dwarf faces all around the rim. The base of the firebowl was stained by corroded metal from a feedpipe for some gas or other the mountain folk used to keep the fires alight in ancient times. The goblins took a more direct approach.

Leaves that had blown into the mountain were piled into the firebowls, dry mushroom stalks heaped high around them.

Runtgit was bound to an iron spit with twisted ropes of soaked squig-hide while boisterous goblins banged flintstones against each other, and against their heads, to raise a spark.

Drums were brought out and beaten, pipes wailed. The goblins began to sing.

Runtgit’s guts churned with terror. Every face was full of hatred and glee at his suffering, every grin a joy at his pain. All his friends had deserted him. He saw Bok fighting over his hat, his best boss hat. He caught Bok’s eye, and Bok slunk away. At least he was loyal enough to look shamefaced. Not like Two Head. Urkdurk clapped and capered, both heads singing along tunelessly as the goblins regaled Runtgit with a stirring air:

‘He stole some stuff, and that’s enough,

To get him set on fire!

He told the rats he’d give them things,

’cos Runtgit is a liar!

We’ll spice him up, and roast him good,

And we’re having runt for tea!

Ol’ Runtgit thought him tough and brave,

He won a big bad fight,

He’s not so smart, not any more,

We’s setting him alight!

And we’re having runt for tea!

Tarkit says he is a thieving little git,

He took stuff from da boss

So now he’s in the cooking pit,

With flames that lick and spit!

And we’re having runt for tea!

Runtgit thinks he’s dead clever,

But now he’s not,

He’s dead, that’s what

He’s in the gobboes’ cooking pot,

And we’re having runt for tea!

Ole Runtgit, me sad ole pal,

The fing on Tarkit’s finger,

Said to da boss, he says it so

You ain’t allowed to linger,

And we’re having runt for tea!’

And so on. Despite their feeble cultural achievements, it seems goblins have quite the talent for extemporisation. The song would hit a lull, and a bright and fiendish face, shining with fungally-induced joy, would leap up and declaim a new verse, the goblins with deeper voices singing the refrain ‘And we’re having runt for tea!’. They all, naturally, found it the very height of hilarity.

Finally, the goblins coaxed a flame into being at the heart of their untidy pile of fuel. It guttered, and Runtgit’s heart skipped, for a condemned man will take joy in every few seconds of life given them. But the flame curled the leaves, and leapt up, and licked at a dry mushroom stalk, and so the fire burst into life. Runtgit’s ears fell flat against his head. He hissed and thrashed against the spit. ‘No! No! Help! Help!’ he squeaked.

‘You might fink it funny,’ said Skarsnik to me at this point in his story. ‘That I would tell you, me, king of da mountains, dat I wuz scared. Surely me, Skarsnik, king of all da Crooked Moons and a lot of uvver gobboes besides, and some orcs and uvver fings, wouldn’t be scared.’ He glared at me. His words were slurred from his beer. ‘Don’t be stupid, humie, course I was scared. Dey was gonna eat me!’

Runtgit was hoisted up by rough hands, banging his head on the floor. Cackling goblins lifted him high over the firebowl, while others erected a spit stand. The mushroom stalks were all ablaze, and now the goblins were assiduously placing compacted pellets of squig dung upon the fire. We think them unsophisticated, the greenskins, but they have their own ways of living. To any who would say otherwise, and I doubt you are one of those, Herr Doktor Wollendorp; I would say if they are so unsophisticated, how are they such a threat to men?

Bellows pumped. Squig-fuel bricks glowed red. Nagbad, resplendent in his dirty white cooking hat, nodded and smacked his lips. The goblins lifted Runtgit higher in the air and placed the spit in its rests and started to rotate him, so as to roast him the better.

‘Noooooo!’ Runtgit howled. He blew at the flames. They were so hot! Such unbearable heat! His skin blistered. Only the turning of the spit provided him any relief. He threw himself from side to side, but the squig ropes were too tight, and tightening as they dried. ‘I got lots of mushrooms! Things you ain’t never seen! You can have all of it! All of it! Lemme go! Don’t eat me! Urkdurk! Help!’

Urkdurk laughed and threw a rock at his former chief. It struck him above the left eye, and blood clouded his vision. Runtgit started a fresh round of pleas, but Nagbad walloped him on the skull with his basting spoon so hard his ears rang.

If Runtgit had not been gripped by such fear, I doubt very much he would have noticed the coil of smoke blowing through the hole in the rockfall. In times of high emotion, we are all wont to see that which would otherwise remain hidden to us, and Runtgit was no different in that regard to a man. He paused in his crying. He frowned. The smoke smelled funny, strong and sharp over the scent of the squig fire and his own crisping skin; a round, full smell, like pepper and drops-water and burned mushroom stalk.

‘Wait! Wait! Can you smell something burning?’ he shouted.

‘Course I can, Runtgit – you!’ shouted Nagbad.

The hall erupted with gales of laughter, for the goblins were by then deep in their cups. The turnspits joined in, bent double, tears running from their eyes. Runtgit swung to a halt. He struggled against his bonds all the harder as his back burned.

His panicked eyes came to rest on Duffskul, stood at the top of the stairs, smoking his pipe, his ever-present skull of fungus brew in his hand, watching, always watching. He couldn’t be sure – smoke and blood were in his eyes – but he swore to me as he related his story that Duffskul winked at him.

The sound of the party receded, the goblins helpless with laughter he could no longer hear.

‘I told you you was special, runt.’ Runtgit looked wildly about, but there was no source for the voice. Duffskul’s eyes glowed a soft green. He was speaking right into Runtgit’s mind!

For some reason, Runtgit was compelled to look towards the rockfall.

The strange smell went away. The smoke stopped its smoking.

Tarkit stood, be-finged finger held high, about to make a joke at Runtgit’s expense.

There was a deafening roar and a crash, and the world turned white, then black.

The rockfall exploded inwards. Tarkit and a score of the Backstairs Boys were shredded to gristle by splinters of rock. Many more goblins fell dead as fist-sized pebbles stove in faces and chests. Others were blown far across the room, smearing themselves messily over the walls. One of the spit stands holding Runtgit collapsed. His head swooshed towards the fire, and the other stand fell and he clattered down. For a moment he teetered dangerously on the lip of the barbecue pit, then he fell to safety. He lay there for a moment, not knowing where he was, utterly terrified by the explosion. His head rang and his vision swam. Grit was in his eyes, ears and mouth. The grumble of settling rock died away. A wave of dust billowed up the stairs, reducing the world to a series of shapes and frightening shadows, full of the squeaks of dying goblins. The whole world reeked of shattered rock and the strange, sharp scent of the smoke amplified a thousandfold. Silhouettes flitted past him as goblins ran through the smoke and dust, hoods flapping as they ran.

Something deep inside Runtgit took over, an urge to survive. He wrestled at his bonds. With difficulty, he rubbed them at the edge of the bowl. The squig-hide was charred and parted quickly. He had his hands and feet loose when the first gunshots rang out, whip-crack clear and deafening in the confined space of the Backstairs.

He peered over the firebowl rim. Squat shapes were coming through the new hole, squat shapes with long beards. They were dressed in armour that clinked in that muted, heavy fashion that well made war harness has.

The dwarfs were coming back to Karak Eight Peaks.

There were well over a score of them, grizzled longbeards, hatred in their eyes. They stepped into the rabble of confused goblins and laid about them with their axes and hammers, hewing them down in droves. A line of warriors armed with handguns took up station where the rockfall had until so recently been, picking off the goblins as they fled.

Tarkit was dead. Urkdurk too. The goblins had not been prepared for a fight. All they had to hand were knives, a lot of skaven-skull drinking pots, and Nagbad’s basting spoon. The fight on the lower landing did not last long.

Still, such is the hatred of the night goblins for the dwarfs they rallied themselves on the upper landing. Runtgit looked up the stairs to the main living space of the Backstairs Boys. Duffskul and the skargobboes were marshalling their forces, kicking goblins into a line and passing out spears. He could not go that way.

He had to get past the mountain folk and go down the stairs, into the unknown.

The lower landing was all confusion. Running goblins shrieked, dwarfs shouted war cries in their phlegmy language, they gestured up the stairs, forming themselves into a block and raising their shields over their heads as the first shower of arrows fell among them.

A dwarf with a magnificent white beard shouted orders. He carried a metal staff and was armoured in heavy plate. The helm was cast to resemble a ferocious dwarf face, the breastplate and staff chased with runes that gleamed with unnatural light, far brighter than the faded writings found in the ruined hold. The dwarfs, shields locked, advanced up the stairs, heavy boots crunching inches away from Runtgit’s hiding place.

A wounded dwarf was dragged before the white-bearded leader. White-beard looked down, spoke words through his helm: ‘Valaya…’ ‘Grungni’ and ‘aid’ and others Runtgit recognised, for he had garnered an understanding of the dwarf language from the Backstairs Boys’ captive. The dwarf struck his staff upon the ground, once, twice, thrice. The runes flared brighter still. The wound on the injured warrior glimmered, and closed. He sat, dazed, and was hauled back to his feet and pushed back into the fight. The old dwarf consulted with two others, less heavily armoured. They carried scrolls which they glanced at, looking around the Backstairs, nodding and pointing, ignoring the fight. The old dwarf held his staff up high. Invisible runes in the rock revealed themselves, and a shape like a door appeared in the stone.

Runtgit slunk around the firebowl. The dwarfs tramped past up the stairs, breaking into a charge. They attacked the goblins, roars of loathing coming from both sides. There is no love lost between the mountain folk and the greenskins who have usurped their halls.

Runtgit kept his eyes on the old dwarf as he crept among the bodies. Staff held high and shining, the old dwarf and his aides were entering a chamber the goblin had never seen before, concealed for centuries by powerful dwarfen magics.

Runtgit lost sight of them as they went inside, and he became intent on his escape. Gun smoke and rock dust choked the air, the torches had blown out, and it was dark. He paused by a shattered goblin corpse. He undid the rope around the goblin’s waist and rolled the body out of its robe. By sheer good fortune, he was able to creep to the cleared rockfall unnoticed. He came close enough to a dwarf gunner to be able to reach out and pluck a hair from his beard. The dwarf, his face enclosed in his helm, intent on his weapon, did not see Runtgit, and the goblin slipped unseen into the dark.

The rockfall was very deep, hundreds of yards. There were signs of pick marks and digging leading up to the blown-open entrance. Evidently, the dwarfs had been working through it for some time. Only magic or artistry could have masked their approach. Runtgit suspected they had plentiful supplies of both.

Runtgit’s bare feet slapped on the rock as he ran down the stairs, the sound of battle receding as he went. He shook goblin gore from the robe as he ran, and slipped it on. There was no hood, and it was only an outer robe; he did not have the comforting layers of cloth he used to swaddle his wiry body in. But it was better than nothing.

Cold, unarmed, and in a part of the underground city no goblin had entered in living memory, Runtgit’s problems were just beginning.

CHAPTER TWELVE

OUT OF THE FIRE AND INTO THE FIRE

The tracks of the mountain folk were deep in the dust. In places, he came across signs of struggles, mummified bodies of ratmen or goblins in poses suggestive of a violent end. The dust around these was scuffed and disturbed, as if some of the combatants’ bodies had been taken away. He saw low cairns of piled stones nearby, and guessed that the dwarfs had buried their ancient dead as they had ascended the stairs.

No goblin tunnel or rat burrow pierced the walls of the stairs here. They were pristine, the signs of long ago battle apart. The runes running along the wall friezes were sharp, glimmers of power clinging to them. Glowstones flickered still. Broad landings periodically broke the stair’s gentle fall, what carvings or ornament adorned them was unsullied by goblin-work.

Runtgit came to a landing where the dwarfs had made camp. Shields, digging tools, machines, spare weapons and packs were neatly arrayed there. Two ponies stood still as statues, nosebags on. A dwarf, even more venerable than the priest he had seen above, sucked on a pipe and grumbled loudly at a brace of short-bearded youngsters, scolding them as they went about their duties.

Runtgit’s ears pressed flat against his head. There was no way past them.

He came to a halt by a statue of a dwarf hero. He scooped up a pebble. Like the landing back at the Backstairs Boys’ lair, here four doors opened off at the sides. He tossed a pebble hard into one of these.

The grumbling dwarf was on his feet in an instant, an axe appearing in his hand. He shouted at the youngsters, bidding them stand either side of the doorway. The older dwarf hitched up his belt, set his pipe aside, and walked boldly over to where Runtgit had thrown the pebble.

Runtgit readied himself. He nearly did not go, but the fear of being caught skulking in the dark was far greater than the fear of being caught running away.

He threw himself down the stairs. He took the deep steps three at a time. A panicked squeak escaped him as he stumbled through the camp; the ponies shied from him and whinnied. He blundered into a stack of picks, knocking them down with a shocking racket.

The veteran dwarf spun on his heel. He pointed and shouted in the thick tongue of the dwarfs. He pulled a pistol and fired. Runtgit ducked, the ball knocking a spray of splinters from the wall right by his head. The sound of dwarf feet pounded after him, and yet Runtgit had fear on his side and he ran with feet winged with terror.

The sounds of pursuit receded behind him. Shouts and echoed curses followed.

Then he was alone.

Runtgit followed the stairs deeper and deeper under the mountains, into places where nothing had trodden for a thousand years, not before the dwarfs came back. He walked for he knew not how long. Now the initial excitement of near death and its cheating had subsided, pains and hurts he had not previously regarded came to taunt him. His wrists and ankles were cut by the squig-hide ropes, he was covered in bruises and scrapes, his skin was peppered with grit from the blast. Worst of all were the burns he had suffered to his back and limbs from his roasting. His skin tightened where it had been seared, making it difficult to walk. He limped on, cold and afraid, into the deep night at the roots of the world.

The walls of the stairs came to be punctured by many square entryways. The stairs were of fine workmanship, but there was little beyond practical neatness to these side-passages. Dwarf-hewn they might have been, but beyond their well-dressed portals were old mine workings, either shafts or vast caverns carved by pick and hammer from the rock, what ores had been taken thence unknowable, the working steeped in centuried silence. Dwarfs are fastidious creatures, for all that in their world, there is a still a difference between a mine and a grand hall.

Runtgit hesitated in some of these doorways. He could go down into the workings, but where did they go? The mountains were riddled with mines left behind by the dwarfs. Most ran on for miles, then abruptly stopped, the mineral veins they followed worked out.

It was very dark in these tunnels. And quiet. The air seemed full of angry dwarf-thoughts at his presence.

He carried on down the stairs.

The stairs ended eventually in a portal carved in the likeness of a shouting dwarf’s face. Runes glowed brightly around it, the stone door that had closed the way drawn aside on ancient rollers. A fresh coat of grease covered these wheels and the machinery at the door sides. A fine carpet of rust was sprinkled on the ground where it had shaken loose. The dwarfs had come this way.

He passed through the door on to a highway under the mountain. When he turned to look back at the doorway, his face grew puzzled. He could see the ancient dwarf head clearly if he looked at it one way, but otherwise, the wall of rock appeared to continue on unbroken but for the incongruous rectangle where the door had been drawn back. More dwarf magic. He had heard from the Little Big ’Uns that they had hidden whole rooms of shiny treasures with their magic scratchings way back. Twice today he had seen the truth of that. No wonder he had never been able to find his way further down the stairs!

The highway was strewn with desiccated ratmen corpses, evidence that once a ferocious battle had been fought here. Haloes of fluff lay around the dead skaven, their weapons outlines of rust on the floor. When Runtgit touched the bodies, their clothes crumbled to dust and their skin was hard as iron. Another new cairn, topped with a fierce dwarf face freshly carved in stone, sat in the middle of the way.

The road surface was riven by cracks. The section to his left had been lifted up by some ancient convulsion of the earth, so that it stood a good ten feet over Runtgit’s head and touched the cave roof. The road leading to it dipped down sharply, for the highway had been driven under itself. A huge crack split the wall and ceiling where these two mismatched levels met. He padded away from the uplifted section. He could not go that way; the earth had closed it. In the other direction, the underway ended abruptly, a fallen slab of roof shutting it far more effectively than any door ever could.

Until recently. A tunnel had been carved through this collapse. Slow-burning lanterns in brackets lined the tunnel. Fresh chisel marks, white on the grey-brown stone, covered the walls. Piles of tailings were heaped at the door, and a dwarf machine sat outside, still and quiet. If that was whence the dwarfs had come, he could not go that way either, for who knew how many angry, bearded warriors waited in that direction?

That left the crack.

Sniffing the air for dwarf-stink, Runtgit entered the tunnel and plucked a lantern from its mount.

He went back to the roadway. The crack was black on black, blacker than the blackest thing in the blackest places of the mountains. It went up the wall and across the ceiling, the sides of the split stretching upwards until they were lost in the gloom. A faint breeze blew down on his head. Runtgit approached the crack in the wall. A slope of rubble led down into the dark. His nose twitched, his ears quivered. There was no movement to the air there, it was dank and mysterious.

Noises sounded from behind him, dwarf noises, coming down the stairs, coming for him.

With a tiny gibber of fear, he went down, slipping and sliding on the uneven surface, and fled into the true dark of the under-mountains.

The dwarf lamp lasted a long time; how long, Runtgit did not know, for time as you or I understand it is an irrelevance to mountains and goblins both. Under the mountains, the weight of the rock above presses down, squashing all light from the air, all nourishment also. It squeezes time flat, makes it sad and cowed. When the lamp finally went out, it was so dark that even Runtgit’s goblin eyes, attuned to the dimness of the world under our feet, could see nothing. He waved his hand in front of him. He felt the air move, but could not see a thing. He cursed himself for not thinking to take two lamps, or three, or four, or lots, lighting them in succession as they burned out one after another. But how many lamps would he have needed? How long was he going to be in this place, lost in the black where even the dwarfs had never ventured? There was no sign anything alive had ever been down here.

Somewhere, water dripped.

Gingerly, he made his way down the unstable rock, his freezing toes feeling out a way. His heart felt it would burst every time a stone skittered off in front of him. He carried on in this way for many hours, until terror became such a constant companion he grew bored of it, and his mind calmed. He became absorbed in his task, pushing his foot forward, gripping the rough wall for support, inching forward and down, feeling for peril with his toes. His eyes had nothing to see, and the dark swirled with odd colours.

Once, his foot went out into nothing, and he barely caught himself before he followed it. He drew himself back at the last minute and got down on his hands and knees, feeling along the edge of a chasm. He dropped a rock into it. He waited a long time before he heard the splash of water echoing up from far below.

His panic rose again, thinking his way blocked. But he found a way around.

After a time, he realised with surprise that he could see. The walls of the tunnel became visible, shadow on shadow at first, then the hard edges of cracked rock. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed it. A dull grey shape moved in the dark. After another twenty steps he could see his feet, another twenty, the path ahead. The loose rock gave way without warning to a water-worn passage. There were many subterranean streams in the mountains, and they made smooth tunnels like this before finding an easier way, leaving their old passage dry. The fault in the stone he had been following narrowed to an arms’-span in the floor of the tunnel, but cleaved it deep. He cocked his head, his ears pricked high. Far off, he could hear the rush of water. A lot of water.

He edged around the crack and continued to where the light became brighter still. The tunnel opened into a large cave, ornamented with glorious spires of rock. Water dripped loudly into a pool as still and bright as a mirror, flowstone formed into exotic shapes around it. On an island in the middle of this small lake, a stand of glowshrooms stood tall. Other mushrooms grew under their broad caps, prospering in their light. It was beauteous, a rare sight, a grotto worthy of Taal himself.

Runtgit could have cried. I suspect he did cry. Skarsnik never admitted to shedding tears, but he must have done. I saw many other goblins weeping, in terror, or with laughter. They are inconstant, emotional beasts, as their garrulous nature attests. He wept then, I am sure, wept for joy at the light which he thought he would never see again.

He dallied a moment at the water’s edge before wading the lake to the island. The water was as cold as ice. He drew in a sharp breath as it came up to his waist, then he gasped in pleasure as it soothed the pain of his burns. He ducked down, letting the chill wash some of the heat of the fire away.

The crop of mushrooms on the island was a modest one, the glowshrooms small compared to those in the mushroom forests higher in the mountain and yet, to the battered goblin, they were a veritable feast. His stomach awoke with stabbing pangs. He was famished! He crammed dozens in, barely stopping to breathe.

His hunger subsided. Cold though he was, he lay down amid the comforting copse of mushrooms. Within seconds, he was fast asleep.

Something brushed across the goblin’s face, a light touch as gentle as cave spider webs wafting in a draft. His snores interrupted, he pawed at his nose and rolled over, muttering in his sleep. He twitched, and pulled his knees in closer to his chest.

The touch came again.

Runtgit was exhausted, but the survival instinct of a night goblin is finely honed. He sat bolt upright, immediately awake. ‘Wassat?’ he said. He looked around himself, head turning this way and that. The mushroom copse glowed. Total, deep quiet, the kind of silence it is only possible to find in the hollow places of the earth. Nothing stirred. The pool was glassy black as polished glass.

Runtgit relaxed. ‘S‘nothing,’ he said, simply to hear the sound of a voice, any voice. He stood and stretched. He shoved a mushroom into his mouth and chewed.

‘Shhhhh,’ said something. A whisper on the air, quiet as shadows creeping down evening mountainsides.

‘Who’s there?’ The mushroom fell from Runtgit’s mouth. His red eyes darted about, squinting into the dim corners of the cave.

‘There, there, there,’ said the voice. This was not his voice’s echo; this voice had its own echo.

Runtgit’s ears flattened against his head. He hunched protectively, hands out in front of him ready to grasp and squeeze any soft warm necks that might present themselves.

Runtgit’s ears twitched at the patter of stone, the slosh of water. An arrow of ripples passed over the pool’s surface, making him jump.

‘So brave, little goblin, so brave to come here. No one has been here for so long, so very, very long.’

The voice swept from one side of the cavern to the other, moving close and then far. It spoke a language the goblin did not know, but which he understood only too well. A soft voice, but under its velvet welcome was something unwholesome and hungry.

‘Leave me alone!’ he said. He spun around. His heart hammered.

‘Why? Why? Why?’ the voice echoed. ‘So tired. So cold. Come and keep me warm, little goblin. Make me warm…’ A shadow passed over the wall. Where it fell, there was no light nor an object to cast it. Long fingers reached outwards from a thin and skeletal form, a shadow skull gaped wide.

The goblin screamed. The goblin ran. He splashed through the water. The cave filled with a terrible scream, the sound of something uncanny and foul. He knew it was coming for him, to suck the warmth from his bones and leave him cold and dead as stone. His eyes alighted on the rock forms again, and now with horror he could see faces, faces trapped within the flowstone!

Something dived down at him, he could feel the air move. He ducked and rolled, screaming as he went.

He left the cave, the thing within roaring in outrage and loss. The crack in the river tunnel opened in front of him. He did not stop to think.

It undoubtedly saved his life.

He cast himself into the crack, towards the rushing sound of water.

‘I fell and I fell den,’ said Skarsnik. He sniffed. ‘I fell a looooong time, down and down and down, me screams loud in me ears, the screams of da fing,’ he shuddered ‘almost as loud. Gor, it was angry! But I had got away.

‘I fought I would never stop! I fought I would fall f’ever and ever! Eventually, I stopped screaming. Den I hit da water. It was freezing cold, and it was fast, faster dan da wulf carts da grass boys ride around in.’ He coughed. ‘I tumbled round and round in da water, no air, all black. Oh, I fought I would die. But den I fought, why? Gork ’n Mork had saved me lots already, I thrashed me arms, and I burst da surface and I breathed! I went under again and again, but just as I fought me last breath had come I’d pop back up. I was banged and bashed and smashed near to bits. But I didn’t die.

‘Da water, it got faster and faster. Dere was a loud noise, like, like loadsa boys chargin’ at once. Dere was light, den I was in da air! Flying through it, falling again. I saw grey sky and grey land, and den I hit some more water. Da thundery noise hit me, and everyfink went black.

‘I came round. Me head hurt so bad. Sumfink was pokin’ and a-proddin’ me in da ribs. I opened me eyes. Gor, dey hurt! It was so bright, and da sun was shining hard and mean in me face. I reached up for me hood, but course, I didn’t have one, did I? On account ov nearly bein’ eaten by me mates and dat.’ He chuckled. ‘Good times.’

‘Sumfink breathed on me, all hot and stinky. I screwed me eyes up real tight. And dere was dis big hairy wulf fing starin’ right at me! I sat up. Dere was anuvver, and anuvver, all wiv gobbo boys sat on ’em. Only dey wasn’t like any boys wot I had see before. Dey was bigger and meaner lookin’ dan da boys back home, all covered in tattoos and paint and wulf bits. And dey didn’t seem to pay da sun no mind at all, dey didn’t even have proper robes on to cover ’em up proper, just smelly wolfskins!’

‘“Wot is dat? Is it a flyin’ gobbo?”’ said one. “Nah, swimmnin’ gobbo,” said anuvver.

‘“Er, dey call me Deffbad, Deffbad da cave squig slayer, so you better all stay back, all of you!” says I, but I was weak and ’urt and dey could see it.

‘“What’s a cave squig? One of them little ’uns?” says the first one again, the one wot fought I was flyin’ and dat.

‘“Stupid! Stupid gobboes!” said dere boss. I could tell he was in charge. He was even bigger and even meaner. His teef had gold on ’em, and his hat was the biggest hat of the lot. “S’scrawny little mountain runt. He’s fallen out of his mountain. And now, s’our prisoner, dat’s what dat is. And we’s gonna take him to da Griff. Get a few teef for im we will. Either dat, or we cans eat him.” And so he gets his wolf to trot over, and he smashes me dead hard on da head wiv his spear and it was all dark again. Which was all right, cause da sun was ’urting me eyes more dan his stupid stick ’urt me ’ed.’ Skarsnik drained his cup. ‘And dat’s how I ended up da potboy of Great Grizzler-Griff Makiki da Wily, although you’ll see, he wasn’t really all dat wily.’ He chuckled.

Skarsnik stood at that point. I had no idea then to what cycle the night goblins conduct their lives, whether it be the turning of night or day or some other thing. When the gates of Karak Eight Peaks are closed, there is no sun to gauge the hours by. The night under the mountains is eternal. The sound from the goblin cavern town was muted, only the occasional shout or giggle or skirl of awful goblin music. The old shaman Duffskul snored loudly in his tent. The heads of Skarsnik’s Moonhat bodyguards nodded. ‘Right den boys, get dis boy down dere wiv da uvvers.’ The king of the Crooked Moons rubbed his hands together. ‘I need some kip.’ He picked up his strange trident and poked hard at his pet. Gobbla awoke with a snuffle and a snort. He growled, then rubbed himself against his master. Skarsnik scratched between the spines running down its back. ‘Come on, Gobbla.’

The lord of the mountains stumped off, his monstrous companion shuffling after him obediently.

As for myself, I was grasped hard by the Moonhats. Whatever mercy they possessed departed with their master, and I was handled most cruelly as I was taken to the vile pit that housed the unfortunate prisoners of the Crooked Moon.

‘And that, gentlemen, is where we too shall pause,’ said Bickenstadt. I grow weary and must sleep. We will continue tomorrow.’

Wollendorp blinked. His eyes were sore from writing all day, his hand cramped. As was often the case when he spent long periods at his work, it took a few seconds for him to come back into himself. The air in the room was stale, soporific with heat from the fire. Meisen slept, chin tucked into his chest, legs stretched out in front of him.

‘Please, gentlemen, ring the bell,’ said Bickenstadt. ‘Call my gaolers and go on your way. We will talk again upon the morrow, you have my word.’

Wollendorp stood unsteadily and did as he was bidden. He kicked Meisen’s boots until he woke.

The asylum staff were not pleased that the two men intended to stay, and more than once, Wollendorp was obliged to produce the Graf’s letter.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

INTERMISSION

It was well past dark by the time the two Averlanders sat down to dinner in the schloss’s kitchen. Wollendorp had protested that gentlemen should not be forced to dine like servants, to which the curt reply came that it was either the kitchen or the refectory with the lunatics. For all Meisen’s earlier comments about the asylum’s relative comfort, the food was bland stew filled with stringy lumps. Wollendorp pushed it around the platter with his spoon. The plate was wooden, the spoon of horn. Neither were clean.

Meisen wolfed his down. ‘You not going to eat that?’ he said.

‘I am sure I will rediscover my appetite shortly, captain,’ said Wollendorp.

‘You go to war, Herr Doktor, and you’ll find it unwise to turn down any food. You get hungry, you get slow and clumsy. Fighting hungry is a quick way to fill your stomach with steel.’

Wollendorp tapped his plate in annoyance. How did Meisen always make his title sound like an insult? He shoved his plate away. There was wine, which was a comfort, rough as it was. He took a drink, and thought on Bickenstadt’s claim of fine Tilean vintages in the dungeons of the world.

‘You think this a waste of time,’ said Wollendorp. ‘We are here under contract, and we are both being paid, surely that has something to recommend it to your better humours?’

‘I don’t care much beyond the money, it’s true,’ said Meisen.

‘So you do think it a waste of time.’

Meisen shrugged. He wiped his mouth on a napkin, grey with a thousand washes, and filled up his cup with wine from the pitcher. ‘The man is obviously insane. No doubt he dreamt all this up in a gutter somewhere.’

‘Well,’ Wollendorp licked his lips. ‘Perhaps. Some details of his story do not make any sense to me, and are factually incorrect. Goblins cannot swim, for example. Their bodies are too heavy, their bones are too dense.’

‘Aye, and I’ll bet you’ve drowned a few finding that out,’ said Meisen drily.

‘Oh, for the love of Shallya, Meisen, I am an academic, a doktor of philosophy, not some drowner of greenskins!’

‘If you were, you might learn a little more. I wager you have never even seen one in the flesh.’ Uncouthly, Meisen spoke with his mouth full.

‘Now that,’ said Wollendorp, looking Meisen in the eye, ‘that is not true.’

Meisen chewed and looked away with a grunt. He took a swig of wine, and swilled it round his mouth, washing down the stew. ‘You are right,’ he said eventually. ‘I do think it a waste of time. Listen to him spin his yarn! I’ve not heard so much horseshit since I saw the Baron of Unterbergen depicted in a play as a hero of the siege of the Red Orcschloss.’

Wollendorp raised an eyebrow.

‘The Baron of Unterbergen is as fat as a cow,’ explained Meisen, ‘can’t swing a sword to save his life and was fourteen years old when that battle took place. He was there all right, but right at the back. I don’t trust playwrights. They can be paid. The vanity of other men is their master, not the truth.’

‘Ah,’ said Wollendorp. He turned his cup around on the table. ‘This is not the same, Meisen. You are right, of course, the man is a playwright. You are also correct to say such men do not create narratives as litanies of cold fact. But there are many accurate details that I cannot decide how he knows, and that speaks to me of some measure of the truth. Then, on the other side of the coin, there are many things he could not know at all. He is embellishing this story, that much is clear. The crux of it, however – the bones of the tale.’ He took a sip of wine and grimaced. ‘That may prove the goodly wife of veracity. The labour of the task is in separating that which is definitely not true from that which may be true.’ He became thoughtful.

‘Horseshit,’ said Meisen again, this time with great emphasis.

This disrupted Wollendorp’s thinking, and he grew surly. He rapped on the table with his spoon. ‘Maybe you are right. I hoped to learn something, some deeper truth of how the greenskins live… I, oh!’ He cast his spoon away. It bounced off the floor. ‘Stop smirking at me, Meisen. You cannot honestly say to me that our visit here is a waste of time for you. You have learned something of the threat the Graf’s holdings may face.’

Meisen snorted. ‘That there are greenskins in the Border Princes? Everyone knows this. Waste of time. Waste of drinking time, waste of whoring time. It is, sir, a waste of time.’

Wollendorp scowled. ‘I suppose there is all his talk of these “Skaven”?’ He looked to Meisen for confirmation. ‘I have known others in similar fields of study to my own who insist they are real, but where is the proof?’

Now it was Meisen’s turn for seriousness. ‘Do not discount the stories, herr doktor. I have seen and fought them myself. As a young man. They are real, of that you can be sure.’

Wollendorp nodded. Of course. The Scarlet Blade’s shame, losing so many of their number to an enemy that many held to be imaginary. After their forays into Averheim’s sewers, fifteen or so years back, they had come back with all manner of ludicrous tales. Any proof they maintained to have was conveniently lost before it could be presented. The burghers and his Grace suspected the Blades of being in league with some cultist faction or other, hence their decline in favour. Wollendorp had no desire to get into an argument with Meisen about it now, it was the shortest and surest path to provoking the soldier. Wollendorp was tired, and vexed, and he could live without further vexation.

‘This is impossible, Meisen. I am the foremost expert in my field, and yet here I am in a madhouse interviewing a lunatic.’

‘As you mentioned earlier, we are being paid.’ Meisen continued with his meal.

Wollendorp fought the urge to chew at a nail. This was so exasperating! All his life he had had an obsession with the greenskins. Ever since…

He didn’t like to think of that.

Part of him so dearly wanted it to be true that a king of goblins reigned under the mountains, it was such a fascinating idea, glorious, in its way. He knew that was wrong. If there were a creature such as Skarsnik, he was a terrible threat. But kingdoms under the mountains! Ratmen, endless tunnels filled with scheming goblins. It was so enthralling, it galled him to admit that it smacked of nonsense.

But what about his sources among the dwarfs? They spoke of their ancient kingdom, they had spoken of Skarsnik.

Skarsnik.

He needed evidence, corroboration, or he’d be no better than those fools who drew maps and put ‘Here be dragons’ in the blank parts, whether there were dragons there or not, and that was beneath his professional pride. And how was he going to get proof? He scolded himself.

He stood quickly, sending his chair scraping across the flags.

‘I am done for this day. I am going to retire, Meisen. I trust I will see you in the morning.’

Without waiting for a response, he roused the dozing boy that had been set to serve him and demanded to be taken to his lodgings.

‘I will eat your stew then,’ called Meisen.

Wollendorp was already out of the door. Shrugging, Meisen leaned across the table, hooked the rim of the plate with his spoon and dragged Wollendorp’s meal towards himself.

Long-nosed faces leered out of the dark, sharp-nailed fingers poked and scratched him. He tried to run, but his legs would not move. Dirty hands grasped him. He screamed, and a filthy palm that stank of leaf mould clamped itself over his mouth and nose. Hard, bony hands gripped him with bruising force. The goblins capered and sang as they dragged him to the dark hole in a hill.

Like they had dragged little Heinz away.

He fell into the hole with them, and they all tumbled together into the chill dark.

Wollendorp sat up with a shout, scaring the boy awake outside. A tremulous knock came on the door.

‘Sir! Sir! Is all well? What has happened? Sir!’

‘A minute!’ he called. ‘A minute, damn you!’ Wollendorp’s nightshirt was soaked with sweat. The fire had gone out and the room was freezing.

He patted himself over, trembling hands feeling for signs of injury. It was a dream, just a dream, you fool! he told himself. Nevertheless, he was ill at ease, and peered nervously into the dark. He would light a candle. With a fumbling haste that embarrassed him, he struck a match and touched it to the wick. His heart slowed as warm light filled the room. No red eyes reflected its glow. No green fingers twitched in anticipation of his throat.

Heinz. Gods have mercy. He had never liked his cousin, and yet why could he not get his terrified face out of his mind? Savage green faces, bloated spiders on the forest road, the cry of panicked horses, the bang of guns and smell of gunpowder, all crowded into his mind whenever Heinz’s pale face surfaced in his thoughts, and it did so often.

And his father had told his mother over and again, travel to Middenheim that time of year was unwise!

He went to the room’s washstand and poured water into the bowl from a pewter ewer. The water felt colder than ice as he splashed it on his face. He let out a ragged breath and dabbed his hands and face dry with the towel.

It was still night-time outside. Autumn was in its last dismal phase, winter approached. He hated this time of year, all mist, mud, rain and wet chill. A clock ticked quietly on the wall. This guestroom was large and in better condition than the other parts of the schloss. No doubt the asylum’s noble benefactors – or more likely their factors, Wollendorp supposed – stayed here when inspecting the results of their donations or the health of an unfortunate relative. These were dark times, and madness was indiscriminate in its afflictions.

Another knock on the door. ‘Herr Wollendorp? Herr Wollendorp, are you ill?’

It was too late to sleep. Wollendorp went to the door, let the serving boy in and had him build a fire. He cast a borrowed dressing gown about himself and sat down to review his notes. In the chair by the fire he was soon warm enough, and he stayed there and worked until the sun rose.

‘He’s not quite so well disposed today, sirs,’ said Krest apologetically. ‘I’m afraid the sisters say dragging all this up has made him take a turn for the worse.’ The attendant ran his huge ring of keys through his hands, picking each one up in turn and letting it drop onto the one below with a little musical click.

‘You will allow us to conclude our interview, will you not?’ said Wollendorp. He really did not want to say, ‘for I am on important business from the Graf Osthammar of Averbad and Nord Wissen,’ again, but he did so anyway. He reached into his jacket.

‘Please! Please,’ said Krest. ‘There is no need to show me your letter again, sir; most generous the Graf has been to Shallya’s house at Werdentraum.’ He held up a hand. ‘I only tell you so that you gentlemen are prepared. Today may not be so fruitful as the last.’

‘Very good,’ said Wollendorp. ‘Thank you.’

Meisen yawned.

Krest opened the door to Bickenstadt’s cell. All was as yesterday. Wollendorp’s writing materials had been replenished, the room was as dark and as close as before, the grille remained as a stark reminder of their host’s insanity. Bickenstadt was clearly agitated. He paced in the shadows, face hidden from them, chains rattling as he went the width of the room and back.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said seriously. ‘I am afraid we must be swift about our tale telling today! It has been made known to me that Skarsnik is not pleased with my efforts to tell his story. Oh! Oh! He tells me, he told me in the night! It is not right at all, not right at all!’

‘He has been like this since midnight last night, good sirs,’ said Krest.

‘Do not tell me that this is unusual. The man is a lunatic,’ said Meisen dismissively.

‘Oh no, not unusual at all,’ said Krest. He shook his head sympathetically. ‘The poor fellow is often like this before he suffers an episode. I fear we may lose him to his ravings again soon.’

‘Krest! Krest! What are you telling them?’ Bickenstadt’s voice became anguished.

‘Nothing, sir. You calm yourself now, sir, or I’ll have to call those nice gentlemen in to help you calm yourself, sir.’

‘There’s no time for that, Krest!’ said Bickenstadt, as if were rebuking his valet. ‘No, no, I must simply... Yes, that is it. He will be happy with that. Much happier.’ Bickenstadt stopped. He walked a little forward until he stood in part in the light of the room’s imprisoned fire, the curtains being still tightly shut. Wollendorp was surprised, although he supposed he should not be, at the man’s filthy and ragged clothing, far worse than that of the other patients he had seen. As for his face and hands, they were still hidden in shadow, the tips of oily hair and beard visible, nothing more. ‘Then gentlemen, you are ready? Yes? Herr Doktor? Herr Kapitan?’

Wollendorp and Meisen answered warily and took their seats. Bickenstadt swallowed audibly and sat down. When he spoke again, his voice was shaky, his mania receding.

‘I should tell you more of his glories! Not of his life under the mountain, of Skarsnik the general, the warrior!’ he said. ‘Oh, do tell me, herr doktor, that you will not dwell overly much on this early part of his life? My play, when it is performed, will cover many battles, his triumphs and successful schemes, but your account may well be the first to be aired. He will be most displeased if your telling is light on his glories, and heavy on his ignominies. Most displeased indeed!’

‘I must admit that I am interested in the life of the greenskins under the mountain. But I will keep that for myself. In my report to the Graf I will not dwell upon his life as a slave, sir,’ said Wollendorp gently. ‘You have my word on that.’

Bickenstadt calmed. Sensing the man was about to pick up his story, Wollendorp picked up his pen.

Chains clinked as Bickenstadt settled into his chair. ‘Good, good. Then I will continue. I will continue.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE MISFORTUNES OF A RUNEPRIEST

Skarsnik’s bodyguards removed me roughly from the throne platform. They were no bigger than I, their giant hats only allowed them to overtop me in height, but their thin limbs hid iron strength, and my arms were soon in wretched agony from their grasp as they pulled me down into the maze of goblin dwellings around the dais’s feet. There was little activity in the town at that hour. Red eyes glinted in shack doorways. Goblin gibbers came and went. Wild laughter might whirl up a crooked alleyway of the goblintown, or a muffled scream cut off as neatly as if with a knife.

I was dragged on. The goblins tripped me or poked me with their weapons without warning, and laughed horribly at my stumbles. I did my best to ignore them and tried to remain alert to their mischief, all the while fearing the twist of the final, fatal blade. It did not come. Evidently, their vindictiveness did not extend so far as permanently harming their master’s new pet.

They took me towards a doorway in the cave wall, between two statues slumped into gravelled ruin. They prodded me down stairs slithery with moisture and ordure. Torches flickered in irregular sconces, and much of the way was too dark to see. I slowed, and they jabbered at me impatiently, surefooted and keen-eyed as they were themselves in that murk.

A noisome wind blew from the depths, carrying with it howls of torment and shrieks of the most distressing kind. We went down further, the stairs winding tightly round. Many were worn to a steep angle, and several times I nearly tumbled to my ruin, much to the amusement of my captors.

The howls stopped. There was whimpering, and then silence. After many long minutes of this dreadful descent, dim firelight granted me succour. It grew in brightness as we went around the last few turns of the stair, and then I was in the cellar.

The stench choked me, a mix of excrement, old blood and spoiled meat. The cellar was long and barrel-vaulted, its buttresses carved directly from the living stone. Arched side vaults barred by iron grilles lined its length. Whatever it had been intended for by its dwarf builders – I supposed a kitchen – now it was the prison-hall of Skarsnik.

Miserable wretches of a half-dozen races were chained together, their heads bowed. They wore nothing but rags to protect them from the chill of the stone. At one end of the hall, a fire blazed in a huge fireplace, another part of the mountain folk’s legacy, but the goblins’ slaves sat as far away from it as they could, as if repulsed rather than drawn to its warmth. I readily understood why, for by the fireplace were arrayed stained tables fitted with manacles and chains. Racks of barbed instruments surrounded these torture benches. A goblin was wiping one table down, whistling as he did, another replacing dripping implements in their proper places. The rotting remains of prisoners past hung like a lord’s hunting trophies from the wall. Above the fire, an iron cauldron large enough to boil an ox hung, although I was under no illusion that oxen were its usual contents.

A huge, fat goblin slept snoring in a chair by the fire, his bursting gut blanketed by a stained apron. Lesser greenskins slumbered on the floor around his feet. Others leaned idly on spears, their eyes fixed nonetheless upon the slaves. The cave was too dark for me to experience the other horrors that doubtlessly lurked in the black, and I count myself fortunate that it was so. As I was marched along by my guards, I caught sight of the fat goblin’s head. Three dimly glowing mushrooms stood proud upon it. This must be Grobskab, I thought, grown fat on his refusal to take part in the runt bake that saw Skarsnik driven from the mountain. It appeared Skarsnik rewarded those who served him well.

My guards kicked and cursed their way through the slaves. The slaves offered no resistance, their spirits broken. The smell from them was vile, all were emaciated, and not one was left unmarked. I was bullied towards one of the side vaults. It went deep into the mountain. Further, smaller spaces led from it, also screened by iron grilles, the manner of space that perhaps barrels or crates might once have been kept in. No longer; the stores there were of living flesh and despair.

One of the goblins pinned my arms to my side while the other fumbled a set of keys from his robes. Cursing under his breath, he searched for the correct one. The door in the centre of the grille squealed open, and he mockingly bade me enter with arms spread wide.

Each of the cells was crammed with ragged creatures. I saw the ratmen of which Skarsnik had spoken, man-sized abominations with long muzzles, covered in fur. They brought me to the final cage, opened its door and I was shoved forward, a boot to my rear propelling me to the floor.

Dank straw layered the floor. A bone covered in scraps of putrid flesh sat in the centre of the cage. I kicked it into a corner, not wishing to learn of its provenance.

There was a shuffle and a moan from the cell opposite. A gabble in a hard language I did not understand, a second voice soothing in that same tongue. The moaning ceased. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out a large shape in this cell opposite mine. The shape split and became two shapes, two bodies, squat and powerful, one prone, the second kneeling. The kneeling shape stood, and made its way from the shadows. The torchlight was weak, but it was enough to see the ruin of the dwarf’s face as he pressed it against the flat bars of his prison.

Where the dwarf’s beard should have been was a raw scar, his chin smooth and hairless. Some whiskers still clung to its cheeks and upper lip, but these had been hacked at, and his face was a mess of cuts. His head had been shaved, longer tufts jutting out from the stubble. His face was seamed with filth. A bandage torn from his own clothes covered one eye. He gripped the bars with huge hands either side of his face, and I saw they had not escaped the attentions of the goblins. Three fingers on one hand were missing, the others were scabbed. And yet for all that, a nobility remained in his face, a defiance in his remaining eye, and I had no doubt that here was a lord of the mountain folk.

‘You must be important,’ he said to me, his voice deep and gravelly as the voices of dwarfs are, his Reikspiel hard. I fancy it was as if he spoke through rough-hewn boulders, and I river-smoothed sand. ‘To get a cell all to yourself.’

I insisted that I was not important. ‘I am but a playwright, sir,’ I said. ‘I have no idea why I am here.’

‘Playwright?’ grunted the dwarf. ‘Let me guess – the usurper is telling you how magnificent he is?’

I blanched. ‘I am not the first?’

The dwarf shook his head and let out a low chuckle. ‘There was one other. He was no scribe, and he refused. A proud man, an honourable man, for an umgi.’

I dropped my eyes. ‘I am ashamed to say I have not refused. I listen, and I write.’

The dwarf grunted with disapproval, as if he expected no better from a mere man. But when he spoke he did so kindly. ‘I cannot say I blame you,’ he said.

‘Are you the one Skarsnik speaks of, the dwarf once imprisoned by his clan?’

There was a cry of terror from behind the dwarf. The dwarf turned back and whispered comfort in his own language, then replied to me: ‘No. I am not he.’ He jerked a thumb behind him. ‘That brave soul who lies there, Grunfin Goldfinder, is the one of whom you speak. He had been held captive by the grobi for years before I joined him. His body was broken long ago, his mind not soon after, but the grobi usurper keeps him alive for his own amusement. Together we have been here five years, at least by my reckoning.’

I blinked. I was not sure what to say. In some manner, this conversation, conducted with all appropriate civilities, was the most shocking thing that had occurred to me in days, throwing all the horror around me into stark contrast. My breeding saved me from a swift descent into madness. ‘I am sorry, sir, I forget my manners,’ I said. ‘I am Jeremiah von Bickenstadt, lately of Averheim, now of nowhere at all.’

‘I forget mine also,’ said the dwarf. ‘The hospitality of the grobi is such that a dwarf can forget his wits, such is the luxury presented him.’

We shared a laugh at this grim jest.

‘I am Braknar, son of Brangar,’ he said. ‘King Belegar, rightful lord of these halls, is my liege.’

‘How did you come to be here?’ I asked.

‘The same as any of my kind,’ said Braknar. ‘I was proud, and I was brought low by my pride.’ He looked off to one side, peering into the dark to where the guards might be. I could see nothing. Our conversation was hushed, our whispers swallowed by the night and the palpable terror hanging over the vault. ‘The grobi are craven and reckless, but they can be cunning.’ He looked back to me. ‘It is a lesson you would be wise in learning, manling. Whatever the grobi usurper tells you, of it believe less than a half measure. He is wicked and clever beyond the run of his kind. Would that I had but known that…’ He chuckled ruefully. ‘Tell me, have you seen his weapon, the three-pronged spear he has beside him at all times? Does he have it still?’

‘I have,’ I said. ‘He does.’

The dwarf looked sorrowful. ‘That is a relief and a shame, then. A relief that I know where it is, a shame that he has it at all.’

‘Why is that?’

He grasped at the bars again, and pushed his face into the grille, so that his nose stuck out and his face was framed by rusting metal. ‘I will not speak of it,’ he said. ‘It is my shame, and I will not share it. Perhaps I will wipe this stain of honour away, perhaps not. It is of small consequence compared to the fate of Vala-Azrilungol, and if the latter goes in our favour, I will revenge myself at leisure. My lord Belegar must have the measure of the usurper. The numbers of my people brought here and…’ His hands twisted on the bars of the cage. ‘The numbers of my people brought here to this dungeon grow the lesser. I reckon it will not be long before Vala-Azrilungol is cleansed of the green filth, grudges may be stricken from the great book, and the songs of my ancestors will be sung loudly in these halls again.’ A strange look, part wistful, part fanatical, came over his face. ‘I came here with Lord Belegar to make it so, and it will be so! He already sits in the citadel where none may assail him, crowned king again, and our people clear more of the delvings of our ancestors. Twenty-nine generations of my clan have lived and died in exile since we were driven from our ancient halls, but we never forget, manling. A dwarf never forgets, and never forgives. I may die in these dungeons, but I will be avenged. The vengeance of the dwarfs will be terrible and final. The fires of Karak Eight Peaks will burn a thousand days, fuelled by the corpses of grobi and skaven, before the hosts of my people dwell here again, and all will be as it was in the days of the glorious past.’

Braknar fully believed this, of that I was convinced. His faith in the victory of his kind shone clear and unchallenged upon his ruined face. But trapped in that dank, chill cavern, surrounded on all sides by enemies of the worst kind, I could not share his optimism.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

IN TRUTH, A BRAVE LITTLE GOBLIN

I was woken some hours later, sore and chilled. My stomach felt a little better. My muscles were stiff and protested vigorously as I was hauled to my feet and dragged away from the prison-caves. I was a young man then, and fit from my life on the road. Had I been older or frailer, I have no doubt that I would have perished from my travels and my incarceration, Skarsnik’s interest in me or not.

The cave of prisoners was empty as I was taken through it. Goblintown was awake and full of bustle. This was fortunate for me as Skarsnik’s bodyguards were forced to kick their way through the crowds, and so had less time to mishandle me, although I drew a deal of unwanted attention from the goblins who crammed the streets.

Skarsnik’s dais was full once again of his cronies and supplicants. He was breaking his fast as I was brought before him. He looked up from his meat with a wide smile of acknowledgement.

‘Wotcha,’ he said.

‘Good morning, my lord,’ I replied and bowed, which broadened his smile.

‘You ’ad sumfink to eat? No? Get him sumfink ta eat!’ he bellowed, and cuffed a random goblin flunky hard around the head. ‘Humie food too! Don’t want ’im dying on me.’

‘Might I also ask for a pot to relieve myself in?’

This made him laugh so hard his belly wobbled. A pot was procured, although there was no privacy to go with it.

Hunger compelled me to eat the stew given me. I had managed to this point to avoid it, but the smell of it, as nauseating as it was, causes stabbing knives of need to trouble my stomach. I devoured it, along with the spongy bread-like mushrooms I was given. I still shudder to think what the stew might have contained. There was another bottle of the wine brought me. The wine washed the taste of the meat, and the thought of what that flavour might betoken, from my mouth and my mind.

‘You ready den?’ said Skarsnik. He wiped his hands and his mouth on a cloth held by a servant, a rich piece of embroidery treated as a soil rag. He was alone in these minimal ablutions, as I saw no other goblin clean itself while there.

I nodded that I was. Trying not to let the shaking of my hand show, I poured myself a full goblet of wine and took up my pen.

‘Now,’ said the green potentate. ‘Where was I? Ah yes… Makiki and his crew, that was it…’

Wolf legs eat miles as readily as wolf mouths devour flesh. Drear moors and steep valleys filled with miserable forest dropped away, and the hills became gentler as they rode down from the skirts of the Worlds Edge Mountains. Runtgit was aware of little of this on his way from his mountain home. His eyes were seared by the light of the Evil Sun, and the grey grasses that whisked past his pointed nose were a confusing blur. He had never been out of the caves, not in his short, short life. The furthest outdoors he had ventured had been to the mouth of the dwarf air chimney, and for some time, his addled mind questioned how the ground could be so hairy and green. The blow to his head had scrambled his wits, and he imagined himself as a flea on the hide of a giant, furred orc as huge and as unknowable as the world.

Runtgit swam in and out of consciousness. He was periodically slapped awake, dirty water or burning liquor poured down his throat. The other goblins laughed at his discomfort. They were larger and more heavily muscled than night goblins, and had an orcish swagger to them that looked strange to Runtgit’s eyes. At first, Runtgit took them to be Little Big ’Uns, but a fearful doubt crept into his heart. Perhaps these were ordinary boys, in which case, the elite of their tribe would be terrible monsters, twice as big as Runtgit was!

He did not give the goblin wolf riders the satisfaction of seeing his fear.

By nightfall, the wolves had covered many leagues. When Runtgit craned his neck to look behind, the mountains had shrunk by half, although they still crowded out most of the sky. The sun, so round and orange and terrible, was slipping down past the horizon, and Runtgit was relieved. He felt parched and fried by this unwelcome orb, and when he blinked, the dusk was marred by glowing blobs, as if the ghost of the sun had snuck into his eyes to haunt him through the night.

This thought terrified him, yet still he did not show it.

The wolves slowed, panting hard. The leader of the little troop wheeled his mount backwards, leaning back and waving his spear as he pulled hard on the reins. The wolf growled and high-stepped around in a tight circle.

‘All right, boys! We’s stopping here tonight,’ he shouted. These goblins spoke greenskin with a strange lilt, and used words which Runtgit had to hear twice before he understood.

‘Boss! I’s not sure that’s clever thinking that, s’night-time. Bad things round here at night-time.’

‘Shut it, Kruggler, you give me any more mouth and it’s target practice time.’ As if to emphasise this, the boss’s wolf stopped and shook, setting the bow and arrows arrayed behind its saddle to rattling. ‘I is boss here, me Snarkit the Snaggler, and if you don’t like it, you bleeding well get zogged. Wulloffs are hungry, see? How’s about you for a nice little snacky-snack, keep them sweet and running well?’

Snarkit’s mount growled. The one named Kruggler demurred to be a meal, and Snarkit spat at him.

Snarkit had them ride over to a tumbledown selection of walls. Once, perhaps, this had been a village. Little but low humps of grass remained, with weathered stones protruding through the turf like old, grey teeth.

The village broch, however, had stood the test of time. The tower was of tightly packed stone, layered without mortar. Partly ruinous, its remains stood in the bleak wilderness as sharp as a fang, the broken redoubt of a forgotten people.

‘All right, boys!’ said Snarkit. He quickly scouted out the broch. ‘Zigg, get the wulloffs somethink to eat. He’ll do.’ Snarkit pointed at a terrified-looking goblin slung over Kruggler’s wolf.

‘Boss! He’s mine! I’ll not get me dues!’ said Kruggler.

‘Shouldn’t cheek me, should you? Wulloffs gotta eat something, be glad it ain’t you. Dirklug! Fink! Rukkit and Bork! Make camp, get me a fire! We’re staying here tonight, tomorrow we take our captures to the Great Grizzler-Griff!’

Runtgit was tipped unceremoniously off the wolf. He landed on his head. This is by far the least delicate part of a goblin, so he was soon recovered enough to wriggle upright and take in his circumstances.

There were a dozen of the wolf boys. Runtgit had heard the Little Big ’Uns and the skargobboes talk about other sorts of goblin, but they were outlandish tales and he had not put much stock by them. He’d always assumed wolves would be akin to a cave squig, round and bouncy and full of teeth. But these creatures were lean, swift-runners, sharp-toothed yes, but in no way similar to a goblin, which squigs somewhat resemble. He was in a land unutterably alien to him.

As we have noted already, the future Skarsnik was not like other goblins. Other goblins would have wailed and pleaded, other goblins would have been snotty little messes, cowering in fright. Not Skarsnik-to-be. He waited, and he watched, looking for opportunities for survival, and perhaps profit, for Runtgit had a calculating nature. To call him an optimist would be incorrect, goblin lives are too hard for a positive outlook, but he was possessed of a certain confidence in his own abilities, even back in the days before he won his crown.

There were seven captives with the wolf riders. Four goblins of differing sorts, a filthy human of primitive appearance (Runtgit, having never seen a human, thought it at first some kind of sick dwarf, until he heard it named differently), a skaven and something he could put no name to. His own captor, Bork, a goblin with a long, scrawny neck, huge nose and a helmet pulled down so tight you couldn’t see his eyes, led the wolves into the remains of a circular hut, the only thing in the village beside the broch standing higher than Runtgit’s waist. The walls there were high enough that once the doorway was blocked with a flat slab of stone, it served adequately as a pen. Shortly after that, there were six prisoners, as Bork cut the throat of one of the goblins and tossed its twitching corpse into the wolf pen. Tearing, snapping and snarling sounds followed, and Runtgit swallowed anxiously in spite of himself.

The broch had a single doorway, halfway up its remaining height. There was but one floor left, of large stone slabs, and only a half-floor at that. One side of the tower, that around the half-floor, was higher than the other, and where the floor had collapsed, so too had the higher parts of the outer wall. Steps led down the inside of the tower from the doorway to the ground within. The prisoners were left on the grass that grew there, bound hand and foot. More of the harsh liquor was forced down their throats. Kruggler laughed as Runtgit spluttered.

‘Can’t take your drink, stupid night goblins. You’re all weak and weedy and scared of your own shadows.’

Runtgit blinked tears from his eyes. ‘Yeah, untie me and say that, or are you too scared to now you don’t have your pet to do your fighting for you?’

Kruggler kicked Runtgit hard and snarled. ‘You think you’re clever? Let’s wait until the sun comes up, then we’ll see.’ Kruggler cringed back in pantomime. ‘Ah! Me eyes! Me eyes!’ He squealed. ‘Make it go away! Ooh! The sun! The Evil Sun!’ He stopped and leaned in close. ‘Pathetic. Should have stayed cowering underground, cave runt. We’ll see how smart your mouth is when you’re up in front of the Griff, when he’s got you in the pit in a fight. Likes a fight, the Griff; he likes a bet. And because you’re not worth betting a single tooth on, you’ll be used for the warm-up, before the proper scrapping starts, runt like you.’

‘Oi!’ Snarkit bellowed. ‘Leave them prisoners be! The Griff pays more for ’em if all their armses and legses work proper!’

Kruggler shot a contemptuous glance up to the half-floor’s edge where the boss stood, framed against the watery blue of the drawing night. Very deliberately, Kruggler spat on Runtgit, and strode away.

‘Dirklug!’ shouted Snarkit. ‘You checked around? Anything strange?’

‘No, boss!’

‘Good, now get me a fire lit!’

This went on for some time, the goblins all bustling as they set up camp. Runtgit was impressed. The wolf boys were disciplined and efficient, two words that he did not know, but which had he known he would never have thought to apply to goblinkind. He decided these goblins, living on their wits out here on their own, had to be sharper than the night goblins, otherwise they would simply die.

It grew black, blacker than the pits of the caves. With the sun gone, it became cold. In the caverns it is always cool, and if some of them are colder than others, the temperature varies but little. Runtgit was soon shivering, his teeth chattering. Where his clothes had not dried on the ride to the ruins they grew stiff and freezing. Frost rimed those of his fellow prisoners, and they all quaked fearsomely with the chill. The upper walls of the broch glowed with comforting firelight, and Runtgit longed for its warmth. Snarkit and his crew had camped on the half-floor of stone slabs. The wolf boys rotated their turn as lookouts, checking on the prisoners as they went to and from the fire. The sounds of laughter and bickering dwindled. Snores replaced conversation, and the fire sank low.

Runtgit could not sleep. His hands and feet were numb from his bindings and the cold. He rested his head against the wall, and stared up at the semicircle of sky trapped in the broch’s walls. Runtgit had been into the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, that place that would one day be his throne room; he had seen the glowstones set there by dwarf-craft long ago. But the sky… deep and dark as the deepest, darkest crevasse under the mountains, and full of lights, so many lights! To his mind, unused to the stars, the night sky was a thing of wonder and beauty. Goblins, I think, do appreciate beauty, but being ugly themselves, both in body and spirit, will do anything to deface it. Perhaps they see mockery in it. I have seen how it enrages them, and how nervous and upset they become once the beauty has been smashed. They are like children in this regard, destroying that which they covet so that none may possess it. The sky, so far and distant, was entirely unconcerned by the creatures toiling below it, and Runtgit appreciated this cold distance as much as he did the twinkling lights of the stars.

It was almost enough to make him forget how cold he was.

The dark shape of a goblin sentry stood, blocking out a portion of the night. Runtgit wished he would move.

There was the faintest ‘Urk!’, and the sentry fell backwards. There was the sound of metal on stone and a muffled squeal.

Silence.

Runtgit sat the straighter.

A bald head, skin so pale it almost glowed in the night, appeared over the wall lip. Yellow eyes blinked. A long-fingered arm spidered up onto the stone, then another. Silently, the creature skulked along the crumbling broch’s stonework, to where the sleeping goblins lay.

Runtgit licked his lips. Whatever it was, it didn’t look very friendly. It looked, in fact, like the kind of creature that might eat a goblin, should it chance upon one lying there tied up and helpless. With a great deal of luck, it would kill the wolf boys and leave him alone. But what if there were more than one? And it would take a great deal of luck…

‘Oi!’ he bellowed as loudly as he could. ‘Oi! There’s something coming over the wall!’

Outside, the wolves commenced howling.

The shape on the wall stared right at him. It shrieked, a long unearthly sound that chilled Runtgit more than the cold ever could. From above came the sound of goblin curses and shouts. Weapons rasped free of their scabbards. The creature’s head whipped round. It bounded on all fours along the wall and leapt towards the ruined half-floor.

Four arrows buried themselves in the creature and it tumbled through the air, landing in a reeking heap by Runtgit’s feet. He drew his legs away from it as best he could. There was something unnatural about it.

‘Bork! Bork! Where is Bork?’ shouted Snarkit. ‘Get yourselves sorted! Kruggler, get on that wall! Dirklug, Rukkit, Gukguk, get out there and let the wulloffs out! Dead-gobblers! They is dead-gobblers coming over the walls!’

The camp was all in commotion. The other goblin slaves wailed.

‘Oi! You, what’s a dead-gobbler? Oi! Stop squealing!’ said Runtgit to the other prisoners. But it was no use; the captive goblins were too far gone into their fright, and the human snapped and snarled at him.

Goblins jumped from the upper floor and scurried up the stone steps to the broch door. Kruggler bounded nimbly to the broken wall and looked out into the dark.

‘There’s one!’ He pulled back his bow, nocked an arrow and loosed it. ‘Mork’s hurty bits!’

‘You miss it?’ shouted Snarkit.

‘No use boss, I can’t see a thing! Too dark!’

The wolves were howling and snarling. Unearthly shrieks came from outside. Goblins screamed. Shouts ended in bubbling moans. A ghoul jumped onto the wall in front of Kruggler. Kruggler dropped his bow in surprise and stabbed it through the eye with an arrow. It fell, clawed hands scratching at its face.

‘Let me loose!’ shouted Runtgit. ‘Let me loose now!’

‘What, are you stupid?’

‘No! But I is a night goblin!’

‘So?’

‘So I sees well in the night, don’t I? And I don’t think youse lot can! Let me loose!’

Kruggler looked to his boss. Runtgit could not see Snarkit’s reaction, but he must have agreed, for Kruggler jumped down and cut Runtgit’s bonds with three swift passes of his knife.

‘You try any funny business, and I’ll gut you, right?’

Runtgit nodded. He blew out his cheeks and thrust his hands under his armpits as the blood rushed back to them. His teeth rattled with the cold. ‘Sure thing, boss,’ he said.

Kruggler gestured to Runtgit to follow him up to the wall.

‘So,’ he said to the night goblin. ‘What do you see?’

Runtgit had no real idea if he could see any better than the big, outside goblins, but it turned out he could. As Kruggler squinted into the dark, Runtgit saw the shapes of ghouls clambering over the ruins.

‘There’s five of ’em,’ Runtgit said at last.

‘’Ow many?’ said Kruggler.

Runtgit looked heavenward in annoyance. ‘Lots,’ he said.

‘Boss! Runt here says we got lots!’

‘Gork’s teeth! Are them wulloffs out yet?’ Snarkit and the other goblins were leaning over the wall, heads bobbing, trying to see what they could. Every now and then one of them let off an arrow, but it would whistle away into the night ineffectively. With no moonlight, and the fire by them dazzling away their ability to see in the dark, the goblins were as nightblind as you or I would have been.

Kruggler pulled Runtgit around the wall to the half-floor. This was where the ruins of the broch reared high above a goblin’s head, but Runtgit could see the wolf pen if he poked his head around the wall. The wolves were scrabbling up the side of the ruined hut, trying to get out. A pair of ghouls were down on the floor, dead themselves, but another hunkered over the corpse of one of Snarkit’s goblins, pulling at its flesh with its teeth. A second goblin cowered in a ball by the wolf pen, the third was nowhere to be seen.

‘No,’ said Runtgit. ‘Your… things are still all locked up. Pity.’ Despite the danger to himself, Runtgit was enjoying watching the plains goblins panic.

‘Right. Well, you go and let them out then!’ said Snarkit.

‘Er, what?’ said Runtgit, the smirk dropping from his face.

‘Dead-gobblers, nasty prospect. Think I’m sending one of my boys out there to get et when I’ve got you? You can go,’ said the wolf boy boss.

‘See, I said boss, I said that we shouldn’t come here, didn’t I?’ Kruggler shouted. Snarkit gnashed his teeth together at this impertinence.

‘What?’ said Runtgit. ‘You want me to go out there, on me own?’

Snarkit grinned wickedly. ‘Nah, Kruggler can go with you. Now youse lot! Get that fire burning high!’

They jumped back down to the ground floor where the slaves were to get to the bottom of the stairs. Once upon a time, there would have been access to the raised doorway from the first floor, but that half of the floor had long since collapsed, and the plains goblins had been forced to leap across to make their camp. They climbed to the top of the stairs. Runtgit looked out into the night. The dead-gobblers stared up at the broch. They were at an impasse. The dead-gobblers would not approach the ruin, the goblins would not go out.

‘What are those things?’ Runtgit whispered.

‘What, you got no dead-gobblers in your caves?’

The night goblin shook his head.

‘They’re a bit like humies, I suppose,’ said Kruggler, ‘but they is wild and crazy. They eat only dead ’uns, the stinkier the better, and that’s what I never seen no regular humie do. They live in like dirty caves and them little green hills what humies bury their dead ’uns in and stuff. I bet there’s one here somewhere, zogging Dirklug is an idiot. He’ll have missed it. That’s if they’s not hanging around with the proper dead ’uns.’

‘What, the dead ’uns they like eating?’ said Runtgit, and thought it a reasonable question.

‘Mork and Gork’s fart at you! You don’t get out much, do you? Dead ’uns, walking about, fighting and that, you know? Click-clack, yellow old bones?’ The plains goblin shuddered. ‘Spooky.’

Two more goblins jumped from the broken floor above, rolling as they hit the floor and springing to their feet, as nimble as tumblers. ‘Boss says we’re to mount up once you’ve got the wulloffs out. Boss says we’re going hunting.’

Kruggler nodded. All of those of the wolf tribe were constantly straining to see if they could catch sight of their mounts. Without the wolves they were lost.

‘All righty then, you ready, cave runt?’

‘Yep,’ said Runtgit.

‘Lead on then,’ said Kruggler.

Runtgit was up and over the wall and running. He pounded towards the wolf pen. It was only twenty yards or so, but it felt as long as the day. The open sky, unchained from the broch, yawned wide and glittery above him as if it would pull him off the ground. His head spun.

Feet pounded behind him. ‘Over there!’ Runtgit shouted, pointing at the ghoul chewing noisily on a fallen goblin. He need not have spared the breath. Away from the firelight, the plains goblins saw nearly as well as he did. Kruggler’s bow sang, and an arrow appeared as if by magic in the dead-gobbler’s shoulder. It sprang up from its meal, arms waving, and fell back with a cry.

Runtgit was so concerned with watching the creature that he almost went head over heels, skidding right through the remains of one of the other goblins Snarkit had sent out. The third remained by the wall, a shivering ball of terror. A series of bloodcurdling screeches set up, coming from all around the ruined village.

Runtgit slammed hard into the flagstone the plains goblins had shut the hut doorway with. Wolf heads bounced up and down on the other side. One got its forequarters up onto the stone, paws scratching frantically, then fell back among his fellows with a yelp.

Runtgit grabbed at the flag, trying to tip it backwards, but it wouldn’t budge. He wished hard he had a flagon of Duffskul’s special brew, the one made of madcap mushrooms that could grant a goblin inhuman strength. But he did not, and he let out an involuntary squeak of frustration.

Kruggler’s bow twanged behind him. There was a screech as the arrow found its mark.

‘No, no no!’ the plains goblin said, his breath coming hard. ‘It’s wedged, there! There! Get that rock out, get it out. That one!’

Runtgit followed Kruggler’s wavering finger to the ground. A square block jammed the makeshift door shut. He wrenched it out and pushed at the bottom of the flagstone. ‘I can’t shift it!’

‘You better had! They’s coming!’ Kruggler shot again and cursed as he missed. The sound of pursuit drew in, the snuffling breath of the ghouls, their triumphant gasps.

Runtgit could have sworn he felt their breath on his neck. ‘They’s coming! They’s coming!’ he yelped.

‘Back back back!’ shouted Kruggler at the wolves. He ran to the flag and put his shoulder to the flagstone. Wolf paws appeared around its edges as it tipped slowly backwards. Kruggler stood up, and stared at the trio of ghouls bearing down upon him and Runtgit. ‘Hello, nearly dead things,’ he said. The ghouls slowed, noses twitching, brows creased in puzzlement as to why this goblin would not run. They were pale and awful, and Runtgit’s knees knocked at the sight of them. They stank of grave mould and deep, damp places where the dead things lie. ‘Say hello to me friendly little doggies.’

Kruggler smirked as he extended one finger and pushed at the loosened flagstone. It fell completely flat, and a tide of furry bodies poured over it, howling as they came. Runtgit threw himself out of the way, their claws raking at his back. The ghouls were buried under an avalanche of teeth and hide. There was a piercing yelp, and one of the wolves fell dead, its chest clawed open. Then the ghouls were pulled to the floor and torn to bits.

One of the wolves ran to Kruggler and bit him playfully. Kruggler’s smile broadened, his pointed teeth picked out in the starlight.

‘Y’see,’ he said, triumph making the plains goblin friendly. ‘You should have pushed the top.’ His smile died.

Runtgit stood at his side, the knife in his hand gouging a shallow trail in the other goblin’s ribs. Kruggler’s eyes widened.

They stood there eyes locked, Kruggler waiting for the blade to finish him.

Runtgit withdrew the knife. ‘Just you remember, Kruggler. I could have done you. I could have done you right now with this knife, and I could have said it was them dead-gobblers what did it, and no one would have been any the wiser.’ He spat on the floor between the goblin’s feet, a reminder of his earlier insult to Runtgit. The knife followed, sticking into the ground. ‘But I didn’t, right? Me and you, we could be a good team.’

‘Fang here would have eaten your face off.’

‘You’d still be dead. Don’t matter if I have a face or not to you then, does it, boy?’

Kruggler snarled and swung himself up onto his wolf. ‘I won’t forget this, cave runt.’

‘I wouldn’t be happy if you did,’ said Runtgit.

Kruggler circled his mount around on the spot, and then raced off.

Dismounted, the wolf boys were as prone to skulking and hunching as any night goblin. A little bigger, certainly: brasher, maybe, but craven creatures still. Once upon his wolf, Kruggler became something else. He was as tall as an orc up there, the wolf obeying the actions of his knees and voice almost before they were issued. It was something to see. Kruggler and his mount flew into the night, bringing one of the ghouls down to the frosty ground where Kruggler’s wolf rent its throat wide. The two goblins waiting at the broch stairs ran out and grabbed their own mounts, pulling themselves onto their backs without stopping the wolves. Then they were running too, round the camp, the loose wolves following in a pack, tearing the ghouls to pieces.

Runtgit thought it rather grand and wondered what he could achieve, if he had such goblins under his command.

The boys in the tower whooped and cackled, the fire leaping high behind them as brush was piled on it. More and more of the goblins came out of the broch, calling their mounts to them and joining the hunt.

Soon it was all over, and Runtgit was surrounded by a circle of prowling wolf riders.

‘You did well, runt,’ said Snarkit. He pressed a nostril closed and snorted a stream of snot onto the floor from the other. ‘But if you think we’re letting you go you’ve got another thing coming.’

Kruggler looked Runtgit hard in the eye as the night goblin was wrestled to the ground and tied again.

Runtgit turned his face to the frozen earth and permitted himself a secret smile.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE GREAT GRIZZLER-GRIFF MAKIKI THE CUNNING

Snarkit’s boys ran down from the foothills and swept onto the plains. The wolves ran faster than ever before, glad at their release from the rough terrain. Runtgit, bouncing along on the back of a wolf whose master had died the night before, did not share their pleasure. He clung on as best he could with his hands tied, and muttered prayers to Gork (and certainly Mork) that he would not fall to his death.

The surviving wolf riders let out a whoop, and their mounts bayed in response. Runtgit unscrewed his eyes – the sun did not hurt them so fiercely as the day before, and he dared to think he was getting accustomed to it. There, on the horizon, a line of dots could be made out against the grey winter sky.

The dots grew into gaudy wagons and clanking contraptions pulled by dozens of wolves. Flatbedded wagons were piled high with diverse wares and scrap metals. Huge cages on wheels, many times the height of a goblin, held chained creatures, smaller ones crammed with prisoners of several peoples. Lines of slaves, tied at the wrists to taut ropes, trudged wearily behind. Covered wagons painted bright greens and yellows and reds, rolled steadily on. Swift chariots threw up sprays of mud from the ground as they raced around the caravan. Wolf riders rushed between the wagons, they sat upon distant hills and scanned the horizon, they raced in mobs thirty strong. They were everywhere. A tribe of goblins was on the move, a world of refuse trailing in their wake.

At the centre of all this rumbling wood and iron went the greatest wagon of all. It was twenty yards long, with a dozen wheels each side, broad and flat and surmounted by a wood and canvas contrivance, part fort, part palace, part tent. Two small wooden towers were set fore and aft of this. Two tall masts held the peaks of the tent high, each topped by a crow’s nest. With the canvas of the tent in its centre, the wagon looked like a ship whose sails had fallen in a storm.

There was a cry from the top of the rear tent pole, then movement. A red flag fluttered in the wind, and a horn sounded. Spear-throwing engines along the side of the wagon tracked the movement of Snarkit’s boys. A large pack of wolf riders peeled free from the host riding alongside the caravan, and sped over the ground to meet them, spears down and bows drawn.

Snarkit gave a shout, and one of his boys took out a curled horn. He blew hard, three long blasts, two short. Immediately the spears of the approaching wolf riders went up.

‘Snarkit’s boys! Snarkit’s boys is back!’ one called, and the wolf riders wheeled about and fell in with the band Runtgit accompanied. There were greetings and catcalls and good-natured spite on both sides as the swollen troop raced over the damp ground to the caravan.

The welcome the Great Grizzler-Griff Makiki the Cunning had for them was somewhat less cordial.

‘You, Snarkit, have got to be zogging kidding me. Nine teef, for this lot?’ Makiki stood up from his throne, a giant’s hand-bones wired together to form a cupped seat, scattering snotlings from his lap. A goblin sat at the hand-throne’s side, scribbling away in a book, and he tutted in annoyance as a snotling landed on his work.

The Grizzler-Griff was a massive goblin, fat and flabby, with deeply unpleasant eyes set deep in a deeply unpleasant face. His nose was unusually upturned for a goblin, and behind his back, the others called him ‘The Snorter’, which I believe is a kind of large boar. Makiki’s foible was for snotlings, and dozens of them were scattered all around the tent-wagon, snickering and playing like malevolent infants. They teased the Griff’s servants, jabbing them with sharp nails and biting their toes, but the attendants to the Griff stood stock still, teeth grinding. The air of the tent was a miasma of snotling urine and dung. Puddles of it were everywhere, running into cracks between the boards of the deck as the landship juddered its way on over the plains. The furs of the tent floored were soaked with it. Runtgit had never seen so many snotlings. ‘What a pathetic little haul!’ continued the Grizzler-Griff. ‘What a shower! What a crock of dung.’ The Griff’s favourite snotling snarled, a large specimen all done up in a velvet suit and wearing a miniature copy of the Griff’s own oversized crown. It hopped up and down in front of the Griff. The fat tradelord bent down and scooped it up. It nestled into the crook of one arm. The Griff gestured rudely with the other. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Snarkit, you used to be good, thought you had a bit of Griff in you, but look at this!’ The Griff went up to the line of kneeling prisoners, and smacked them one at a time around the head. ‘Two hill goblins, a beast fing, a humie savage, and a cave runt! What use are they! Eh? What use?’

‘Er, Griff boss sir,’ said Snarkit, ‘you forget the ratboy. I got you him and all.’

‘Oh, he’s going straight in the wulloff feed. Last time I had one of them in here it turned out to be a sneaky git, tried to knife me in the night. No fear.’

Without prompting, two of the Griff’s Little Big ’Uns came forward and dragged the ratman away. Runtgit doubted it could get up to much harm, it was skin and bone, a ratslave if he ever saw one. The Little Big ’Un’s on the other hand, they were the biggest goblins he’d seen, nearly as tall as the human and twice as muscly. An even bigger goblin stood behind the Griff’s throne, an enormous club dangling from its fist. Its face was slack with idiocy, but its muscles bulged.

‘Er, this one, boss, he’s clever. He is!’ Snarkit pointed to Runtgit. ‘Saved us a load of bother with some dead-gobblers he did. He could be well useful.’

‘Hmm, yeah, I heard about that.’ The Grizzler-Griff stroked one of his many chins. ‘You’re getting slack Snarkit, the old Snarkit, the Snarkit I used to know, he’d never make a gaffe like that! Never.’ The Griff slapped a palm on to the top of Runtgit’s head and pushed back until the night goblin was looking into the Griff’s piggy eyes. ‘Can you fight, little cave runt?’

Runtgit gave him his most defiant look and nodded hard. The Griff’s ringed, greasy fingers patted Runtgit’s head forcefully. An odd look flickered over the Griff’s face so quickly Runtgit nearly missed it. Snarkit certainly did.

‘Pickings is thin, boss,’ said Snarkit.

‘Nah!’ The Griff shook his head emphatically. The snotling in his arms blew a raspberry and plucked at the Griff’s clothes. The Griff went back to his throne and swept several snotlings from its dirty cushion. ‘No more money for you! You’ll get nothing, nothing at all.’

‘Boss!’

‘All right! Not nothing. Five teeth is it, and you’ll be happy. Gur!’

The big goblin came to life, a statue waking from the stone.

‘Pay Snarkit here!’ The Griff waved at Snarkit. ‘Come back with rubbish like this again and I’ll have you fed to me wulloffs, you get me?’

‘I get you, boss,’ said Snarkit surlily. The goblin did not look up from the floor. What had seemed so powerful before, to Runtgit, had become as strong as a beaten snottie in front of a big orc boss. (Skarsnik’s words, not mine, but illustrative, I am sure you will agree, Herr Doktor.)

The Griff watched Snarkit go, petting his favourite snotling as he did. The wind blew at the sides of the dirty canvas. The wagon creaked.

‘He gone?’

‘He gone, boss!’ said a sentry at the door.

‘Right then, hill gobboes to the pushin’ teams, they look strong enough’ said the Griff. He shoved the snotling away and rubbed his hands together. ‘Five teef! A bargain. Ha!’

‘No one out-grifts the Griff, Griff,’ said the scribe.

‘Righty-right Gulbash me old mucker. I like that. I’m very clever to have come up with that one. “No one out-grifts the Griff!” Write it down, I likes it a lot.’

Gulbash dutifully did as he was told, marking out his statement in the blocky, laborious glyphs of orc-kind.

‘Beast thing next up in the fighting pit tomorrow.’ The Griff looked it up and down. ‘Nice specimen. I’ll put two teef on him to win.’ Gulbash, the goblin with the book, scratched the detail down. ‘Humie to the slave lines, we’ll sell it on. And you.’ The Griff’s face lit up with sadistic delight as he got to Runtgit. ‘Put him in the slave cages, he’s too runty to walk far without his feet wearing off, and I want to see what these brains is all about. We still got da stunty and that humie we picked up lots of days ago?’

‘Yes your Grizzly-Griffness,’ said Gulbash. ‘We do.’

‘Oh, Gulbash me mucker! Of course we do, dat stunty is me best fighter, isn’t he? See Gulbash, I’m always testing you, see?’

‘Yes, Griff.’

‘Right. So, stick him in there, then we’ll see how blessed clever he is.’

The Griff’s favourite snotling tittered evilly, and the Griff joined in. ‘Oi! Get Gurklekin to get me some food up! I’m hungry enough to eat youse all up. Get me something tasty to eat now!’

Runtgit was dragged away.

‘What da Griff had in for me, I dint know,’ said Skarsnik. He had become almost wistful as he recounted this part of his story, as if his time outside the mountain had been one of gratifying enterprise and pleasure. ‘Them big gobboes of his shoved me into this wagon, not a big ’un like da Griff’s, but a little ’un. Dere was lots of uvver prisoners in dere, and dey came and went and more came and dey went too, sold by da Griff or eaten or dead from sickness and fings. But these two, one was a stunty, another a humie like you. The humie and stunty gave me such hard looks it near hurt me feelings.’ He chuckled. ‘An’ I was in there for a long old while. The Griff’s boys went from place to place on the plain. Sometimes, a whole load of ’em would rush off into the hills, mostly they stuck together. They were traders, see, going from da Howlers to da Broken Teef, to Crooked Fang and da Stinkin’ Geezers, wheelin’ and dealin’ sellin’ and buyin’ and stealin’. The Griff was good at dat, real good. But what did he want wiv me? And why was I in dat cage? No! Don’t answer, it’s a right-orcical question, innit? I’ll tell you why…’

The caravan rolled over endless plains, creaking from one dilapidated greenskin village to another. Orc fortresses came and went, tribes of wolf boys would join them for a while and then fall away. The goblin who would become Skarsnik saw many strange things. The landscape was studded with effigies of Mork and Gork, huge heads sculpted from stone or orc dung. Some were ancient, little more than grassed-over mounds where stunted trees, blasted by the winds, fed off the ancient ordure. He saw sorcerous towers that scraped the sky, giants battling by moonlight, hefting boulders at each other, their roars rolling thunderously across the plain.

Several times the caravan was assailed by other greenskins, but the Griff’s forces were well-disciplined and numerous. Foes were encircled and killed, the Griff’s bolt throwers accounting for many. Runtgit realised that the Griff often disguised his strength, sending his wolf boys far away and signalling them back by flashes of light or horn blast when required. Chariots were disguised as rickety wagons by boards and painted cloth and extra wheels hung from ropes, the bolt throwers were hidden under tarpaulins, all the better to lure unsuspecting greenskins in to assault the caravan.

Those they defeated, they devoured or sold.

Then there were the pit fights. The Griff had a fine line in showmanship, setting up fighting rings at the caravan’s stops, and setting his captives against one another. Among the Griff’s followers were goblins of many talents. They would juggle and stiltwalk around the goblin villages, blowing fire and singing vulgar songs.

Runtgit would listen to the hoots and howls and the ringing of blades, and wonder when he would be forced into the pit.

He was not.

Through rain and snow and freezing nights, Runtgit rode the wagon. He did nothing, said nothing, to draw attention to himself. But he listened. He listened to the guards complain. Their griping told him so much – who was an enemy to whom, who was friends with whom, who was strong or slow, who was cunning or weak.

And he listened to the prisoners.

The dwarf said little. He spoke, sometimes, while he slept. Occasionally he spoke with himself at length in the Khazalid tongue. Runtgit paid close attention to what he said, attempting to improve his grasp of the language, although it proved difficult.

The human was another matter. A man like me, Skarsnik said, and he meant a man of the Empire. How he came to be in that cage Skarsnik did not tell me, but the man spoke Reikspiel, and he spoke it often. He spoke to every prisoner that came in, he tried to engage the dwarf in conversation, he even spoke to Runtgit. Runtgit flattened his ears and smiled and bobbed his head submissively, to show he meant no harm, but the man lost patience with the goblin’s inability to understand him and addressed Runtgit infrequently.

At night, the man often wept. Runtgit found this amusing.

While the other prisoners slept or sank into their own private miseries, Runtgit wrapped his inhuman lips around the sounds of Reikspiel, and he practised the words silently, his face pressed outward through the wagon bars. After a few months, his sharp little mind had grasped a hold of our language. I doubt very much he learned it so well as to be able to speak to me as he did solely within the confines of that cage, but he insisted that it was so.

Runtgit was a goblin of unusual patience. Most of them are creatures of impulse. Not Runtgit. He waited and waited for many long weeks, biding his time, waiting to see if the Griff’s plans regarding him would reveal themselves. They did not.

Winter passed, and watery sunlight played over the Badlands. The colder months are brutal there, but when spring comes, it does so with rapidity, overthrowing winter in a series of bold skirmishes. Although spring may lose a battle, it cannot hope but win the war. New growth forced itself through the prairies; the battlefields of the greenskins became brief gardens ornamented by weathered dung-idols sporting out-rageous crests of wildflowers.

Runtgit did not care for flowers, but he did care for his liberty, and he hatched a plan to reacquire it.

He waited for a moment when the caravan was stopped. Goblin guards lounged around the slave wagons, picking their teeth and bullying the smallest of their number. A kind of calm prevailed.

‘Oi, you,’ said Runtgit. ‘Yeah, you.’

The dwarf’s head came up fast, fury boiling in his eyes.

‘How do you know our sacred tongue?’ he spat. His face grew red.

Runtgit did not quite understand this, but he understood enough to say something exceptionally impolite to the dwarf. It involved the dwarf’s mother, her sexual habits, and a mountain pony. He wasn’t entirely sure if he had the grammar right, but the sentiment was there.

The dwarf’s face went purple with rage. He leapt to his feet, chains taut as he swiped at Runtgit. Runtgit laughed. The Griff valued his prisoners; their manacle chains were short enough to prevent them killing each other.

The dwarf, however, was not for the stopping. Veins stood out on his temples, his muscles bulged, he roared oaths to the dwarf’s ancestor-gods. His entire body was red and shaking with the effort.

By now, goblins were up and on their feet. ‘Oi, you! Get down, stop that now! Oi!’ They poked their spear butts through the bars, attempting to subdue the dwarf.

‘You get in there and bop him on his head!’ said one.

‘No fear! You do it! He’s gone nutty!’

The dwarf heaved, leaning his body into his restraints. Blood ran down his arms where the manacles cut into his arms. He bellowed. Runtgit goaded him on, rattling off every vaguely offensive thing he could think of to say with his limited grasp of Khazalid, although the mere fact he knew any at all was almost certainly enough to feed the dwarf’s fury.

One chain gave way, a weak link splitting. The dwarf’s arm came free. He alternated his efforts then between grabbing at the laughing Runtgit and tugging hard at his remaining restraint. Runtgit dodged, hopping from foot to foot. The dwarf flailed his stumpy legs in Runtgit’s direction. Spit flew from his mouth and stuck in his tangled beard.

One of the smaller goblins was pushed into the cage by his fellows. He held a large club. Warily, he approached the dwarf. The dwarf ducked its first swipe, grabbed the club, tugged the goblin towards him and smashed its face hard into the bars.

He pulled the club from the felled goblin’s fingers and swung hard at Runtgit. Runtgit stopped laughing. His movements were restricted by his own chains, and he could not dodge far enough. The club cracked into his elbow, and agony exploded up his arm. The dwarf bent down, searching the goblin for something more dangerous. He let out a bark of triumphant laughter, and held up a key before his face.

He jiggled it in the manacle lock, cursing the inferior workmanship of greenskins as he did so.

‘Oi! Oi! What the zog… Oi!’ Gulbash came running towards the wagon. ‘What? You, you, you! Get in there! Oi!’ He kicked and slapped at the goblins crowding around the cage door. ‘You think the Griff won’t gut you, you let his prizes get scratched? Get in there, now!’

Goblins came in: two, then three, then five. There was only one entrance to the wagon, and so they could only approach from one direction. Goblins on the outside jabbed at the dwarf, hoping to herd him towards the clubs and jacks of the goblins in the cage.

I do not know how much you know yourself of the mountain folk, but no dwarf will surrender without a fight, especially when the fury is upon him. Letting out a roar of outrage at his long captivity, the dwarf slipped free from his chains. Runtgit forgotten, he threw himself into the goblins. Green bodies flew in every direction. The other prisoners huddled as tight as they could into the bars as the dwarf laid about him with the club.

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ shouted Gulbash.

A goblin performed an overhead thrust with his spear, impaling the dwarf’s leg. The dwarf stumbled, he fought on, but could not move.

‘That’s the spirit! Get the stunty!’ hollered Gulbash.

Goblins piled on top of the dwarf. Clubs rose and fell. After a frantic tussle on the floor, the dwarf lay spread-eagled and pinned, two panting goblins to each limb.

Runtgit chuckled. A finger poked him through the bars. ‘Dunno what you’re laughing about, cave runt,’ said Gulbash. ‘The Griff is going to want to see you about this. Then we’ll see who’s laughing, won’t we?’

‘What did you say to him?’ said the Griff.

‘Boss…’

‘Shut it, Gulbash, I want to hear what the cave runt has to say.’

The Griff sat on his giant hand-throne, stroking his fat chins with one hand, his favourite snotling with the other.

‘I dunno, I told him some rude stuff,’ said Runtgit.

‘Someone told me,’ said the Griff, ‘that you said it in stunty speak. How comes you knows stunty speak?’

‘Just do,’ said Runtgit with a shrug.

‘And why didn’t you tell us that before?’ said the Griff.

‘Just didn’t,’ said Runtgit.

The Griff sighed. He drummed his fingers on his throne. He snorted through his piggy nose. ‘All right, everybody out. Everybody except Gur.’

‘What?’ said Gulbash. His ears went up high, then as far back as they would go. ‘You’re talking to him, on… on your own?’

‘Gulbash, he’s tied up, and I’ve got Gur, don’t I?’

‘Yes boss, but boss…’

‘Get out, Gulbash.’

His head bowed low, the Griff’s chief advisor shuffled out, his precious book tucked under his arm, following the Griff’s other cronies and hangers-on.

The Griff grunted. ‘Right then, cave runt. I suppose you want to know why I put you in that cage, yeah?’

‘Not really,’ said Runtgit.

The Griff spat on the floor. Snotlings scrabbled to get at it. ‘Yeah you do, you don’t fool me. You’re a clever ’un, like I is. Now, be clever like what I think you is, and tell me, why did I put you in that cage. Or I can have your feet and hands cut off and I’ll set the snotties on you.’

The snotlings stilled. Two dozen pairs of eyes fixed hungrily on Runtgit.

‘I’ll say, if that’s all right, boss. You wanted to see what I’d do, boss,’ said Runtgit. He relaxed as the snotlings went back to tussling among themselves.

‘Right. See, clever. I knew you was. What you doing out of your caves, cave runt? I seen your sort before, but not on your own, too scaredy for that aren’t you?’

‘I was chased out, boss.’

‘Why?’

‘For being clever.’

‘Clever, how?’

Seeing no other option, Runtgit laid out his short life, his rise to power, his deals with the skaven, and his fall from the lofty heights of top mushroom gatherer.

The Griff settled himself more comfortably in his throne. ‘Thought so. If it’s true, and if it ain’t you got a fine talent for telling tales, and that ain’t to be sniffed at anyways. Let me tell you something, cave runt. I need someone clever like you. Someone to keep an eye on things for me, someone to do me dirties for me, you get me?’

‘Yeah boss, I understand.’

The Griff rubbed his mouth. ‘I can’t trust none of this lot, can I? But you? You got no friends here. I’m your only friend. That’s how I know you is not going to try and do me in. You betray me, what have you got? You got nothing and no one. You be a good little goblin, and we’ll be mates. Heh! Like the great Grom and that Niblet fella he used to hang around with, that was a big Griff and a little cave runt too, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes boss. Thanks boss.’

‘“Yes boss. Thanks boss”,’ mimicked the Griff. He sneered. ‘Now, get on. Get on down to the cook wagon, tell Gurklekin I sent you, and that you’re me new potboy and food taster.’

‘Yes boss. Thanks boss.’

‘What’s yer name? Deffbug…?’ The Griff petted his snotling, and it nuzzled into him contentedly.

‘Nah, er, Deffbad, but I said that to make myself sound harder. It’s Runtgit, boss.’

‘Heh. That fits, because you is runty, but you is also gitty.’ He laughed as if he’d made the wittiest comment of the season. ‘Right then, Runtgit, you can take that for a start.’ The Griff pointed to a big iron pot full of filth. ‘That’s me day’s leavings. Get shot of it. Stinks worse than me snotties. No drops on the wagons, eh?’ he said, oblivious to the mess his pets made. ‘Chuck it over the side.’

‘Yes, boss… Yes, Griff.’ Runtgit struggled with the pot. His hands were still bound, and it was full to the brim.

He negotiated the rough deck of the tent-ship carefully. He made it to the door.

‘Oh, and Runtgit?’

Runtgit turned back. ‘Yes, boss?’

‘You cross me…’ The Griff plucked the snotling from his chest. He gave it an affectionate tickle under the chin with a claw, then swift as a snake grasped its head and crushed it like an egg. The little greenskin’s small measure of brain leaked through his fingers. The Griff dropped the corpse, and wiped his hand on his throne cushions. ‘There’s always another snottie, Runtgit. There’s always another runt. You get me?’

Runtgit nodded, and walked out of the tent onto the outside deck, where he tipped the pot over the side.

Gulbash glared at him. Runtgit gave the plains goblin a cocky salute, and took the empty pot back in to his new master.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE WAY OF COIN

‘I became his potboy, cleanin’ up his drops,’ said Skarsnik, ‘runnin’ errands and dat, making food, tellin’ tales. Everyone fought I was just da poop boy, but I weren’t. I was his best gobbo. His spy. His sneaky git.’ He patted his belly through his robes and beard belt. ‘Good times.’ Gobbla snuffled and shuffled round. His bulk nearly obscured his master from me. Skarsnik scratched him on the head. As he spoke he plucked lice from around Gobbla’s horny plates, squashing them between his fingers and eating them. ‘Bigbug don’t like Drid, Drid likes Urbash, Urbash is finking about a challenge on Mirkit, Mirkit wants to be da next Griff, and so on. Stuff like dat, and den da Griff would have a little word, or there’d be a new fighter in da pit fight, or his snotties would get a little fatter, Of course, didn’t take much to mention one or two boys in there that I dint like, did it? This goblin was bad to me, and he’d get the mention. Anuvver might wake up to find he’d stolen the Griff’s second-best boss hat. They called me cave runt for a while, then it was Runtgit, and den it was boss. Makiki came to trust me more and more, he’d tell me everyfink. “Maybe I kills ya tomorrer,” he’d say, every night. “Maybe I kills ya tomorrer.” But ’e never did.’

Skarsnik pushed Gobbla away and reached for his goblet. The great squig whined as his master’s attentions were withdrawn, a ridiculous sound coming from so fearsome a monster. ‘Only Gulbash I couldn’t shift. He could write. He could read. He could read humie, you know that? He was all clever like, and da Griff trusted him. I did try, but da Griff wouldn’t have anyfink said against him. He wanted us to be mates, but dat was never gonna happen. He did make Gulbash show me how to make da glyphs, and read the humie books. He tried to tell me wrong, course, but I was smarter. For a bit of extra food an that, some of the prisoners, dem what could read the scratchings, they helped me, and orc glyphs is orc glyphs, ain’t dey?’ He tapped his head. ‘I had dem in me head since I was a sproutling, what I learned though with Gulbash was to write ’em good, tell stories wiv em, and give orders. All very handy indeed.

‘Now, the big fing I had over Gulbash was dat he was a big scaredy. Say what you like about dem outside gobboes, dey might be bigger and braver and that than me night boys, but dey is slow, and Gulbash was slow and scared. He was cunning, but I was cunninger, and me, not like him, well, I liked a scrap. So what’s that mean? That means I was lots better, that’s what…’

‘There they is, boss!’ Runtgit snapped the spyglass shut and gave it to Griff Makiki. For once, the boss goblin had dragged his corpulent self out of the tent and up the netting to the crow’s nest. The day was windy, and his wolfskin cloak billowed around him, wafting the stale scent of fat goblin and snotling piss up into Runtgit’s hood. Gulbash crouched at the Griff’s feet, hands wrapped so hard round the netting his fingers were white.

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, there’s a lot of humies out dere,’ Gulbash said carefully.

‘Yeah, and a bunch of fatboys too.’ Runtgit pointed to the shapes of ogres striding alongside the human wagons. ‘About forty of ’em I reckon.’

Makiki screwed up his face at this difficult, high number. ‘Forty? That’s a lot.’

‘Not too many, boss,’ lied Runtgit.

‘Them wagons are all made of metal. And they have them boomstick things,’ countered Gulbash.

‘Guns?’ said Runtgit. ‘Don’t worry about guns, boss. Slow, them bangsticks. Noisy, yeah, and nasty, but well slow.’

‘I think they can see us,’ said Gulbash.

The Griff rounded on his scribe. ‘Course they can see us! This is the biggest cart in the Badlands! Zogging idiot.’

Runtgit nodded. ‘It don’t matter. It’s good. What works on gobboes, your disguises and tricks and that, your Griffness, works on humies too, don’t it? They ain’t so clever. Anyways, look how quick they’s going.’ He pointed out the plumes of dust kicked up by the horses’ hooves. ‘They is scared. They is looking to avoid…’ He searched his sharp little mind for the word he had learned from the human slaves. ‘“Confruntashuns,” and while they is looking at us lot, they’s not looking at Snarkit’s boys, are they?’

‘Those horses are noisy!’ said Gulbash.

‘Taste good though,’ said the Griff, and licked his lips.

‘So,’ said Runtgit innocently, ‘shall I ask Gulbash to go and have a go at ’em? Give ’em a taste of greenskin fightyness?’

The Griff scratched under his second-best boss hat. He was obviously thinking about not attacking the Imperial caravan, otherwise his shiniest helm would have been atop his head. ‘Nah, Gulbash don’t like a scrap. I’m not sure I like it, Runtgit. Not sure at all. Let ’m go on by, we got plenty of slaves and stuff, we’re near to the Green Gribblers’ territory, and they always have loads of teeth. Eh, lads? We can have ourselves an easier fight.’ The Griff looked to the other goblins up on the crow’s nest. Their ears and noses twitched. They were half scared, half spoiling for a scrap, and liking and loathing their Griff in equal measure for saving them from it. Such is the wide divide in the mind of the goblin. Betwixt fear and violence they live, forever.

‘True, true,’ said Runtgit. ‘Forget I said anything.’

‘Yeah?’ said the Griff. He sounded relieved, for he had come to rely on the night goblin’s counsel.

‘Yeah, but there is…’

‘What?’ said the Griff.

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Runtgit, as he leaned on the railing facing the train of wagons on the horizon. It was running parallel to the Griff’s, heading up to the pass. They were north of the Iron Rock, the Griff’s caravan having cut across the plains in a wide arc away from the sea dwarfs of Barak Varr. They had been haunting the old dwarf highway waiting for a suitable target. This human caravan was either plying trade on the landward route between the Empire and the dwarf city, or maybe on its way from there to the Silver Road, and on from there to wherever the humans went when they crossed the mountains to the Dark Lands.

‘What?’ said the Griff.

‘Well, only that there’ll be loads of gold and shinies and other pretty things in there, and guns and swords and spikies. But you don’t want all that, do you? Nah, I see, it’s too much trouble. You is real wise, Griff, I got to hand it to you.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said the Griff. His eyes had taken on that odd shine they had when he was thinking about money.

‘Boss!’ said Gulbash. ‘Don’t listen to him!’

‘Aw look, Gulbash won’t go, he’s too scared. And you can’t go boss, too important, gotta keep things running here, eh?’

‘Zogging pity that,’ said the Griff.

They were quiet a while, Runtgit letting the idea of gold and weapons sink into the piggy goblin lord’s head.

‘I could go,’ said Runtgit. ‘I mean, I could, make sure it’s all done right and that. For you, boss.’

‘Did you say Snarkit’s boys were already out there?’

‘Yeah,’ said Runtgit, ‘and some others, I thought you might fancy a crack, got it all set up for you, so I did. Just in case like.’

‘Did you now?’ said the Griff, who was not entirely stupid. As it was, he was greedier than he was clever. A quick calculation told him what he could gain from the venture if Runtgit went. As he tallied it, he would lose little if the cave runt died.

What he did not calculate, however, was what he might lose if Runtgit were successful.

‘All right then. I’ll lend you me best cart. And me driver…’

‘Can I pick me own driver?’

‘All right. And some armour and that. You pull this off, cave runt…’

‘Yeah, boss,’ said Runtgit, rubbing his long hands together. ‘I know.’

Kruggler was most put out to be chosen to drive Runtgit’s chariot. He preferred riding wolves to driving them; mostly because it was difficult to run away in a chariot. Secondly, when driving a chariot, there were always other goblins directly behind you, goblins with pointy knives and bows. That Runtgit was one of those goblins was a worry to him. ‘Why you pick me?’ he shouted over the thunder of wheels. His ears flapped in the wind.

‘Wanna talk!’ said Runtgit. He looked the very picture of a goblin boss in his armour. The links of a fine mail shirt shone out from under his outer robe, and large leather spaulders decorated with boar tusks were tied atop his shoulders. His pointed black hood was pierced on both sides to allow the horns from his helm to poke out. By his side he wore a sickle-moon sword, the traditional weapon of the night goblin chiefs. Of course, the plains goblins had little experience in making these, but Runtgit had the tribal smith create it, mainly by beating the plains goblin over the head with an iron bar until he had roughly the shape he needed.

But the effect was rather undone. Runtgit felt terribly ill on the bouncing chariot. Kruggler could see it, and he grinned at the night goblin as he clutched at the post. ‘Got a problem?’ He swerved the chariot left then right, and Runtgit groaned. Kruggler stood as nonchalantly on the deck of the chariot as only one born to it could. He swayed with its every move, wolf reins held carelessly in one hand. ‘I thought you was doing pretty good, meself, cave runt, what you need my help for?’

Runtgit gulped down a mouthful of saliva. He was turning an unhealthy shade of white. ‘I got the boss’s ear, right? I’m his best man after Gulbash, but Gulbash is the problem. He don’t like me, and I need rid, you understand?’

‘I’s not back-stabbing Gulbash!’

‘Nah, don’t want you to, I’ll sort him out. It’s Gur I want rid of.’

‘Are you shroomstruck?’ shouted Kruggler. He pulled hard on the reins in surprise. The three wolves pulling the chariot yipped in annoyance and veered hard left, threatening to tip the vehicle. Curses and howls came from behind as the dozen chariots following them were forced into patterns of evasion. ‘He’s the biggest, hardest gobbo in the tribe! The only reason he’s not the Griff is that he’s well thick.’

‘Nah! Listen! Gur listens to Gulbash, he’s really Gulbash’s gobbo, not the boss’s! Think of that! Our poor boss, Gulbash has got him! Get rid of Gur, then I can get rid of Gulbash, boss will be safe, and I’ll be number two gobbo. You help me… Well, you could be number three. Be dead easy, promise. I’m going to fix it.’

‘How?’

‘Because he is well thick. I promise, honest, you do this for me and it won’t be no trouble for you.’

‘How do I know you ain’t wanting rid of me?’

‘You don’t’ said Runtgit, and managed a weak smile. ‘And if you don’t do what I says, well you might make boss, but more likely you’ll be dead. You do this, you might be a Griff instead.’

‘Griff?’ Kruggler laughed. ‘You are crazy.’

‘Throw down on him tomorrow, when we’s dividing up the spoils, all right?’

‘Oh, so you think we’re going to win too? Nutty.’

‘Oh, we’ll win all right,’ said Runtgit. ‘We’ll win. Got to, haven’t I? Got to show the Griff that I am the bestest boss he has, so that he will listen to me good. Gulbash don’t fight. I do. It’s important, that.’

‘So you’s doing this on the chance? You lot eat too many mushrooms in those caves!’ said Kruggler.

‘Don’t worry.’ Runtgit patted the bigger goblin on the arm, ‘I got a plan. I always do.’

‘Does it involve them?’ Kruggler nodded to a box of clinking clay bottles wrapped in straw on the chariot bed. A burning torch was strapped near them to the side of the chariot.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Runtgit wickedly. ‘Yes it does.’

The chariots, flanked by huge mobs of wolf boys, were drawing near the Empire caravan. When the men had noticed the goblins bearing down on them, they had picked up speed, the ogres breaking into a jog, their sturdy legs keeping pace with the horses drawing the wagons. Runtgit expected this. He also knew that they’d quickly realise that the wagons could not hope to outrun the wolves. The men prepared for battle.

There were a dozen wagons pulled by teams of eight drays apiece. Seventeen spare horses trailed behind. A dozen outriders armed with pistols galloped alongside. The wagons were steel-plated – loopholes in the sides of each, wheels the size of a man bearing their weight. The tops were flat and surrounded by a low metal-plated parapet, making each a small fortress. Groups of men in the bright clothing of caravan mercenaries were stationed atop them, their guns poking above the side. With smoothness that spoke of frequent practice, the lead wagon pulled off the setts of the old dwarf road, curling back towards the tail of the caravan. The others followed, until the wagons were in a circle. Men jumped down from their driver’s boards, unhitched the horses and led them into the centre of the circle. Ogres pushed at the wheels of the horseless wagons,until they were nose-to-tail with the one in front, and men hurried about, slamming steel pins into sockets, joining the wagons up into an immovable wall. The chariots were still a way off, and already three wagons were linked together.

‘We’ll never get there before they’ve made that lot into a fort!’ shouted Kruggler. He raised his whip to urge the wolves on. Runtgit grabbed his arm.

‘Nah, mate, slow down.’ Runtgit turned and nodded to one of two musicians on the back of the chariot behind him and Kruggler. The goblin blew out his cheeks and puffed hard on a curling goat horn. A blast rang out on the wind.

Puffs of smoke came from the tops of the wagons, followed a second later by the crack of gunfire. Balls hissed through the air. Goblins toppled from wolves behind Runtgit’s chariot. Wolves yelped in pain. A chariot wolf foundered and fell, tripping the others pulling its cart. Goblins squealed in panic as the contraption ran over its beasts and flipped, exploding into splinters of wood as it hit the floor. Shouts of fear and anger came from behind as the other chariots split around the wreck. Another lost a wheel to a hidden stone and slowed violently to a halt, spilling goblins onto the grass where they were promptly run over.

Runtgit ignored the casualties. His eyes were on the ground not far from the caravan circle. He let out a shout of triumph. The prairie came alive as blankets covered in grass were cast aside. Goblins and their wolves, lying underneath, sprang to their feet, emerging as if by magic from the spring growth. They were close enough now that Runtgit could hear the noise of the caravan – the whinnies of frightened horses, shouts and curses as the men caught sight of this other threat. Snarkit’s boys were very close to them, and the wagons had not yet closed their circle.

The wolves ran at full speed towards the caravan laager. Half the ogres abandoned their attempts to push the wagons together, and formed up, two to each gap. Their comrades continued their efforts, men lending their shoulders to the wheels. Puffs of gunpowder smoke came from the wagon loopholes and armoured tops. A score of goblins fell, and the mob next to Snarkit’s turned tail and fled. Snarkit’s boys charged on, their spears levelled. The first rank were smashed from their saddles by heavy ogre clubs, then the rest swarmed the giant mercenaries, wolves snarling and biting, goblin spears tearing deep into muscled fat. Snarkit’s wolf leapt high, clearing the tumult, and landed on the inside of the laager. Ogres were pulled down, their clubs hampered by the press of wolf and goblin. They struggled bare-handed on the ground, swatting at the greenskins swarming all over them. Other goblins ran over them to the middle of the laager. The screams of wounded horses joined the battle’s noise.

‘Now! Kruggler, go right!’

‘What?’

‘That way!’ shouted Runtgit, and smacked the other goblin on the head. The chariot tilted as it made a sharp turn, the plains goblins expertly leaning, Runtgit staggering into its wicker sides. Runtgit’s chariots and wolf boys ran around the laager, pouring volleys of arrows over the sides. Men toppled from the roofs of the wagons. Long guns retorted, and goblins were blasted from their saddles. The greenskins were hollering, their wolves yipping and baying.

‘Hold it steady, Kruggler!’ said Runtgit. He bent down to the crate at his feet, taking up a clay bottle. An oil-soaked rag hung from its top. He touched this to the burning torch and lobbed it as hard as he could. The bottle hit the side of an armoured wagon, exploded as it broke and ignited its cargo of flammable squig oil.

‘Hahahaha!’ laughed Runtgit. The other goblins joined in, their eyes burning red, wicked smiles on their faces.

‘Watch out! Fatboys!’ shouted Kruggler. A group of ogres stood before them. A hail of arrows arced over Runtgit’s chariot, peppering the brutes and bringing one down.

‘Run ’em down! Run ’em down!’ bellowed Runtgit. His hornblower blew out the order and Runtgit threw another makeshift bomb into the wagons. It whooshed as the clay cracked and the oil took fire.

The chariots accelerated. The ogres stood defiant, braced to receive the charge. Four chariots went into them, wolves and goblins alike making a terrible din.

One ogre went down, the chariot bouncing over his solid body; another chariot shattered on impact, cracked to matchwood against the ogre’s armoured gut. The wolves were snared in their own traces and easily slain, the goblin crew thrown to the floor. Kruggler jinked around the tangle of wood, wolf and goblin, twitching the reins to bring the chariot back around the rear of the ogre group. A spray of blood went up as the chariot’s scythed wheels took legs off at the knee, their owners toppling and bellowing in outrage. Runtgit ducked a club blow. It took the side off his chariot and one of the crew gobboes instead.

He and Kruggler howled with delight. This was living! Fast and free as the wind. Runtgit had had no idea life outside the caves could be so much fun.

Most of the chariots had caromed into the ogres, leaving Runtgit at the head of three. They rode on, wolf riders at their sides, arrows flying, on round the wagons, Runtgit lobbing bombs until half the caravan was ablaze. They whipped past the far side of the laager where Snarkit’s boys fought hard against man and ogre.

They were coming for their second pass around when a wagon side flipped down. Men heaved at an object covered in a heavy oilcloth. They pulled it free to reveal a gun with nine barrels. The crew hurried into position and began to turn a crank at the rear. As each barrel came to bear, a heavy hammer descended, setting off a charge.

The air was suddenly full of iron. One of Runtgit’s wolves exploded in a shower of gore. Its remains caught at the other wolves’ feet, and the chariot skidded to a halt. The cart tipped over, sending Kruggler and Runtgit tumbling. The other chariots were smashed to pieces.

Runtgit stood to find himself staring up at the nine-barrelled cannon.

‘Er,’ he said. The men at the other end of the gun smiled and pulled back the hammers on the top deck of guns. Runtgit closed his eyes.

There was a gasp, and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. He opened his eyes again. Snarkit leant down from the open wagon side, his knife dripping.

‘Your lucky day, cave runt.’

The sounds of battle were dying down, isolated gunshots and screams. Runtgit smiled.

‘Now what?’ said Snarkit.

‘Help me up, I got some talking to do.’

The caravan leader knelt on the floor, his defiant eyes cast to the Griff’s palace-wagon deck. His hands were bound behind him, and his ripped finery was covered in soot and bloodstains.

‘Tell him,’ said the Great Grizzler-Griff, ‘that I is going to kill ’em and eat ’em all. Hurhurhur.’

‘Er, no,’ said Runtgit.

‘You did well, Runtgit… hang on, what do you mean “no”?!’ The Griff’s face went from satisfaction to rage in a heartbeat. He clenched his fist, throttling the snotling on his lap.

‘No offence,’ wheedled Runtgit. ‘But I’s got a better idea.’

‘You don’t get to say no to me, Runt!’ roared the Griff. ‘Gur!’

The massive goblin behind his throne swung his head, his slow, evil eyes focussing on Runtgit.

Runtgit waved his hands, his black robe flapping. ‘No, no, wait, boss! No, no, boss. It’s a good idea, honest. Let me tell you, and if you don’t like it, then set Gur on me. Loads of gold and shinies innit?’

The Griff calmed. ‘All right, all right.’ He unclenched his fist. The snotling whimpered with relief.

Runtgit spoke quickly. ‘Don’t kill ’em! You let ’em go, they come back, they’ll bring more cash back with them. And if they go home, then their mates will say “Ooh, look at that! That way’s nice and safe, we’ll be back in time for tea, but best take some gold to give them nice goblin wolf boys what will see us through the Badlands up to the mountains.”’

‘You talkin’ stupid Runtgit, I can kill em all and have all their gold for meself.’

‘No! Me Grizzly-Grifty-Grifflyness, listen up. You kill them now, sure, you get all their gold. But it’s all the gold you’re ever going to get, ain’t it? But if you let them go, you take some gold now, and some later. And then their mates come, and you take some of their gold, and their mates come, and so on. You kill them, their mates ain’t never going to come, are they?’

To most other goblins, this would have been utterly incomprehensible. But the Griff wasn’t any other goblin. He was the Griff, the canniest trader in the northern Badlands. He stroked his chin. ‘I heard of something like dat. Them, what they called? Gulbash, them goblins with their funny “tack” thing.’

‘The Red-Faces, Griff. They called it taxing, learned it off some ogres a whiles back,’ said Gulbash grudgingly. He gave Runtgit a look of withering scorn.

‘Yeah, taxing. I take a little bit of gold off lots of them, that’s better than a lot of gold off some of them, that’s,’ he counted on his fingers, ‘one, two, three, four, why, that’s lots of gold!’

‘It’s not lots of gold, boss,’ whispered Runtgit enticingly. ‘It’s loads of gold.’

‘And so,’ said Skarsnik, ‘dat’s how I got to be da Griff’s second boss. After dat, I could do wot I liked.’

I noted all this down diligently as I had noted everything so far. But a thought occurred to me. ‘I am sorry, my lord, to interrupt your story. But you did speak of Gur the goblin, and how you were afraid of him…’

Skarsnik’s eyes became dangerous and hard. All sense of comradeship went from them as if a flame had been doused. ‘I never said I was afraid of him, did I?’ Gobbla growled.

I attempted to keep my voice level. ‘I mean, my lord, that he stood in the way of your plans, being Gulbash’s man, and all that.’

‘I never said he was no man, eiver,’ said Skarsnik, shaking his head at my idiocy. ‘But yeah, I did, dint I? I had to get rid of him, had to. You asking because you want to know? Yeah? All right then, this is how I got rid of big old Gur.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

GUR, GULBASH, THE GRIFF AND THE WAY BACK HOME

Runtgit had seen the mushrooms a few weeks before, growing in a pile of aurochs dung; the wild cattle that goblins will not tackle, such is their ferocity. The mushrooms were poor and shrivelled specimens to a night goblin used to their cave cousins, ones so big they were taller than an orc, but they would do.

The plains goblins did not notice the mushrooms at all; they tramped or rode or rolled by them, unmindful of their use, for the proper cultivation and employment of fungi is very much the realm of the night goblins.

Runtgit had been sitting on his hut-wagon’s driving board, thinking, his long chin in his long hands, wondering what was next, and how he was going to fulfil his plan of getting himself a whole army of goblins so that he could return home in triumph and have Snotruk imaginatively murdered. Such are the daydreams of the power-hungry greenskin, the principal difference with our protagonist here being that he successfully pursued them.

The dung, and its crop of weedy mushrooms, slid across his vision as Runtgit’s hut-wagon rolled on, his mangy wolves huffing and wheezing as they dragged it ever onwards across the plains.

Runtgit sat up and turned his head. Without a word to his driver, he slid from the drive board and landed on the turf. He hurried back to the dung and sniffed at the fungus.

‘Look at that!’ called a goblin guard to his fellow. ‘The Griff’s pet cave runt is eating dung!’ The two, spears at a lazy slope on their crooked shoulders, trudged by laughing. Runtgit paid them no heed. He plucked the mushrooms with deft fingers, and placed them in a wolf-hide pouch he pulled from his voluminous robes. His head twitching backwards and forwards with paranoia, he scurried back to his wagon, and pulled himself up. His driver looked at him and snorted. There was precious little conversation between them, for if Runtgit was obeyed, he was still not entirely accepted by the plains goblin tribe.

That night, by flickering lamps fuelled with man fat, he hung the mushrooms up to dry in an out of the way corner of his wagon.

That was some time before the fight with the humans. And then the night of Runtgit’s victory came, and he had a use for the mushrooms.

‘All right there, Gur! No, mate, don’t get up.’

The big goblin sat by the fireside, his face furrowed with lines of perpetual puzzlement. Gur looked out on the world with incomprehension, and he wore it for all to see. The other goblins said Gur was as stupid as an orc. In this, they were misguided, as the least intelligent of orcs is a good deal more intelligent than Gur was.

‘Wot you want?’ said Gur. His words were poorly formed and slow, even for a goblin.

‘I brought you this! It’s a present.’ Runtgit held out a steaming bowl of stew. Gur’s big nose twitched speculatively. Runtgit was pleased to see the other goblin swallow down a mouthful of saliva.

He hitched up his robes with his free hand and squatted down. ‘Mind if I sit? Course you don’t.’ Runtgit looked around the campfires. The sounds of revelry and casual violence came from each and every one – all that is, except for Gur’s. ‘Not joining in the party?’

‘Gur not like party,’ he said. Uttering that sentence cost much time and effort, and he puffed out a huge breath when he had finished. ‘Gur too slow.’

‘Aw, matey, that’s not right, big goblin like you, should have lots of friends.’

‘You be Gur’s friend?’ said Gur. His ears rose slightly. ‘Everyone fraid of Gur. Gur big! Gur strong! Gur smash! Hurhurhur.’

‘I used to have a friend like you.’

‘Yeah? What happen him?’

‘Oh,’ said Runtgit, poking a stick into the fire. ‘He tried to eat me, and then got himself all blowed up by the stunties.’

‘Oh,’ said Gur.

‘Oh. So,’ Runtgit said breezily, ‘you is big and strong, and I like big and strong pals, so I made you this.’

‘Smell good.’

‘You eat it all up then,’ said Runtgit. ‘Go on, all up.’ He held out the plate.

Gur shook his head, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘You sneaky. You share, or Gur no eat.’

Runtgit laughed. ‘Sure, why not? Very tasty this, I’d be delighted to share your present. I even have two spoons, I was hoping you’d say that, so I was.’

They ate together.

‘Gur! Gur! What is wrong with you! Fight him! Fight him!’ bellowed the Griff.

Gur staggered around in slow circles, his club dragging in the dirt of the fighting pit. Kruggler laughed and danced around him, slapping the big goblin’s rear with the flat of his scimitar. Gur looked even more puzzled than usual. He made a couple of passes with his club, staggering with it, like he was trying to throw the heavy weapon away but forgetting to let go. Kruggler let out a warshout and cut at the big goblin’s exposed leg.

Makiki was so enraged that he was driven to stand up, leaning on the spikes set into the rim of the fighting pit. ‘Have you been at the brew again!? Fight you lazy zogger! Fight!’

Gur spun around on his heel drunkenly, nearly losing his footing. Kruggler stabbed him in the chest and leaned hard on his blade. The notched end of his scimitar came out Gur’s back.

‘Kweeeee!’ squeaked Kruggler and thrust his face close to Gur’s. Gur looked down at the blade and then up to Kruggler. His mouth formed a question he never voiced. Kruggler stepped to one side, and the big goblin crashed face down into the dirt of the pit floor. The goblins around the pit went wild. The air rang with a cacophony of shouts, cheers and curses as bets were paid and money lost.

‘What?’ shouted Makiki. ‘What?!’

‘Looks like you got yourself a new bodyguard, boss,’ said Runtgit.

The Griff’s eyes narrowed. ‘You have anything to do with this, Runtgit?’

‘Not me, boss. Why’d I want to hurt poor old Gur?’

‘I heard you gave him some food last night.’

‘Which I ate myself,’ said Runtgit, wounded by this accusation. ‘I was only trying to be friends. Like you said, boss, I don’t have many here.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ The Griff stared at the victorious Kruggler, who was prancing around the ring, bloodied sword held high. He looked back to Runtgit. ‘I find you did something sneaky…’

‘Yes, boss.’

The Griff turned on his heel and swept out as elegantly as his gross body would allow. He too had lost many orc teeth, the goblins’ currency, on this bout.

Runtgit belched a nasty acid burp. Dungshrooms always disagreed with him. At least he, having been eating them since he was a runt, was largely immune to their intoxicating effects. He giggled, mainly because he had bet on the right goblin.

Gulbash looked at him with hatred. Runtgit waved and smiled.

‘And dat was dat,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Wiv Gur gone, Gulbash daredn’t front me up. He was a big snivelling coward, and I’m not.’ He leaned forward on his iron throne. ‘One fing about me, ’umie, I’m cleverer dan most gobboes, but I’m braver too. I likes me scraps. Oh, he had a couple of the uvver boys try it on, for a while there I was fighting in da pit once a week! I fink da Griff was sulking, cos he let em have a go. But the fing is, smaller we might be dan dose outside gobboes, a little nervier, like, but we is quick. Stunties is slow, outside gobboes is slow, but night goblins? We’s fast, faster than either of dem at any rate. I’d go in jabbin’ and a-pokin’. An’ if I had some big ’un to bash dat I dint fink I could beats, den he might have a little haccident before da match, if ya know what I mean.’ His eyes shone. ‘So I was boss. Second boss. Makiki was chief, but dere was so much money wot I got, so much shiny-shiny, dat the uvver gobboes started to lissen to me more dan him. I was da prince of da grass, I was. And da Griff got fatter and fatter, and I got more and more big, until I was as big as an outside gobbo, and bigger still – as big as one of dere bosses. And den they didn’t dare boss me no more, and dey all did wot I said.

‘Dat’s when I fought it was time to come home… Oh yes, dey hadn’t heard the last of old Runtgit in da mountains, not by a long shot. But first I was gonna need two fings. I needed a bit of muscle, and I was gonna have to get rid of Gulbash, wasn’t I?’

‘This stuff stinks, s’all goaty and horrid!’ Gulbash pushed the sack of rancid beastman meat away from him with his toe.

‘Shut it, Gulbash. I didn’t want to bring you but the Griff made me, so shut up or you’ll be the bait, all right?’ Runtgit said. Spring had come and gone, summer was a distant memory. Runtgit had been with the plains goblins nigh on a year. He had grown to a size properly commensurate with that of a goblin lordling. The sun no longer bothered him. He even went abroad with his hood down on cloudy days, and no one, not ever, referred to him as ‘cave runt’ any more.

They were lying on the damp stone, looking out over an outcrop of rock to a defile below. The bottom of it was choked with bones and half-eaten carcasses.

‘I can’t see any trollses, no, none at all,’ said Kruggler. He licked his lips nervously.

‘Oh, they is down there all right,’ said Runtgit.

‘The Griff had some once, but he sold ‘em, they et their wagon, and half a mob of gobboes. Too dangerous, he said.’

‘That’s cos he didn’t know how to handle them, did he? I do. One of the Little Big ’Uns in me clan had been a trollboss once. Told me all about it, didn’t he? It’s all about the food, you’ll see.’ Runtgit could barely stop himself from laughing at what he had planned. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ said Runtgit. ‘They’s all sleepin’ now. Don’t want to wake them up. A woked up troll is a grumpy troll.’

They moved away quietly, sliding over the rocks, carrying the sack of beastmeat. They went to the mouth of the defile. They left the meat there and retreated to the shelter of a large boulder some distance away. Some of Kruggler’s boys dragged another sack from the wagons hidden behind the bluff around the corner, creating a scent trail from wagons to canyon. They lost their nerve near the entrance, tossed the second sack atop the first and ran.

‘Oi!’ hissed Runtgit. ‘Quietly!’

Nothing stirred.

Goblins hid all around the rocks, eyes on the canyon opening.

‘I don’t like it up here, boss,’ said Kruggler, looking at the mountains looming in the distance. ‘It’s all slopy and crooked. Wulloffs can’t run. Anything could be around here. Anything at all!’

‘And it is,’ said Runtgit, ‘but none of what’s out there is as bad as us, is it? Better get used to it Krugs, because we get these boys on our side, we’re going up.’ He pointed a dirty green finger towards the mountains. ‘All the way up. And then down. All the way down.’

‘You got any of that beastmeat on you?’ said Gulbash, sniffing around him.

‘No, why?’ said Runtgit.

‘I dunno, we put the sack over there, and I can still smells it.’

‘Must be you,’ said Kruggler. He and Runtgit guffawed. Gulbash’s ears went flat against his head, and he hissed at them, his hand twitching near his dagger.

‘Don’t even think about it, Gulbash,’ growled Runtgit.

They waited, fidgeting. Gulbash fell asleep. Kruggler could not keep still, drifting away every half-hour to relieve himself behind a rock. The sun tracked its way across the sky, and down over the plains behind them. The rocks took on an orange tint. Once, Runtgit would have cowered at this colour, the anger of the Evil Sun staining the world in hated light. These days he barely noticed.

Kruggler was energetically picking his nose. Runtgit pulled his hand from his face. ‘Give Gulbash a slap,’ he said, ‘the trolls are waking up.’

Kruggler smacked Gulbash hard on the nose, and his snores stopped.

‘Ow!’ said Gulbash.

‘I don’t see nothing,’ said Kruggler.

‘Watch the stones,’ said Runtgit, and pointed. ‘Not the caves.’

Kruggler stared into the failing light. The gully was darker than the surrounding hillside, a black slash across dusk-greyed rock. In its shadowy confines, he saw movement.

‘What?’ he whispered.

What he’d taken to be rocks earlier were shifting, cracks in the stone defining arms and hands, nobbles in the rock elbows and knees.

‘Is they made of stone?’ said Kruggler in amazement.

‘Nah,’ said Runtgit. All were talking quietly. ‘They just eat lots of it, this sort, and so they looks like it. That’s just the way it is with trolls.’

The trolls stood one by one, scratching themselves and belching, until five were revealed. Their long black claws rasped on their skin with a noise like grindstones. Cracked scales covered their backs and arms. They were the same colour as the rock of the gully, dirty brown. Eyes glittered under heavy brows. They had long noses and pronounced jaws like orcs. And they were huge! As tall as five goblins stood one atop the other. Whispers of fear went around the goblins hidden in the rocks.

‘Right then, Kruggler, you get back there and make sure they have those wagons ready. Trolls are stupider than Gur was, so if you got them some food and that, they’re no bother. Just don’t get in the way, all right?’

Kruggler nodded and licked his lips nervously. Their three sturdy wagons bore iron cages, a couple of runty looking beastmen they had caught chained as bait in each. He drew his long knife and slipped away. He knew his job.

‘All right Gulbash me old mucker, here they come…’

‘There better be no funny business, or I’m telling the Griff.’

‘That’s why you’re here matey, I know.’ Runtgit watched the defile. The trolls’ long noses were twitching. They had scented the beastmeat. ‘All right, let’s get out of here.’

They withdrew cautiously. The sleepy trolls kicked their way through the bones and carcasses that littered the floor of their lair. As they drew nearer the meat, they pushed and shoved at each other. One reached the sacks and tore them open. They grumbled at one another as they scrapped over the meat. Another pushed through, nose close to the ground, sniffling and snuffling at the rock.

The trolls emerged from the defile’s mouth.

‘Now, Kruggler! Now!’ Runtgit punched a fist into the air. From behind him came the sound of bleating and rough-voiced beast words as the beastmen had their throats sliced by Kruggler and his crew.

The trolls’ heads snapped up as the scent of fresh blood filled the air. Their eyes wide, noses twitching, they ambled forward with gathering speed.

Runtgit backed stealthily away from Gulbash.

It took Gulbash a moment to notice. ‘Oi! Where are you going?’ said Gulbash. ‘Hey! Why is that troll looking at me?’

Runtgit made it to the steep rock wall of the bluff. A rope snaked down, and he put his foot into a loop at the bottom. ‘Quick, Gulbash, come on!’ he said. His words lacked sincerity.

Gulbash was transfixed by terror. The lanky frame of the troll loomed over him, nose twitching. Gulbash’s head tilted back. The troll came closer, bending low. It sniffed at Gulbash.

Gulbash backed up slowly. ‘Nice troll! Nice troll!’ squeaked Gulbash. Something occurred to him then, in his last few moments of life, a spark of an idea. He fumbled at his belongings hanging from his belt. His pouch of things felt heavier than usual.

His back hit the rock. He patted at it; the rope had gone. He tugged at the binding on his pouch and pulled it from his belt.

From his pouch, he withdrew a rotting piece of beastmeat.

Gulbash held the meat up before disbelieving eyes as the troll’s huge hand descended. Drool ran from the monster’s mouth, glistening on its belly.

‘Runtgi–’ he wailed. His cry was cut off as the fist closed, crushing him.

Runtgit watched as the troll stuffed the corpse of Gulbash into his mouth. Chewing, it ambled off after its fellows towards the smell of blood. Shouts came from where the wagons were concealed as goblins used long prods to guide the trolls into their cages. That was the plan, and Runtgit could hear nothing that made him think Kruggler’s boys had got it wrong.

‘Poor old Gulbash,’ Runtgit said. He flipped his hood back and pulled his helmet off. He clasped it to his chest and dropped his head. ‘What will the Griff do now?’

The goblins on top of the rock with him looked to one another as Runtgit laughed fit to burst.

‘Six weeks later, me and Kruggler’s mob were making our way up into the mountains. They was scared, them outside gobboes, scared of da beasts and da cold and da wet. How I laughed! ‘Who’s a scaredy now?’ I’d say, and dey’d look at every rock like an army of stunties was ready to leap out and get ’em.’ Skarsnik sniffed. ‘Every greeny is scared of sumfink, and dem outside boys ain’t no different. Still, we needed to find a way in, a way dat wasn’t watched too much. I fought and I fought, and I fought some more. Go down the stunty chimney? Too narrer. Come in through da ways I got out all dem months back? Well!’ He waved a finger in the air. ‘I had no idea where dat was, did I, or how I could swim up a river, or climb up dat place I fell down, or get me trolls and wulfies up if I could find it, and den dere was da fing in da dark… Nah. I couldn’t go in da way I came out. Wasn’t feesibul, was it?’ he said. I was impressed still with his grasp of our Reik’s tongue. Surely he had omitted some detail as to how he had learned it. I bore the words of Brangar in mind, that I could not trust anything this greenskin said, despite his charisma.

‘So,’ said the green king. ‘I figured we could do it one way and one way only. I only had a zogging army wiv me, didn’t I? S’obvious. I had to come through the front door.’

Skarsnik began to detail his long travails in reaching the old dwarf city, at whose heart the grand doors to the undercity of Karak Eight Peaks were situated, the doors I could see from the throne dais. A tribe of mountain goblins, kin to the Griff Makiki’s kind, assailed them, running above them on mountain ledges, peppering them with arrow fire. He lost many of the plains goblins this way, for a wolf is of little use in assailing an archer on top of a cliff. He rooted out their villages and beat them, his trolls wreaking carnage. How he controlled these idiot monsters is beyond my comprehension. What little I know of trolls suggests communication with them is impossible, as they possess no speech of their own. And yet the greenskins manage. When I asked of this, Skarsnik gave me one of those looks, one of the ones he reserved for unintelligence in his lieutenants, and went on with his tale.

Skarsnik explained that as a greenskin grows in power, so his power grows. A few minor clans and tribes of goblins had drifted to his banner as the caravan of Makiki struggled on upwards through the mountains, simply by dint of them being there. The way Skarsnik told it to me, any large agglomeration of greenskins will attract others to it. Their kind respects strength, and only a strong leader can keep a large tribe of them together. If there are victories, this process accelerates. So it was after Skarsnik’s victory over the mountain goblins. His original group of a hundred or so goblin warriors swelled until it was three hundred and more strong, twice the size of the Backstairs Boys. Several opportunistic bands of orcs from the Broken Tooth tribe attached themselves to his force – only weeks before Runtgit’s goblins were forced to skulk by their territory, ever-watchful of their patrols. They took a treacherous, little used route to avoid Mad Dog Pass and the orcish holdings of Black Crag and their warleader, Gorfang Rotgut. At the time of Runtgit, or should I say Skarsnik’s, arrival at his home, a small band of orcs made their home in the ruins of the city, mostly outcasts from Rotgut’s Red Fangs tribe. These were swept aside, their jeers turning to howls of outrage as the goblin army smashed their defences. Their survivors pledged allegiance to the rising goblin leader. Or they did, once Runtgit had bested their last remaining boss in single combat.

If this seems unlikely, this victory over an orc by a goblin, then please forgive me. I do not know myself whether to trust all of this story I recount to you. Skarsnik was certainly of an imposing size, and his underlings seemed afraid of him. Greenskins, lest we forget, respect strength at arms above all else. But I forget a detail, as Skarsnik himself forgot when initially telling me his story, and the telling of this may lend credence to his claims of expertise in combat.

‘If I may, my lord, and I do not wish to interrupt your reminiscences, but perhaps you could tell me what became of the Great Grizzler-Griff Makiki?’ I admit I myself was curious. Initially I had wished to appear as if I were doing a thorough job, now I wanted to know for the sake of knowing. It may have been that the story’s telling blocked out the horrors all around me, the glimmering red eyes, the stench, the sharp teeth and rusted weapons, the pain in my sick stomach. I still wanted to know.

‘Wot? Him. Oh yeah.’ Skarsnik scratched himself under the armpit, and picked up a goblet. This was not the fine dwarf drinking vessel of the day before, but a goblin skull polished white with use, mounted on an iron stem. ‘Er, yeah, I suppose dat is important, ain’t it? He was a Griff after all, except he wasn’t when I finished wiv him, oh no. He was nuffink then.’

Thatch burned. Runtgit leaned on his sickle-moon sword, making no attempt to wipe the blood from it. He panted lightly, the chief of the Lazy Claw goblins in two unequal parts in front of him. The corpse was poorly clad and free of jewellery. He had been scrawny for a chief, armed only with a club and armoured in bark studded with bits of metal. Kruggler led the round-up, his wolf boys hunting down fleeing Lazy Claws and prodding them towards the slave lines.

This wasn’t right. The Griff was doing it all wrong. Greenskins were supposed to submit to the chiefs that conquered them, swelling the tribe of the victor and building steadily to the start of a new Waaagh!, a green tide that would sweep aside the armies of other nations, and trample their cities into the dust.

Runtgit’s eyes gleamed at the thought of it, of the fame and glory. His dreams had exceeded mere revenge by now, and his plans were growing ever bolder. The most famous heroes of the greenskins are remembered because of their deeds. He watched the scrawny Lazy Claws whipped crying into lines. No one would remember the Great Grizzler-Griff Makiki; petty slave deals and raiding for scrap was a runt’s game. Runtgit snarled and spat into the dirt.

‘Boss!’ said Kruggler. The goblin, once so antagonistic to Runtgit, had become his trusted right hand. ‘All these weaklings are lined up.’

‘It’s a poor effort, Krugs,’ said Runtgit. He shifted his moon sword over his shoulders and slung his hands over its grip and blade, letting the weapon take their weight. ‘When was the last Waaagh! in the Badlands, Kruggler?’

Kruggler shrugged. ‘A whiles back, it’s always orcses that starts it, and they don’t ever come to much. Last big one round here was Da River Boyz, but that got bashed up before it got as far as the Iron Rock.’

‘Grom,’ said Runtgit firmly. ‘Grom started his Waaagh! here, didn’t he?’

‘Oh yeah, boss, but that was like…’ Kruggler counted on his fingers. He looked at them perplexed once he got past the fourth. ‘Ooooh, like loads of years ago.’

Runtgit nodded.

‘Thinking of having your own Waaagh!, boss?’ said Kruggler mockingly.

Runtgit shot him a black look. The smile fell off Kruggler’s face.

‘Sorry, boss.’

Runtgit though a moment. ‘Tell these runts, any of them want to fight for me, they can join up with us. Give them weapons and a job.’

‘Boss!’

‘It’s the way it should be, Krugs.’

‘But–’

‘Yeah, I know what Makiki will say, I’ll handle him.’ There was a crash of tumbling stones as the trolls pushed over the chief’s house. They sat down amid the wreckage, chewing placidly on beams. ‘And get them trolls back in their cages. There’s zog all to steal in this place, there’ll be a lot less if they eat what there is.’ Full of irritation, Runtgit stalked away, swinging his sword at the bloodstained grass.

Makiki had grown grosser by far since Runtgit had arrived. No longer obliged to do much of anything except eat and give orders, his girth had expanded considerably.

‘What are you doing, Runtgit? Giving spears to beaten runts?’ Makiki scoffed.

‘It’s not right, boss. How we ever going to be powerful and strong if we’s always selling us beaten boys off?’

Makiki sneered and thumped his throne arm. ‘Is that what this is about? Listen, Runtgit, we’re not having no Waaagh! There’s orcses north all about, a hundred different tribes of gobbo all around. We get ideas, we get pounded. Simple as. Best to be smart and trade.’

‘It’s not what Grom would have done,’ said Runtgit.

‘You ain’t Grom the Paunch, cave runt! You’re Niblet, remember?’ Makiki laughed, and looked around at his other followers. None joined in. Makiki scowled. ‘You’ve been good for me tribe, Runtgit. Real good, but I’m going to have to put you down. Kruggler!’

Kruggler didn’t move.

‘Snarkit!’

Nor did Snarkit. Makiki called name after name. Goblins stood stock still, and most looked to Runtgit. The others looked unsure, or stared at their feet.

Snarkit spoke. ‘I don’t like Runtgit, never have, never will, but he’s a good boss. You want him gone, you gotta do it yourself.’

Makiki growled and looked about the room. ‘Like that, is it? All right then. Pit fight.’

The whisper went around the room. The atmosphere was tense, but excitement quivered across it.

Makiki stood. He towered over Runtgit. He was not as tall as Gur had been, but he had much more mass. Strong muscles moved under flab.

‘You gonna fight me, Runtgit? Or are you going to do me like you did old Gur?’

‘Oh no,’ said Runtgit. ‘We’re going to do this proper like.’

Makiki clapped his greasy hands together. Runtgit turned away as the fat chief started to shout orders to the boss goblins. ‘And make sure the pit is dug nice and deep! I don’t want this little git climbin–’

Runtgit hopped into the air, putting his entire weight into a double-handed swing with his sickle sword. The moon-shaped blade at the end of the weapon whistled and took Makiki in the throat.

The Griff’s proclamation ended in a choke. He grabbed with both hands at his multiple chins. Green skin parted, revealing beads of yellow fat. Blood welled up between the Griff’s fingers. It became a torrent, jetting from his hands.

Makiki the Great Grizzler-Griff fell forward like a felled tree. When he hit the deck, the entire tent-wagon rocked. Snotlings looked up from their play. Tentatively at first, they clambered onto the corpse, mewling and poking. ‘Boss! Boss! Boss!’ they said, the only word most of them could manage. One by one they stopped their crying. They gave the body of the Griff an experimental sniff. One of them nibbled, gently at first, then it started tearing at the flabby green flesh. Others joined it in feasting on the body of their master. Their confusion turned to savagery as the scent of raw meat drove them wild.

Runtgit watched in disinterest as Makiki was devoured by his pets.

‘Boss?’ said Kruggler.

‘Don’t want no pit fight. Changed my mind,’ said Runtgit. He shrugged. ‘There’s been a change. I’m in charge. Any objections?’ He hefted his black iron weapon and waved it menacingly. The goblins shook their heads. Some did it hastily, in fear, others with slow admiration. But all shook their heads. ‘Good,’ said Runtgit. ‘Kruggler, get the boys together, we’re going into the mountains.’

There were squeaks and mutterings from all present. None of the goblins moved to challenge their new leader.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Runtgit. ‘There’ll be lots of gold. Lots of rich pickings, and then you lot can come home. You get me?’

‘We get you, boss,’ said Kruggler. ‘We get you.’

‘Night goblins is fast. We is clever, we is quick. Da Griff was fat and slow, but he was strong and cunnin’. Why should I fight him in da pit? Mork likes cunnin’, and I is cunnin’, I is da blessed of Mork, I is. Me! Yes, you surprised?

‘I seen him, you know? I seen him. The second time he talked to me, I was out dere on the plains. I was all drunk one night, and da stars swam and went all green. And this big orc made of stars, he said, “You!” – ’e shouts lots. “You! Little greeny! Go home! Go home and be da biggest and bestest gobbo since Grom da Paunch flattened da pansies! Go on! Go on home now!” You might fink dat’s nonsense, but…’ Skarsnik held his hands palm up and looked around at the vast dwarf hall and the goblintown it contained. ‘But it ain’t, oh it ain’t!’

‘It ain’t!’ shouted a voice from the tent. Duffskul was another goblin who could speak the tongue of men. It was reinforced in my mind how little we know of these creatures. ‘He’s da chosen of Mork. And Gork! Yes he is!’

‘Shut up, Duffskul!’ said Skarsnik. ‘I left Snarkit in charge of da caravan. No point wasting it, right? Good money from dat, and I was gonna need dat. But da Griff’s palace, I burned that right up, with the snotties in and all! You should have heard the little zoggers squeal as they roasted… We had snottie kebabs and danced around the fire. Difficult making a snottie kebab, dey climb off da stick, but I is something of an expert…’ A misty look of nostalgia came over the goblin and he trailed away, heading off into the private world of memory. He shook it off. ‘Right, where was I?’

He scratched under his hood. ‘Killed da Griff, burneded da Griff, came up through da mountains, killed dose runts, killed dem orcs.’ He lapsed into muttering. ‘Ah! Dat’s right. The gates of pillar city. After I’d beat dem orcs well good, and dere boss, I got to da gates, the great gates wot have never ever been shut, not in faaaarsands of years! Not since we gobboes drove the stunties out wiv our spears and steel. No sir, never shut! I was gonna lead Kruggler’s crew and da rest down into the underground, bash up who got in me way, and go see Dungstrangler. He’s been tribe chief for so long I don’t even fink dere was another chief before him. Wiv an army, he’d have to take me back, right? And he’d have to make me a boss. That was me plan. And then I could kill Snotruk, if he was still alive. A good plan, dose big halls are big enough for a proper battler, no worries! So I got dere, and there was a little problem.’ He held his forefinger above his thumb to demonstrate the tiny nature of said problem.

‘And what was that, my lord?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ said Skarsnik with a big sigh. ‘Dose big gates, dem ones what have not been shut up for a long long time?

‘Dey was shut, wasn’t dey?’

‘This ain’t supposed to be like dis!’ said Runtgit. He ran his hands over the carved stone doors. Rubble was piled where the doors had been set when he had left – open, as they had been for all time. The impossible had happened, and the doors had been pulled closed, fan-shaped scrape marks and powdered stone marring the floor from their movement. The doors were big as mountains themselves, the stern faces of dwarfs glaring out over the surface city. Someone had repaired the mechanisms that shut them. He scratched his chin. Who? It could have been goblins. They weren’t too stupid to achieve such a feat, but why would they bother? And where were the goblin engineers’ improvements? (In my time under the mountain, I saw many such altered devices. These enhancements were invariably of lower quality than the original work, and hampered the function of whatever they were attached to rather than improved it.) He stood there for a few moments, thinking about the weird machines he’d seen in the deepest depths of the mountains, at the limits of the old dwarf delvings, the machines in the caverns of the ratmen.

He looked around. ‘Oi! You!’ He pointed a claw at an orc at the bottom of the stair leading to the gates. The orc looked left and right at its fellows, then pointed doubtfully at himself. ‘’Ow long this been shut then?’ He strode down the steps.

‘I dunno,’ shrugged the orc with a voice wherein dwelt the very essence of surliness. ‘Been like that since we came and set up camp.’

‘Well,’ said Runtgit impatiently. ‘How long is that?’

‘Er, lots of nights?’ ventured the orc. He displayed his annoyance at being spoken to like that by a goblin plainly, but he was wary nevertheless. Runtgit was large now, and he had killed the orc’s boss.

‘You see any gobboes around?’

‘Oh nah,’ said the orc. ‘Just the rat-things, scurryin’ about, always busy. They taste horrible. Not like a nice bit of goblin.’

‘Right,’ said Runtgit.

‘What is it, boss?’ said Kruggler. The goblins were looking warily around the silent dwarf surface city, jumping at their own shadows. Runtgit had to act fast, or his little army would break up. The trolls would keep them here for a while, lending the goblins courage by their presence, but at the end of all things, goblins are only goblins.

‘Things have changed around here,’ Runtgit thought aloud. ‘But if what I think has happened has happened, it’ll be good for us. If there are rat-things in the upper levels, then we can kill ’em all good and be friends with the warboss here. Savvy?’

Kruggler nodded. ‘And then we gets our stunty gold?’

‘And as much rat steak as you can eat, Krugs.’

‘How’s we gonna get in then?’ said Kruggler. He looked up at the gates of Karak Eight Peaks. Runtgit could tell he was frightened by their scale. There was nothing like this on the plains, just primitive human ruins.

‘Don’t worry, Krugs, it’s just stone and that,’ said Runtgit. ‘I got to go in. Best if I go meself, I knows the way.’ And he didn’t want to reveal the secret to the plains goblins. ‘I go talk to the big chief, and then we can see if we can sort out a deal.’

‘Are you sure, boss?’

‘Eh!’ He threw his arms wide and slapped his chest. ‘I’ll be okay. I’m a boss now! Any gobbo bothers me and I’ll kill him dead.’ Runtgit swished his sword through the air. ‘Make camp. I’ll be back before the sun is up.’

‘Yes boss.’

Runtgit waited until the goblins were bedded in well, holed up in an old dwarf building in an elevated position with clear views. He told them to steer clear of the citadel. Too obvious, he said, but the orcs did not listen and said they had been camping near there anyway, and what was he going to do about it? Runtgit left them to it. If a crowd of orcs wished to die to warn his other servants of impending peril, then that was fine with him.

There were many ways into the lower levels, but only one Runtgit dared try. If the skaven truly had occupied the levels this close to the surface, there was no telling what would be waiting at the bottom. Besides, not all goblins in the ruins recognised the overlordship of Ibrit, and to get home, he would have to traverse many territories.

The old ventilation chimney, that had never been found by anyone else, not even after he had been caught and accused of being a thieving git. It would take him right into the heart of the Backstairs Boys’ mean little fiefdom, which could be good, or bad. If Duffskul was still alive, he might have a chance.

He made sure the goblins blocked and guarded the ways down into the undercity from the dwarf building. When he was sure no one was watching him, he set off up the mountain to the shaft.

Wandering on his own through the moonlit ruins brought back memories of his runthood in the mountains, and he found himself humming an old squig hunting air as left the edges of the surface buildings. He picked his way through broken cliff dwellings towards the steep mountainside. Once there, he sheathed his sword, spat on his hands, and began to climb.

The moons were high by the time he made it to the shaft. It was surprisingly small, he having grown so mighty since his exile. He still fit, his mail scraping on the chimney walls as he made it down and down to the depths. His limbs, grown large on power, good meat, and war, were barely aching by the time he made it to the bottom. He pulled himself with trouble through the crack in the wall. Cautiously, he walked around the spur of flowstone hiding the crack from the mushroom cave.

There was nobody there. The air was heavy, as if it had not been disturbed for a long time. Mushrooms grew wild. They had not been harvested, the older ones left to die and rot after their sporing. No one had been there in months.

All the mushroom caves were like that. By the time he made it to the way up from the caverns to the runtcave, he was worried as to what he might find. Perhaps the skaven had wiped out the Backstairs Boys to a goblin? He readied himself for the fight of his life.

He emerged out of the complex of mushroom caverns into the back of the runtcave.

Runtgit heaved a sigh of relief. Sleeping runts lay on the floor, although they were thin and small and few in number. He picked his way through them.

He crept up the stairs and pulled his sword. The runtboy watching over the runts was asleep. He awoke with a sword blade at his neck.

‘Oi!’ said Runtgit. ‘I need to see the boss. And then I need to see Ibrit Dungstrangler.’

The runtboy, a goblin Runtgit was not familiar with, gaped helplessly.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Runtgit, and ran him through.

He went up the stairs. A circle of goblins played dice around a fire on the landing. Many others slept. There were a lot fewer Backstairs Boys than there used to be.

‘Bit lazy, all this sleeping, ain’t it?’ said Runtgit. ‘It’s night-time you know, you’s lot should all be working.’

The dicing goblins, all Little Big ’Uns, looked up at Runtgit and leapt to their feet. He was pleased to see he was bigger than them all.

‘Who is this boss?’ said one.

A second peered hard at him. ‘That ain’t no boss! I recognise him!’

‘I need to speak to your boss,’ said Runtgit. ‘I need to see Chief Ibrit.’

‘You ain’t seeing no one, thieving git!’

‘Oh yeah,’ said a third. ‘It’s Runtgit. Hello, Runtgit.’

‘Shut up you!’ said a fourth. ‘Runtgit’s dead. Can’t be Runtgit.’

‘Looks like Runtgit,’ said the first.

‘He’s supposed to be dead,’ said the fourth doubtfully.

‘Big, isn’t he?’ said the third.

They thrust their weapons at him, trying to herd him towards the wall. Runtgit batted them aside with his sword. ‘That’s pathetic,’ he snarled. ‘Really pathetic, you the best the Backstairs lot have got?’

‘Ooh, he’s a feisty sort!’ cackled one.

‘I recognise that sneer! It is Runtgit! Come on youse lot! Kill him, kill him dead! Let’s take his body to the boss!’ said the first.

Runtgit rolled his eyes. He moved swiftly under their blows, dodged a spear thrust, parried a sword and decapitated the most talkative goblin. By now, the rest of the landing was stirring, sleepy goblins groping for their weapons.

‘Gork’s teeth! I don’t want to fight you boys,’ said Runtgit. ‘Can’t we be friends?’

‘There’s no being friendly with a thieving git like you!’ said one. The Little Big ’Uns pressed him hard. He was forced to kill another, then another. The other goblins, seeing their biggest and best so casually despatched, kept their distance.

Runtgit had the last Little Big ’Un under his boot, sword at his throat, when a voice called out.

‘Oi! Stop!’

Runtgit looked up the stair. A huddle of night goblins were at the top, bows creaking as they trained their arrows upon him. A bulky figure stood in the middle, hands on his hips, boss hood proud on his head.

Runtgit let his sword point droop to the floor.

‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Runt, come back all big and bosslike. I wonder what he wants, boys? Things have changed around here, Runt, things have changed a lot.’

The boss of the Backstairs Boys marched down the steps onto the main landing. Half his face was mangled, his skin rough with grit from the dwarfs’ destruction of the rockfall. But he was recognisable.

‘Snotruk!’ said Runtgit.

‘Yeah, Snotruk! I’m the boss round here, Runt. You’s going to be sorry you ever came back.’

Snotruk gave a curt nod. Arrows were pointed at Runtgit. A burly goblin came up. With an evil grin, he smashed a squig pacifier into Runtgit’s head. Blackness crowded out the world, Snotruk’s evil face pursuing him into a dreamless pit.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ENTER GOBBLA, STAGE CENTRE

Runtgit stood on wobbly legs. A lump the size of a squig throbbed on the side of his head. He prodded it carefully as he took in his surroundings. He was in an old quarry, the centre of which, where he stood, occupied entirely by a fighting pit ringed with incurved spikes, like the fighting pits Makiki had been so fond of, only much bigger. Mirrors of beaten bronze shone torchlight on Runtgit. Two gates had been chipped into the rock on either side of the pit, barred by iron gates. Goblins crowded around the arena on a shallow spiral road that led down from a gate at the top, running all the way around the quarry to and down to the floor. Around the road dwarf masons of old had pushed their barrows full of stone, but now the way from the arena floor was barred by a spiked fence festooned with skulls.

Runtgit had never been in the quarry before. The Backstairs Boys must have expanded their holdings in his absence.

‘Right then you lot!’ A big shape stood from a chair made of skaven skulls. He leaned against a fence of spiked wood and bone. Snotruk. He had grown big and muscled since Runtgit had departed; like him, he had gained the size of rank. Snotruk wore a tall, iron helm fashioned in the shape of a leering moon, a heavy fur draped over his shoulders. ‘This little runt here,’ he pointed down at Runtgit, ‘is a thieving git! He was supposed to get et, but the stunties spoiled the party.’ He turned and rattled a pole decorated with beard scalps. ‘They’s not going to spoil this one!’

A cheer went up from the Backstairs Boys. ‘Thieving git! Thieving git! Thieving git!’ they chanted. Their faces were hidden in their hoods, eyes glinting in the torchlight, mouths set in cruel grins. One stood on a rock, hands flapping and passing out stone chits, taking bets on how long the returned Runtgit would live. Another enterprising sort went around the goblins with a tray, from which he sold strips of roasted squig flesh and flasks of beer.

Snotruk held up his hands for silence. It came reluctantly. ‘Now then, Runtgit, you got anything to say?’

Runtgit licked his lips nervously. He looked around the stadium. Every face there was hostile, except Duffskul’s, and his expression was unreadable. He stood watching with the other boss goblins on Snotruk’s throne platform. He held his copper weirding staff, earthing the energy generated by the squealing mob. Green sparks flashed around his fingers and nose, but he was calm, smoking his pipe. His eyes were amused, as enigmatic as ever.

‘Er,’ said Runtgit. His eyes alighted on a stake of wood. It was placed insecurely, typical goblin-work, wedged into a hole with a pebble. If he could get that out…

Snotruk laughed. ‘Great last words, runt!’

‘Zog off, Snotruk!’ shouted Runtgit, waving his fist. ‘I’ll have you!’

Snotruk smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ Leather thongs creaked as he tightened his grip on the fence. ‘Release the squigs!’ he shouted.

Runtgit looked over to one of the gates barring the tunnels into the arena. Behind it, Fuggrak the squig herder and his boys cranked on handles. The portcullis went up, and Fuggrak’s lads jumped behind wooden shields studded with squig teeth and nails. The blare of squig horns sounded. The excited squeals of squigs answered.

Runtgit ran for the loose spike as the squigs came into the arena. Four of them, they emerged into the light slowly, sniffing the sand. Little eyes squinted. Chains rattled on their taloned feet, that hobbled to prevent them from leaping out of the arena.

Runtgit reached the spike, his throbbing head forgotten in the heat of danger. He went straight for the pebble, flipping it out with quick fingers. The spike drew out easily from the hole. He spun round with the stake held out before him as a hurtling body came through the air, clawed feet wheeling, teeth snapping. Runtgit ducked the clashing jaws and the cave beast impaled itself on his makeshift weapon. It deflated with a wet noise. He shook it off in time to get the stake across his body as another squig came in. He jammed the stake widthways across its mouth. The creature leaned hard into him, jaw straining. Its teeth scissored the wood, raising splinters, and Runtgit was glad his hands were outside its mouth.

Behind Runtgit, two goblins cheered.

‘I told you we’d get a good show, dint I? Good old Runtgit,’ said one.

‘Oh yeah, good old deadgit!’ said the other. They howled with laughter.

Runtgit jammed one end of his spike against the wall, extricated his hand and poked the squig hard in both eyes. Its eyeballs popped, and it keened most horribly as it reeled back, blinded.

Runtgit dragged his stake round and drove the point up through the squig’s gaping mouth, through the weaker part of its skull, and thence into its brain. It died instantly.

Two squigs remained. They barked and snapped at him. He circled, keeping his back to the arena wall. There was no way he could use the stunning trick Fuggrak had taught him, the squigs were alert, jaws wide. With several dozen treacherous greenskins behind him, this was not the ideal situation for the future warlord.

Runtgit noticed the squig on the left tensing for a leap. He set himself ready to receive it. The creature’s powerful legs sent it sailing into the air. Runtgit rolled back, using the blunt end of his stake to flip the squig through the air. It went hurtling into the stakes lining the pit. Goblins scattered in panic. The squig smacked straight into the stakes, where it snagged and died, corpse sagging like a rotting pumpkin.

‘One left, Snotruk!’ shouted Runtgit. ‘One left! I don’t need no stunties to spoil your party for you this time!’

‘Cocky!’ shouted Snotruk, but Runtgit was pleased to hear anger in Snotruk’s voice. Snotruk scrabbled in a bowl held by a lackey, pulling out a fat handful of beetle grubs. He chomped down. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, runt!’ Blue juice ran from his mouth and he bellowed, ‘Release Gobbla!’

A howl of delight went around the arena. The bookmaker goblin took a flurry of frantic bets.

The second gate clanked up behind Runtgit. He circled backwards, trying to get both the gate and the remaining squig in front of him.

In the dark of the gate, a single yellow eye flashed.

The biggest cave squig Runtgit had ever seen shuffled forward. Two of Fuggrak’s goblins poked at it with prods, swearing at it. It turned around with deadly speed. Savage jaws snapped shut. A prod’s metal head bounced off the arena wall as the great squig chomped down on the shaft. The goblin herder screamed and held blood-pumping wrists up in front of his eyes, his hands severed. Goblins laughed and pointed at the wounded herder and at Runtgit. Squigpipes wailed. Gobbla wailed back as the noise hurt his ears. More herders came and poked at the beast. Gradually, they goaded it into the arena.

Runtgit had never seen a giant cave squig before, one of those rare squigs that grow to enormous size in the deep, dark places of the world. Here was one in the flesh. A ridge of horns curved over its face, bony plates covered its back. Its legs were heavily muscled, as big each as one of the lesser squigs. If he was not so busy fending off the remaining lesser squig, Runtgit would have frozen with fright.

A wave of musty air washed over Runtgit, a blend of mould and animal hide. The giant squig snorted. A flap of cartilage bisecting the hole that passed for its nose flicked back and forth as it sniffed the air. The thing shuffled forward. One eye was milky white, a scar running across its face, deep and old and pink.

‘I’m glad he’s gonna eat ya!’ called Snotruk over the noise of the crowd. ‘But I’ll give you this, you do give a good show, Runtgit!’

Goblins hooted with laughter. Gobbla glared up at Snotruk and gave a dangerous rumble.

Runtgit stabbed at the other squig, his stake point catching in its rubbery flesh. It barked in annoyance. Using the stake as a lever, he strained and sent the animal staggering.

Gobbla charged.

Head down, it hopped clumsily across the arena’s sand, slowed by its chained ankles. The lesser squig tried to get at Runtgit, but Gobbla tossed its mighty head and batted it out of the way. Runtgit held his stake out. It was as puny and useless as a mushroom stalk in the face of such power, but he would not go down squeaking like a runt.

Gobbla’s massive jaws gaped wide.

‘Down in one! Down in one! Down in one!’ shouted the crowd.

Runtgit’s stick disappeared into the monster’s deep gullet. His world was suddenly roofed by a ceiling of red flesh fringed by teeth. The smell of half-digested goblin wafted up from the depths of its stomach.

‘Zog it,’ he said, and closed his eyes tight.

Nothing happened. He opened one eye, and then another.

The red cave squig retreated. The squig looked at him curiously. Its cadaverous nose came towards him, snorting blasts of hot breath at him. It snuffled once, twice, and then buried its nose in his robes, sniffing hard. Runtgit was buffeted backwards. ‘Hey! Hey!’ he said. The squig was making a peculiar whiffling noise. The shouts of the crowd trailed off into stunned silence.

‘What’s going on? What’s going on? Eat that runt! That’s an order!’ howled Snotruk. But he was powerless to command the squig.

Runtgit cautiously reached his hand up and scratched the squig between the horns. It wriggled with delight and mewled. A long tongue as big as Runtgit rasped up the goblin, covering him in slobber. He spluttered and laughed. The eye! Could this be the squigling he’d saved from Snotruk? He patted his new friend.

The other squig came bounding over to attack. Gobbla waddled around. He barked out a challenge. The other squig snapped back, and Gobbla chomped down on it hard, bursting it like a grape.

Runtgit laughed. ‘You’ll never get me, Snotruk!’ He walked over to where the prodder head lay on the sand. ‘I’ve been to the roots of the mountain! I’ve seen the things in the dark! I’ve been outside! I’ve seen the world! I’ve lived under the glare of the Evil Sun and the Bad Moon.’

‘Ooh!’ went the crowd.

‘Without a hat!’ added Runtgit.

A gasp went around the room. Runtgit jammed one of the prodder head’s points into the chain hobbling Gobbla and prised a link apart. He shook it and the chain came in two. ‘I’ve fought fatboys and humies and gobboes and orcses. I’ve taken a tribe and killed a Griff. I’ve spoken to Mork. And then I’ve come home.’ He pointed the prodder at Snotruk. ‘What makes a git like you think you can kill someone like me?’

Snotruk growled. He roared. He shouted, ‘Archers! Kill him, fill him full of arrers!’

Night Goblins with bows came to the edge of the pit, and drew back their strings.

They never let fly. Arrows from the other side of the pit flew into them, felling many. The rest fled. On the upper levels of the arena, Kruggler and a score of plains goblins shrugged off stolen robes. ‘Nobody touch my boss!’ he shouted.

Snotruk shouted. The cave was in uproar. Runtgit patted the giant squig on the flank and whispered in its ear. ‘Go get ’im, Gobbla.’ A good name, he thought.

The great squig stepped from foot to foot, trilling in delight at its freedom from the chains. It drew its legs under itself, and with one mighty leap hurtled upwards. It crashed into the spikes surrounding Snotruk’s throne, smashing them to flinders. The Little Big ’Uns attending Snotruk dropped their weapons and ran. Snotruk turned to flee, but a heavy foot stomped on the hem of his robe.

‘Wa–’ he began.

Gobbla gaped wide and bit him in half with a loud ‘Chomp!’

‘Now,’ said Runtgit. ‘Those were lousy last words.’

Duffskul looked from the great squig to Runtgit. Unlike the others, he had not scurried away. He took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Welcome home, Runt. I told you you was special. I keep saying so, don’t I?’

‘Kruggler and his lads had followed me, see, even though I told ’em not to,’ said Skarsnik. ‘And was I glad dat dey did! Den dere was Gobbla.’ He gave his pet an affectionate kick. ‘That’s another rule, right dere, humie,’ he said. ‘To be da boss, don’t matter how many rules you’ve got, you gotta be lucky too.’ He settled back into his throne, throwing his legs over one of the arms. ‘So, we had a little chat, me and da uvvers. “He’s been sent by Gork an’ Mork!” says Duffskul, and they lissens to him, drunk though he was, but mostlys they look at Gobbla, and dey look at Kruggler and ’is lads, and dey say “Okay den, you can be clan boss”.’ He stroked at his skull cup. ‘And when Gobbla crapped out Snotruk’s bones, I ’ad ’im made into dis luvverly cup. Nice innit?’ He held it up for me to see. I agreed, naturally. ‘Cheers, Snotruk!’ he said. He took a messy slurp of beer from the skull and he laughed. He became serious again.

‘But it wasn’t all happy and chirpy snotties in da mushroom patch, was it? No sirree. Fings had changed while I’d been gone away. Bad fings ’ad ’appened.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Fer a start, all dis,’ he waved his hand around the chamber, ‘all dis had fallen inta da hands of da ratboys. Dere’d never been nobody much up here anyhows, few orcses, mebbe, some ov da outside gobboes, some ov da scrawnier night boys. Too close to da surface to grow mushrooms, see, nowhere to hide, so not many of our lot wanted to live up here. Before I came along, they was happier skulking about in da darker places. ’Swhy until I got da power, lot of Crooked Moon boys were out eastaways in da tunnels outside da city. But den dem ratties got a bit uppity, dint dey? What was ours became deres, dey killed off any gobbo dat came up here, and so we killed off any ratboy we could lay our hands on. It was a terrible state of affairs! All fightin’ and bashin’ and dat. S’all good fun, but dem ratties had come up in numbers. Choked all da boys wiv green smoke and funny fings wot shot lightning. Dey was all scared. Ibrit Dungstrangler was cut off, way the other side of where da ratties had come up. Da lads tole me loads of boyz were carted off down dere.’ He pointed a talon down. ‘So, there was me. I had me little band of Backstairs Boys, Fuggrak’s squig wallopers, Kruggler’s gang, them Broken Toof orcses what had come into da mountains wiv me, da mountain gobboes, and da Black Crag outcast boys. About, ooh, I dunno.’ He scrunched his face up with effort. ‘Five hundred gobboes and squigs, an’ bart a hunnred orcses,’ he said.

He belched. ‘Dat’s better. Word got out dat dere was a new boss in town, an’ a couple of da other clans from da halls hooked up wiv me, including dem what had been given a pastin’ by da ratboys. Some of dem tried to fight me,’ he chuckled. ‘Gobbla ate a lot ov chiefs and clan bosses den. But I was bein’ clever. You might fink I’d go in dere, loads ov gobboes, and kick out da ratboys. But did I?’ He did not wait for a reply. ‘Course I didn’t! I knew dat wouldn’t work. I sent runners out to all da clans and tribes, even tried to get over to Ibrit, but I couldn’t. I had Kruggler and dis orcy name of Bograt keep the top all sorted. Ratses tried to come up a couple ov times, but dey got a bashin’. I had the entrances sealed up nice, all but a few, and we kept ’em in tight. Course, by that time Kruggler figured there weren’t much gold to be had, and dat, well, I was fibbin’. But he didn’t care no matter, dere was loads of fighting, and sides, he was a big boss in a big tribe now, and he was doing very well for hisself. Bograt wasn’t like da uvver orcs, he kept da orcs in line topside, took ’em down when dey was a-grumblin’ about followin’ orders from off of runts. I knew he was working for Gorfang, he was usin’ us night boys to keep da ratties out of da Black Crag, but right den I didn’t care at all, because dat suited me fine.’

He put the luckless Snotruk’s skull down and laced his fingers behind his head.

‘We was careful, though. I never told them runners much at all, so if they got caught by the ratties, then they couldn’t squeal. Any fights wiv da ratties were done by da different clans, here and there, tit and tat, so dey wouldn’t figure we were linkin’ up like. And anyways, we was still fighting each uvver. Da ratties fought dey had won, dat dey could take a whole load of greenie land away and we’d just go back ta normal, bashing each uvvers brains out in da teeny bits dey let us keep.’

He sat forward. ‘And dey was right, fer a while. But dey hadn’t counted on me, had dey? Da ratties pulled back dere armies a ways. Here an’ there they set up breedin’ pits – horrible places full of pink squirming fings.’ He gave a shudder. ‘S’gusting. But dey was too cautious to move up ’ere all nice. At da same time, dey fought we was beat, or maybe dey were fightin’ each uvver again, cause dey do that a lot. Anyways, when dere wasn’t dat many of dem, and dey was getting all,’ he tilted his head on one side, eyes shining as he searched for the right word, ‘com-play-sunt, yeah, when dey was dat, dat was when I made me move.’ He chuckled deep in his throat, a disturbing, gurgling sound, and spat upon the floor. ‘Dem ratties never knew what ’it ’em.’

CHAPTER TWENTY

I AM SKARSNIK!

Runtgit’s plans to rid the upper halls of the skaven were complex to say the least. A series of bluffs, betrayals, staged retreats and cunning counter-attacks. That was, in any case, the way Skarsnik described it to me, the veritable acme of strategic genius. Skarsnik was never modest, however, and my experience of battle begins and ends with the loss of the inn of Bechtersmoln. I was forced to take the proclamations of his brilliance on trust, as you are now as I repeat them, herr doktor.

Skarsnik, still then Runtgit, plotted long and hard. He would sit and listen to the insane dwarf Grunfin Goldfinder for inspiration, his new friend Gobbla never far from his side. I inferred that cave squigs are nigh on untrainable; their handlers must drive them before themselves with steel and noise, and those few that are ridden are uncontrollable.

Gobbla was different. A most placid beast, as I saw him, who hung off his master’s every word and gesture. But then appearances can be deceptive. Suffice it to say, Gobbla followed Runtgit everywhere, would obey his commands instantly, and proved highly effective in both intimidating and eating any opposition to the rising goblin’s schemes.

Conceiving his plans in the poky rooms off the Backstairs was one thing. Getting his minions to understand and accept them was another. He argued long and hard. There were several intelligent creatures in Skarsnik’s retinue; goblins, as we have seen, are possessed of a certain low cunning, but of wisdom akin to our mannish faculty, they have little. I do not doubt this held true back through all his days of power. There was always the air of frustration around the goblin king, an immense irritation at the idiocy of those that abetted him. How long must he have schemed? It was surely only half the time he strove to ensure those schemes were put into motion effectively.

Of key importance was that the skaven remain ignorant of his intentions. Ibrit Dungstrangler remained isolated outside the city, away from the part of the Crooked Moon tribe which dwelt within the city’s walls and principal deeps. Runtgit parleyed and talked with the other factions of greenskins in Karak Eight Peaks. Where that failed, he resorted to murder and well-timed accidents, removing those chiefs who opposed him until they had been replaced with others more amenable to his ideas. This did not take too long; he was a rising power, the chief of the Crooked Moons was absent, and goblins respect strength and wits above all else.

All the runners sent to speak with Chief Ibrit never returned. Lacking anyone to lead them, the shamans and the subchiefs, the bosses and the skargobboes, the runtbosses, the champions, the snivelling cave lords and the Little Big ’Uns became frantic for someone to take charge. Runtgit was only too happy to oblige.

All over Karak Eight Peaks, goblins moved. Goblin engineers led teams to prepare the wicked surprises Runtgit had in mind for the skaven. Kruggler was instructed to leave the surface in the hands of Bograt the orc. He, a large number of goblins and Runtgit’s trolls were despatched on a most secret mission, upon which they were gone many months. Goblin and night goblin alike muttered that Kruggler was probably dead, perceived as a threat to the power of the ex-runt and disposed of. Runtgit let them think this was so, for it served his purposes for them to think him so ruthless.

Time passed.

‘No, no, no!’ Runtgit smashed his fist down hard on the table. ‘You.’ He jabbed a hard claw into the chest of the boss of the Notched Axe Lads. ‘You and the rest of the pathetic gits you call your clan, go here!’

‘Sorry, boss,’ squeaked the Notched Axe Lads boss. Gobbla loomed over Runtgit’s shoulder. The other bosses in the room, night goblins, orcs and common goblins of the hardest sort, shuffled back as Runtgit’s giant pet gave them all a speculative look.

‘Zogging idiots!’ He swept the maps off the table onto the floor. ‘Is it so hard? You is supposed to be the brains of your clans! Clever, I wanted, but you is all idiots!’ Gobbla waddled around on the spot, following Runtgit’s glare, his leathery feet slapping on the floor. The great squig’s tongue lolled. The goblin chiefs could not help but recoil from it. ‘It’s easy! We hit them hard, we hit them everywhere! We hit them so hard they can’t squeak properly no more!’

‘Er, but boss,’ said Gruzzwazz, the Lord High Stab Boss of the Gut Shredders, ‘we haven’t got that many gobboes.’

‘Argh!’ Runtgit stamped his foot hard. ‘It’s not about how many gobboes you have, it’s about how you use them. Look.’ He stared at the table. ‘Where’s me maps?’

‘Here they are, boss,’ said Fikbat, Arch-High Gitflicker of the Cunning Cave Spiders. He quickly placed them back on the table and smoothed them flat. ‘There you go, all nice again.’

‘Fikbat,’ said Runtgit through gritted teeth.

‘Yes, boss?’

‘They is all upside down!’ he shouted.

‘It don’t matter,’ said Fikbat. ‘Er, does it?’

Runtgit groaned and pulled his hand down his long face. By the time it had got to the bottom of his pointy chin, his exasperation had turned into an unpleasant smile. ‘Right. Gobbla, eat Fikbat.’

The boss goblin was crunched up swiftly by Runtgit’s pet. ‘Now, any more bright ideas? Because…’

A goblin came running into the room. ‘Boss!’ he panted.

Runtgit scooped a spear off the table and hurled. It sailed through the air and hit the goblin in the shoulder. He staggered backwards into the chamber wall.

‘How am I supposed to concentrate with all these interruptions! Idiots asking questions, gobboes a-coming and a-going without so much as a by-your-leave! Gah!’

‘But, boss!’ said the goblin hoarsely, clutching at the spear. ‘It’s the stuff! We got some! The black sand! You said you wanted telling as soon as we got some!’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Runtgit. ‘Thanks.’ He relaxed and frowned at the goblin. ‘Go and have a sit down. You might want to get that spear looked at. Looks painful.’

‘Yes, boss,’ whimpered the messenger.

Two goblins came in bearing a wooden sled on ropes looped over their shoulders. They carried it gingerly and set it down with looks of utter fear on their faces. On top of it were three kegs, each marked with dwarf runes. Runtgit’s eyes glittered as he saw them. His tongue darted out, lizard-quick. ‘We got fifteen more outside, boss,’ said one of the goblins.

‘Righty-right,’ Runtgit said. ‘That’s it. Tomorrow then, tomorrow night we do it proper like. Three horn blasts, and we drive those furry gits back down whatever hole they came up out of. I’ve got someone to see, and once he’s gone, the rat-things will be in disarray!’ He cackled madly. No one joined in. He looked to his lieutenants. They looked back stupidly. ‘Ak! I mean the rat-things will be totally zogged!’ He cackled again. This time his lackeys joined in. Runtgit stopped suddenly and scowled. ‘Go on then! Positions! Positions! Got to be organised, haven’t we? Go on, get out!’

The head gobboes filed out, chattering excitedly to each other. They left Runtgit with Duffskul, who sat drinking on a stool in the corner. Runtgit looked to the old shaman. ‘I often think it would be easier if I could lead every zogging mob meself,’ he said. He grumbled as deep as an orc, but there was a hint of a gobliny whine to it, and Runtgit hated himself for that.

Duffskul took a large drink from his pot and smacked his lips together happily. ‘I said you’re special, Runt, but you ain’t that special.’

Runtgit went deep into the mountain. At the avenue of stone trees he bade his guards remain behind. They had to restrain Gobbla, who howled as his master set out on his own. The great squig’s cries followed him as he took one of the rat tunnels. Alone again, he headed out of goblin territory and into the uppermost levels of the skaven’s Under-Empire.

Half an hour later, he sauntered up to a guard post, emerging from the shadows like a ghost, thumbs hooked in his belt as if he had not a care in the world.

‘Wotcha,’ he said to the surprised guards. ‘Skreekrit about?’

Black-furred stormvermin came and clapped the goblin in irons. He was as big as they were now, and they held little fear for him. He had a plan, after all, and no plan is worthy if it does not include at least a few calculated risks. Gork and Mork would see to his safety.

Down they went, deep into the skaven’s realm. Their holdings had expanded since Runtgit was last there, the tunnels full of skaven in armour and shambling monsters as big as Runtgit’s trolls. Loud bangs and crackles, ear-piercing shrieks and other sounds generated by arcane machinery echoed around the tunnels, and everywhere the air had a sharp smell to it, overpowering the musty odour of the skaven themselves. There were more pipes this time. He looked at these metal snakes, and he thought of Duffskul’s smoking pipe, and then he thought of the strange green fog the other chieftains had told him of when he had returned, the one that had choked the goblins the night before the skaven came and took the upper halls. He resolved to do something about that.

They passed the guard tower Runtgit had been taken to last time, and went deeper, following a road as wide as the old dwarf highways, but chewed from the rock and supported by jerry-rigged buttresses of stone and mouldering wood.

They went off this and into a warren of tunnels. The chittering of the ratmen came from every direction, grating on Runtgit’s sensitive hearing. His clever eyes darted back and forward, taking in every detail.

He was pushed into a broad chamber, a hall. Alone upon a throne at one end sat Skreekrit. The skaven had grown fatter and sleeker since their last meeting, as Runtgit had grown larger and more powerful. They recognised each other just the same.

The stormvermin shoved the goblin to the floor. Runtgit went onto one knee, but stopped himself falling onto his nose.

‘All right there, Skreekrit me old mate. It’s been a long time.’

Skreekrit’s whiskers twitched. ‘Small one? Green-thing? Runtgit?’ He stood from his throne, and walked down the steps to the floor. ‘You-you? You so big-big!’

‘Things change, don’t they mate? I’ve had a few adventures, got me own boys now. But I’ve come back.’ He licked the points of his yellow teeth. ‘That’s when I see how much things can change. You have been busy.’

The skaven’s skin quivered. ‘Yes-yes. I now Great Chieftain. City of Pillars upper levels my command, given to me by Warlord Skruk Spittletail! We drive out green-things again! Always green-things, we drive out, they come back, they die, they come back. You great nuisance.’ He shook his head.

‘Yeah,’ said Runtgit. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘And what you? What-what you want, green-thing? I kill-kill you now, but...’ He shrugged. ‘You good to me in days gone by. You live. You speak, then maybe you die-die. We see.’

‘Well that’s it, Skreekrit, me old pal.’ Runtgit glanced behind himself at the skaven guards and stood up, a difficulty with his hands bound behind him. The guards moved forward. Skreekrit stopped them with a gesture of his hand. ‘I reckon we can do a deal again. To tell you the truth, there ain’t that many of my lot left. We just want to be left alone is all, grow our mushrooms in peace. You can have the city. We lost, fair and square. We learned our lesson. We won’t be no more bother.’

Skreekrit chirruped. ‘Since when goblin know what fair and square is?’

‘I could say the same thing about you ratties,’ said Runtgit. He dropped his voice to a whisper. His ears drooped and he hunched smaller. ‘Thing is mate, we’re done. I figured we could make a deal, sort it out, know what I mean? What do you say to peace? We’ll leave you alone and you needn’t worry about us no more.’

‘I no trust you!’

‘Yeah, that’s okay,’ said Runtgit. ‘So I figured I’d give you something as a token of my esteem, a little peace offering, if you like. I’ll bet you’ve not had any of that lovely glowy green rock, have you?’

Runtgit knew full well they had not. Parties of skaven had been scouring the upper levels, but none had found Runtgit’s wyrdstone in the old fort.

Skreekrit froze. The constant, jittery movements common to his race stilled. ‘Speak-speak,’ he said.

‘Well, there is a load of it left. No trading this time.’ Runtgit gave an apologetic chuckle. ‘Fact is, there isn’t enough of us left to bring it down to you!’ he said. ‘Nah, I’m just gonna give it to you. All of it. Spoils of victory. What do you say?’

Skreekrit tilted his head on one side. ‘You trick me.’

‘No trick mate! I’m all out of tricks. You’ve won, haven’t you? Didn’t I say so already?’

The skaven thought for a moment. ‘Very well. You show warriors. They tell me. You live, deal-deal?’

‘Listen, I only want to show you. No offence and that, but what if I showed one of your boys here,’ Runtgit dropped his voice to a hiss, ‘and they took it for themselves?’ He spoke normally again. ‘Oh, and, sorry about this, but if something happens to me, then another gobbo will be telling some other rattie big boss about it instead, you get it?’

Skreekrit squeaked in alarm then nodded. ‘Very well. I come-come. We go together.’

Skreekrit, a guard of stormvermin and Runtgit went up out of the skaven tunnels, away from the clamour of their infernal industries. They went out into the places once inhabited by goblin clans, all silent now. Runtgit had forbidden anyone but his spies from getting too close to the rat tunnels or their new forts and pits. He had his goblins hidden away, waiting for the big event. He kept his numbers hidden.

They left the goblins’ empty domain and headed upwards to the cave where Two Head had been born.

The remains of the dwarf fort were exactly as they had been left, the tunnel to the well bottom still hidden, the warpstone boulder glowing dimly within. Scattered lumps of it lay around the floor where they had been left by Runtgit’s goblins. The ladder he had put in was still in place, leading into the pit. Even Diglit’s skeleton remained, a sorry heap of bones bundled into a corner. No one had come here after he had gone.

Skreekrit stopped, a hand signal staying his men. ‘It smells! Much goblin! Goblin-stink, goblin-things!’

‘Calm down, mate,’ said Runtgit. ‘Of course it stinks of gobbo. I had dozens of boys mining this stuff for you, they were getting all hot and bothered, know what I mean?’

‘This fresh scent.’

‘That’s me, mate. I’m scared aren’t I? Prisoner of a powerful big chieftain like you.’

This seemed to pacify Skreekrit. His armour clicked as he made his way to the pit. ‘This-this not just warpstone, little green-thing.’

‘No?’ said Runtgit. He looked around the well bottom. The fort above must have been useful in commanding Mad Dog Pass in ages past, before it collapsed. He thought he might rebuild it when he was the lord of the mountains. ‘What is it then, if it’s not just glowy green rock?’

‘This history! This great artefact! Long time gone, skaven put warpstone in beard-things’ wells, make them weak, make them weak to kill-kill!’ He slammed his fist into his armoured palm. ‘Great cost, many warptokens.’

‘So you’ve been bringing it back when you found it again? I see.’

‘Most gone, long gone, but many wells here, many buried. Sometimes we find. This big beard-thing castle once, that why great warpstone piece, like here!’

Runtgit gave a long, impressed whistle. Which also happened to be the signal to the lads in the shadows. ‘Well, well, it’s all yours now, ain’t it?’

Black shapes with red eyes rose silently behind the stormvermin.

‘Yes-yes!’ Skreekrit looked up from the pit. ‘And now you die…’

‘Nah, mate,’ Runtgit shook his head and chuckled. ‘You got that part all wrong.’

The creak of a bow being drawn gave them away.

The stormvermin’s ears twitched, and they spun to face the noise.

‘What this!? Green-things? Treachery! Treachery!’ shouted a stormvermin. He opened his muzzle to say more, but a black-fletched arrow took him in the heart. Arrows whistled through the air as goblins smeared in stinking mushroom juice and nightblack squig oil jumped from their hiding places. With commendable rapidity, the stormvermin formed an armoured wall, protecting their lord. Skreekrit was in the centre of the chamber, the tunnel full of goblins; the stormvermin hacked at the horde of greenskins with their halberds, felling them with little effort, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. There was no way out. A stormvermin moved to grab at Runtgit, but the future king stepped aside as three arrows thunked into its back.

‘You trick me!’ said Skreekrit.

Runtgit shrugged. ‘Yeah, sorry. There’s a lot more gobboes than you think, see. You kill a thousand of us, there’s two thousand more, hiding in all the cracks and little places, like.’

‘There be one less-less! You die-die!’ Skreekrit stepped forward, his sword in his hand. Runtgit stepped towards him. His chains fell to the floor. He’d picked the locks hours ago.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. The knife he’d hidden under his deepest layer of rags was in his hand, and then it was in a gap in Skreekrit’s armour. The skaven’s beady eyes widened. His sword clanged to the floor. The chamber rang to the clash of weapons, the squeals of dying goblins, and the squeaks of injured ratmen. Skreekrit choked, his steel teeth bloodied. ‘I quite liked you, so I did,’ said Runtgit. He eased the dying skaven to the ground, twisting his knife as he did so. The blade scraped satisfyingly on Skreekrit’s armour and ribs. ‘We’re not so different, you and I. Good mates, yeah?’

Skreekrit’s eyes dulled. Runtgit looked at him thoughtfully and then cackled. He kneeled and rocked his knife across the throat of the ratman. He sawed through gristle, reached the neck vertebrae, just as he had done to Gronskwee at Skreekrit’s request. With a grunt, he parted the chieftain’s head from his shoulders. He turned around and held it aloft, shrieking in triumph.

The last stormvermin went down fighting. For ten of the great ratmen, Runtgit had lost thirty or more greenskins. Their small, crumpled bodies littered the chamber like black leaves.

He kicked his way through the dead and dying. Excited goblin faces crowded around him. He didn’t have much time.

Runtgit and his gang ran as fast as they could through the tunnels towards the throne room of Karak Eight Peaks. Here the principal encampment of skaven in the upper levels was to be found. It was vital they were destroyed as the remainder of his plan was put into action.

Two hours later, he arrived in a series of small caverns adjoining the Hall of a Thousand Pillars. These caves had once been part of the Great Western Halls, destroyed in the war that had broken out between the goblins and skaven when the hold had first been taken from the dwarfs. His goblins had painstakingly carved out a route between pockets of stale air, trapped under slabs of ceiling for centuries, carting tons of rubble away in secret. Passages propped up with crooked timber wound their way in. Torches cast feeble light and stained the roof with oily smoke.

Yellowed orc bones and rusted armour crunched underfoot as Runtgit marched into the cramped space. He wore his mail, iron boots, vambraces and a tall spiky chief’s hat. His moon sword was unsheathed. Gobbla waddled at his side. Two hundred pairs of red eyes followed his entrance.

‘You lot ready?’ shouted Runtgit. Hushed calls of assent and excitement replied. Duffskul pushed himself off a toppled statue’s head and drained his cup.

‘Boss,’ he whispered, giving the warboss a curt nod. He signalled to his helpers, who sat upon five bound and gagged goblins. The eyes of these restrained greenskins rolled. Muffled giggling came from each. By Duffskul were five metal balls, each nearly as big as a goblin, on long chains as thick as an orc’s wrist.

‘What we got then?’ said Runtgit. He marched up to the doorway that had once opened upon the Hall of a Thousand Pillars. There had been eight of these mighty portals, one for each of the peaks that ringed the city, mirroring the gates in the walls of the surface city above. Symbolic, I presume, of the dwarf kings’ mastery over the mountains or some such. Precious little good it did them. The western three doors were blocked when the halls they led to had been collapsed by the skaven during the fall of the dwarf empire. Blocked, until now.

Runtgit pressed his eye up against the hole his goblins had made in the rubble pile, a thin shield of tumbled stone hiding his men from the ratmen. He looked upon the skaven fort in the centre of the throne room.

The throne room had been the domain of the Grinning Shroom Kings, a pathetic collection of goblins whose grandiose title only served to underline the weakness of their clan. No night goblin wished to dwell so near the surface if he could help it. The skaven regarded it more highly. The ratmen had assembled a scrofulous camp in the middle of the hall, near to the throne dais of the dwarf kings. Makeshift walls of plundered masonry surrounded their tents. Scaffolding marked the beginnings of more permanent fortifications. These were sited upon the ruins of older towers and walls, thrown up and pulled down innumerable times during the skaven and goblins’ endless wars.

‘They haven’t got any idea that we’re here, boss!’ said the regiment’s officer, a crook-nosed goblin with the voice of a village idiot.

‘Cracking plan, boss!’ called one of the boys.

‘Yeah!’ called another. A chorus of approving goblin gibber set up.

‘Quiet youse!’ Runtgit said this harshly; he had to keep his reputation as a proper boss, although his black little heart swelled with pride. ‘Don’t want them to hear us, eh?’

Runtgit turned back to the hole and nodded with satisfaction. The ratmen were wary but quiet. He checked the wall of rubble in the doorway. Ropes had been attached to strategic boulders within the pile of rocks and tumbled masonry, waiting to be pulled loose.

Runtgit turned to a goblin at the mouth of the entrance tunnel and nodded. The goblin sketched a quick bow and ran off, hood and robe flapping.

Ten minutes later, a horn sounded, almost lost in the depths of the mountain. Runtgit waited with bated breath. Where were the others? He was about to cry his rage at his minions’ incompetence when another horn sounded, then another, and another, until all the ruins of Karak Eight Peaks rang to their long, mournful songs. Squigpipes and drums joined their call. The dwarf city reverberated to greenskin war music.

An explosion sounded far beneath Runtgit’s feet, so distant it was but the faintest of thunders. A second and third followed hard upon it as stolen dwarf blackpowder collapsed the uppermost of the skaven’s tunnels. Rock fragments pattered down. The goblins looked nervously to the fallen slabs roofing their chamber.

‘That’s the skaven tunnels sealed then, this lot won’t be seeing any help now, will they?’ Runtgit gloated. He pushed his eye to the hole. The skaven were agitated; ratmen ran to and fro. Their leader gave orders in their high, squeaking tongue. ‘Kruggler’s lot should be coming around about… Now.’

Frantic arms waved on the skaven walls. From where Runtgit was, they looked about the same size as normal rats. He entertained the notion of stomping them flat with his armoured boots, and the thought of it made him giggle.

The cracking pop of gunfire sounded. The skaven were rushing towards the other side of the camp. The drone of squigpipes sang out from the far side of the encampment. Bolt throwers, brought from Kruggler’s lot on the surface piece by piece, fired. Spear-sized arrows flew from the high galleries where the war machines were stationed. A skaven signalling with flares from atop a half-finished tower was hit square in the chest. It flew backwards, landing on a tent that promptly caught afire.

Runtgit was pleased with that. He had told Kruggler to target their order-givers, officers and chiefs.

In the dim light of the eternal glowstones, Runtgit made out the shapes of bounding squigs drawing in on the south-east of the fort. Kruggler’s most insane squig herders rode atop the enraged animals, jabbing them in their ears or hitting them with the flats of their swords to make them bounce faster. A couple of the squigs cleared the wall, disappearing within the skaven fort, where Runtgit hoped they were causing the largest amount of damage possible.

He nodded. ‘All right, boys, now.’

Goblins took up the ropes attached to the posts rammed hard into the rubble. They had had none of the fungus brew that ordinarily gave the night goblins the courage to go into battle; he had not allowed it. One misplaced titter or high-pitched fighting song and the entirety of his plans would be undone. But the goblins here were not cowering, nor did they shiver with fear. Their ears were erect with confidence. They looked to him with excitement on their ugly faces. He had done that, with his leadership and plans. He sneered. Those rats were as good as dead.

The goblins heaved and pulled. They made comical noises of effort, squealing and huffing. At first nothing happened, and Runtgit wondered if he should not have brought one of his trolls up into the cave. But then, with a sudden grinding, one of the biggest boulders shifted. The rope attached to the post underneath its slackened, sending goblins sprawling. The others pulled upon their lines, and the wall gave and came crashing inwards.

Runtgit did not wait for the dust to clear. ‘Through! Through! Through!’ he roared. His voice had deepened as he had grown, and it came out impressively orcy. Goblins practically elbowed each other out of the way to be through the gap before their fellows. The standard bearers of three goblin mobs, and their drum beaters and hornblowers, ran into position, marking rally points for the goblins. Quicker than he thought possible, Runtgit’s three mobs formed up. Two hoots from the horns, a clang of cymbals and gongs, and their spears dropped to form a hedge of spikes. Duffskul’s assistants carried their bound and struggling charges into the front ranks of the mobs, and they were ready.

Runtgit glanced north, to where the great gates to the throne room were locked against the outside, keeping his greenskins on the surface. His teams should be moving into position now, but if so they moved well, for he could not pick them out in the dark. He banished thoughts that they may have been caught. Too late to worry about that!

He looked upon his goblins. Not frightened, not weaselly, but ready for battle and brave, brave because of him.

Their shields locked loosely together. Upon each was the same symbol. Whether the goblin was a Red Hat, or a Shroom King, or a Cave Clobberer, or a Backstairs Boy, or any one of the dozens of clans and minor tribes that inhabited the ruined city, each one had repainted his shield. They ranged from crude to spectacular, these daubings, but each showed the same thing.

The Crooked Moon.

Runtgit took his place in the front of the biggest mob. Duffskul rolled up his sleeves and stood next to him. The wily old shaman nodded.

‘Ready, boss?’ he said.

‘Forward!’ shouted Runtgit.

The goblins jogged forward, covering the ground between the sealed west halls and the skaven fort at the centre of the throne room quickly. The skaven, not expecting an attack from this direction and assailed already to the south-east, slipped into a panic, but their officers held firm and whipped them into order. Half of the ratmen turned from the south-eastern corner where Fuggrak’s boys were herding angry squigs into their camp. Skaven wheeled and formed ranks to meet this new threat.

Strange lights played about the goblin standards. Sparks arced and crackled. Duffskul glanced up, he frowned. ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ he said. He made passes in front of his face with his hands, his eyes flared green, and the sparks died.

‘Skaven wizlevards,’ he said, panting with the run. ‘Shaman stuff.’

Skaven glaives dropped to meet the goblin charge.

‘Lads, halt!’ cried Runtgit. As smoothly as they had been drilled, the goblins came to a halt. Skaven looked at one another in puzzlement.

Duffskul’s assistants cut the ropes on the bound goblins. A hideous cackling set up as they were ungagged. The ends of the chains on the balls were pushed into their hands, and they were shoved from the goblin ranks. These goblins spun around and around, intoxicated by one of Duffskul’s more peculiar brews. One tangled himself in his chain and dropped to the floor crying with laughter, but the others, tugging on their balls, somehow managed to shift the enormous weights along. Dragging them in circles at first, the goblins moved faster and faster. The balls lifted into the air in a blur of iron, and the goblins wobbled towards the skaven lines.

‘Ah, fanatics,’ said Duffskul happily. ‘Don’t you love them? This is where it gets good.’

Gunshots ricocheted from the iron balls as the goblin fanatics picked up speed. Empowered by Duffskul’s potions, they moved impossibly fast. They impacted the skaven regiments in a whirl of motion. Bodies flew everywhere. Even at that distance, blood and scraps of fur rained down on Runtgit and his mobs.

‘Right!’ Runtgit said. ‘Charge!’ With the hooting of horns relaying his orders, the goblins surged forward. There was an almighty crash and a cacophony of squeaks as the two subterranean peoples met blade to blade.

Duffskul smashed a skaven down with his staff, and shot green spears from his fingers. They fizzed and popped among the skaven, frying them in their armour, boiling their eyes in their skulls.

‘I got to get me some of that!’ Runtgit said.

‘Shaman stuff, boss runt,’ said Duffskul.

Runtgit disembowelled a squeaking ratman. Another lost an arm as Runtgit’s moon sword swung round his head and down. Gobbla was a nightmare of flashing teeth, his gigantic bulk squashing as many ratmen as he swallowed. Every time one of the skaven came close to Runtgit, Gobbla would interpose himself, ending every threat to his master with a snap of his jaws. Skaven spears bounced from his rubbery hide, or pierced it only to snag and break. With Gobbla by his side, Runtgit felt invincible.

‘Boss! Boss! More ratties!’ shouted one of his men.

Runtgit looked to the north-east. Through one of the great arches, a column of skaven were marching down the slope. They came from the second of the ratmen’s main camps, ready to reinforce their brethren in the Hall of a Thousand Pillars.

Panic rippled through Runtgit’s warriors, but his bosses and chiefs slapped heads and pointed to Runtgit and Gobbla. They fought on harder, their faith in Runtgit urging them to supreme effort.

There was a booming noise, loud as thunder, a rattle of mighty chains and the whistle of steam engines. A crack appeared in the darkness, a line of light so bright it dazzled all the combatants on the field.

Runtgit’s teams had been successful, they had killed the skaven at the gates and taken control of the machines they had used to shut out the world.

The doors of Karak Eight Peaks were opening.

With a roar like an avalanche, the doors swung wide. Howling filled the vast hall along with the light. Kruggler’s boys came charging down the steps from the outside, and straight into the side of the skaven relief force.

It was just as Runtgit had planned. He let the fight surge on away from him, and clambered up onto a pile of rubble to get a better view.

The relief column of ratmen bowed as goblin chariots crashed into it. Even from here, Runtgit could see tiny bodies being thrown high into the air. Well ordered blocks of infantry became a seething mass of terrified fur. Skaven broke and fled, scrambling back up the slopes to the north-eastern halls. Kruggler’s wolf riders ran them down.

Confident his plan was working, Runtgit threw himself back into the fight. He shrieked. His goblins, sensing victory to be close, fought with all the ferocity of orcs. Runtgit cut down a skaven and raised his sword to cut again. Only at the last moment did he swerve it aside, nearly burying it in the face of Fuggrak’s boy, Rozzla.

‘Sorry,’ panted Runtgit. ‘I thought you was a ratboy.’

Rozzla grunted and slapped squigs away from Runtgit’s infantry mobs. So expeditious was he in this task that only a few were accidentally eaten.

The skaven were defeated. Knots of them fought grimly on, knowing there would be no quarter. Soon, they were all dead. Kruggler came galloping over on his wolf, coming to a sliding halt on the blood-wet cavern floor. Goblins pointed him out, muttering that he was not dead after all, although none had the faintest of ideas where the plains goblin had been all these weeks. ‘North-eastern lots are dead ’uns, I got some boys going over to the camp now, but I don’t think they’ll have any trouble,’ said Kruggler.

‘Well done, Kruggs, extra rat steaks for your lads. That was a good charge.’

Whispers went around the goblins, they turned into shouts, and then songs. Goblins did little dances, kicking pointy-toed shoes high. They had won! They had beaten the skaven, and it was all thanks to Runtgit!

‘All hail Runtgit!’ Fuggrak kicked squigs out of his way and grabbed the goblin boss’s arm and held it high. Goblins piled up a mound of dead skaven, and Runtgit was propelled to the top.

‘Runtgit! Runtgit! Runtgit!’ shouted the goblins, delirious with battle lust.

‘Nah, he’s not Runtgit,’ said Duffskul. His voice was a quiet croak, but such was the power in him the army fell silent. The old shaman walked up the corpse pile. ‘I said that weren’t his name. He needs a better name than that.’ Duffskul stroked his chin, then grabbed Runtgit’s other arm in a tight grip.

‘All hail the grim cutter! All hail the tough stabber! All hail Skarsnik!’

‘Skarsnik! Skarsnik! Skarsnik!’ bellowed the goblins.

The goblin who had been the Runt, and who was then Runtgit, shook off the hands of his fellows and held his arms high. ‘I am Skarsnik!’ he shouted.

For miles around, the caves echoed to goblin cheers and the roars of cave beasts.

As Skarsnik took his new name, all over Karak Eight Peaks skaven died. Goblins in skaven skins approached checkpoints, knifing surprised guards. New breeding chambers were doused in squig oil and set ablaze. Several towers collapsed simultaneously, more or less, as goblins pulled pit props from shafts undermining them. Everywhere, hordes of laughing goblins descended on the newly conquered skaven territories, hacking furred bodies to pieces in vicious tunnel fights. In every corner of the upper city, skaven were ambushed and destroyed.

Skarsnik’s genius had been to assault the skaven outposts together. The ratmen, he told me, are bold in numbers but on their own more cowardly than even a goblin. Isolated, unable to reinforce each other or bring their numbers to bear, the skaven panicked, and were cut down by the hundred.

This was the way of the city, it had been ever since the dwarfs were driven out hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Sometimes the goblins would hold more of the ruinous realm, sometimes the skaven. It essentially came to the same situation – the greenskins held the upper deeps, peaks and surface city, the skaven the lower levels. How much was a matter of degree, nothing more.

This situation, this perpetuation of the bloody status quo, as entertaining as it was, this was not of interest to Skarsnik.

Skarsnik intended to keep what he had won for good.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

IN A SMALL REVERSAL, IBRIT RETURNS

There was a clamour on the stairs and a shouting. Trumpets and drums sounded.

‘Ibrit’s coming back! Ibrit’s coming back!’ shouted Skarsnik’s top-stair sentry. His calls were silenced by a steel-clad fist.

Skarsnik and Duffskul were in the rooms near the prisoners, plotting to the accompaniment of tormented dwarf. They looked up from their new charts.

‘Here he comes,’ said Skarsnik.

‘Yep,’ said Duffskul. He cracked his knuckles, downed a pot of fungus ale, and put on his most crazed face.

‘Ibrit!’ shouted the guard at the door. ‘Urk!’ he said, as he was pushed over by a thick brown hand.

Ibrit Dungstrangler walked into the room. He was so big he had to bow his head to get through the entryway. When Skarsnik had been a runt, Ibrit had seemed to be a giant. Skarsnik was many times the size he had been then, and still Ibrit seemed huge.

The chief of the Crooked Moons stood at the top of the stairs, huge brown hands smeared with fresh dung hooked into the top of his belt. His robes were stained thereabouts with the filth he so loved to squash in his fists.

‘What is this,’ he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘about some runt come back and taking an orcy name and going round beating up the ratties, eh? Eh? Anyone going to answer me, perhaps?’

‘Er,’ said Skarsnik. ‘That’s me, boss.’ He stooped a little, ears flattening a fraction in submission, but not too much. He was a powerful boss in his right.

Perhaps here is a suitable moment to indulge in a brief discussion of Skarsnik’s new name. Goblins may take many names over the course of their lives. Many of them are bestowed upon them by their fellows; the greenskins are hatched from the earth, if they are to be believed, and possess no mothers or fathers to name them. The vast majority of these names are insulting – dung spittle, scumbloid sniffer, dead muncher, weak enemy, dead runt, stupid runt, thick runt – or any other concept that might humiliate and degrade the receiver (‘runt’ being a firm favourite). Once a goblin has garnered a measure of respect from their friends, he might choose his own name, and these will be of less offensive nature. A canny goblin will choose a name that makes him appear neither too weak – for to do so may mark him out as a potential meal, or too powerful – for that might make him a threat. To take a name such as Skarsnik… among our green friends, Skarsnik is a great name, a warlord’s name, its meaning akin to ‘tough cutter’ or ‘hard stabber’ in Reikspiel. An ambitious orc might take such a name as a challenge. He would be expected, and would expect, to fight to keep both it and his life.

For a goblin to take a name like that, a powerful name, an orcish name; well, no matter that he might have had it bestowed by his fellows, a name like that is a provocation to all other greenskins who hear it. The orcs of Black Crag certainly took it to be so, and so did Ibrit Dungstrangler, then chief of the Crooked Moons.

‘Go on then,’ said Ibrit. He walked into the room, filling it as full as one of Skarsnik’s trolls would.

‘Well, er, boss, y’see, I thought I’d get rid of the ratboys, take our lands back, leave the way open for you, so to speak.’

‘You certainly did that.’ Ibrit looked around the room and sniffed. ‘Bit pokey this place. Howsabout I make you top bigboss of the tribe? You can have the places you kicked the ratties out of, see if you can keep hold of them for me, all right?’

Skarsnik wrung his hands together and bobbed a servile bow. ‘Oooh, yes, boss, thank you, boss.’

Ibrit took another look around. He gave Gobbla, asleep in the corner, a long, hard stare. ‘Right then. You see you don’t get smart, all right? And we’ll get along famously.’ He spat on the floor. ‘Best be sharp. I’ve heard word of stunties around again, creeping about, nicking stuff they’ve got no rights to be having. I’ll be needing your boys I reckon, keep ’em out. This ain’t their place no more, but if they need a good smacking to remember that, then I’m only too happy to do it.’

‘Ooh, stunties, I hates stunties I do!’ gibbered Duffskul, a long rope of drool escaping from his lips.

‘Shut up, you. Everyone hates stunties. You’re crawling. What’s that?’ said Ibrit, pointing a dung-scented finger at Skarsnik’s charts.

‘Maps, boss.’

Ibrit shook his head and tutted, as if Skarsnik had suggested he would go into battle with a candied mushroom stalk rather than a sword. He drew in closer. The stench of dung was overpowering. ‘Not gobliny, not gobliny at all. Maps! Thinks he’s a stunty.’ The big goblin grinned, a nasty, humourless smirk full of sharp teeth and rancid holes where sharp teeth should have been. ‘That name too, that’s not a gobliny name. You go round with a name like that, a gobbo’s gonna think you think you’re an orc or something, that you got ideas above your station.’ Ibrit poked Skarsnik in the chest with his stinking forefinger to punctuate each word. ‘Have you got ideas above your station, “Skarsnik”?’

Duffskul’s mask of lunacy dropped a moment, revealing the true face of lunacy underneath. His real madness was a different madness, sharper and harder edged than the pantomime he gave the chief. Dangerous. Ibrit took an involuntary half-step back, ears twitching in his hood.

‘Mork gave him that name,’ said Duffskul.

The chief drew himself back up to his full height. ‘That’s as may be, shaman, but he’s going to have to watch it. Or I might think he’s got his eyes on me best boss hat. Have you, Skarsnik?’

‘What?’ said Skarsnik, all innocence.

‘You know, got your eyes on me best boss hat?’

‘Oh that, oh no,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Not at all.’

‘Good. Good.’ Ibrit cast one final look around and then left.

Outside the door, Ibrit said to his skargobbo boss. ‘He’s gotta go.’

Inside, Skarsnik said to Duffskul, ‘He’s gotta go.’

‘Oh yus,’ said Duffskul. Two kinds of crazy flitted across his face. Skarsnik gave up trying to decide which was real and which an act.

The following weeks and months were tense. Ibrit and Skarsnik constantly watched one another. Skarsnik, patient as a snake, did nothing. Ibrit acted. Traps were uncovered, assassins eaten by Gobbla, who by now had proven his worth as a bodyguard time and again. The two goblins maintained an air of civility appropriate to goblins, which is to say hardly civil at all. This is the way of the goblins. An orc might have demanded a fight, Skarsnik said to me, but goblins will dance around one another, looking for the most propitious moment for a good back-stabbing. Praises will be sung, vassals pledged, gifts given. Never mind that the praise song will have a set of less flattering alternative lyrics, or that the vassals come with back-stabbing daggers, or that gifts are dangerously faulty or outright poisonous. Let me warn you now, gentlemen, if a goblin is ever overly polite to you, which is to say at all, beware, for he is plotting your downfall as surely as the moons rise in the sky.

And then the dwarfs came back to reclaim their ancestral lands, and Skarsnik finally made his move on Chief Ibrit.

Skarsnik watched in disbelief as Ibrit had his goblins charge headlong into the line of dwarfs. The fanatics they’d sent in had done some damage, but not much. Three of them had collided with each other on the walls of the roadway, and two more picked off by gunfire. Two had got through, but Skarsnik had been amazed to see half the stunties the great balls had flattened pick themselves up off the floor and get back into line. The dwarfs were the most heavily armoured things he’d ever seen, and were holding the narrowest part of the cavern. It was the only way into the citadel’s underground portion, the dwarfs having blown, blocked or collapsed all the other entrances after they retook it.

‘What would you do, boss?’ asked Duffskul.

‘Well, I wouldn’t do that,’ said Skarsnik. Gobbla grumbled at his side. Behind him, the Backstairs Boys fidgeted, itching to get at their hated enemy. ‘I could go in the side, take them out, or try to creep up over that rock there and get them from behind. But that idiot Ibrit’s keeping me out of the fight, isn’t he? I bet you he’ll wait until Gruskin’s lot are all dead, then he’ll have me go for the front. It’s zogging stupid, I tells you.’

‘You’ve too much glory, boss,’ said Duffskul. ‘That’s part of it. He won’t listen to your good sense. You get too many victories under your belt and he’ll be dead for sure. You’re like a great big ball of dung, and he’s a little scumbloid, oh yus.’

‘Er, yeah, right. He’s an idiot,’ said Skarsnik. Ibrit had already tried to get Skarsnik killed off by throwing him hard at the front of the dwarfs in early skirmishes, but he had become such a fearsome fighter, and Gobbla was so dangerous, that he had won pretty much every encounter anyway. All except those he did not think he could win, at which points he had become mysteriously unavailable. ‘We’ll never get those stunties out of that castle this way! They’re not gonna come out where we can fight them nice and unfairly are they? I mean, they’ve already kicked Kruggs and the lads out of topside town. What is that zogger thinking? He should never have sent Bograt off back to Rotgut. Doesn’t he see he’s not going to get any favours off the orcs for that?’

‘Ibrit’s losing support from the clans, boss,’ said Duffskul. ‘Ever since he marched back in and took over. Yours is the name they whisper in awe, Ibrit they curse and spit. They blame him for letting the stunties back in.’

‘Yeah, well, if I’d still have been in charge, then that would not have happened, not ever. Nope.’

The old shaman sucked on his pipe. ‘I reckon it might be time, don’t you?’

‘He still thinks you’re on his side?’

Duffskul let out a long, squeaking fart. His eyes crossed. ‘Oh yus. I think. More or less.’

The last of the goblins ran away from the line of dwarfs. One of Ibrit’s bosses was waving a flag at Skarsnik, signalling that the Backstairs Boys should go in. Skarsnik did not fancy his chances there much and pretended not to notice. He kept his eyes locked on the dwarf regiments holding the tunnel. The old white beard, the one who had blasted his way into the Backstairs – Skarsnik was sure of it – stood at their centre, staff glowing.

‘I want that stick, Duffskul, I want it bad.’

‘Oh, a fine stick,’ said Duffskul. ‘I could do things with a stick like that, right proper and orcify it.’ He hawked up some phlegm and spat it onto the stone wall. He peered at it glistening there, as if it could tell him something. ‘But what about Ibrit?’

Skarsnik snarled. ‘Him first then, then get me that stick. Here’s what we’re going to do,’ said Skarsnik, and outlined his improbable plan.

‘Come quick, boss! Come quick!’ Duffskul capered and gurned, turning wheels that sent his hood flapping as he came into Ibrit’s throne room. Some of it was an act, but in truth a large part of it was not, for Duffskul was that day incredibly drunk.

‘Duffskul? Duffskul, ain’t it?’ Ibrit sat upon his throne of skaven skulls – skaven that Skarsnik had killed. He had moved his lair into the city, out of the mountain passages where the bulk of the Crooked Moons habitually dwelled. The city was full of goblins. He did not make his headquarters in the throne room, as Skarsnik would later, but in an out of the way hall. Grand in its way, but not the statement of power and bravado that sitting in the vulnerable throne room would be for the future king.

Ibrit’s cronies were everywhere, drinking and arguing as is the way of goblin chiefs. They looked up at the shaman’s noise, and went back to their own business. Duffskul was not worth their attention.

‘Yes, oh great chief! It is I, Duffskul! I have great news for you, and tidings, yeah, them too, oh yus!’

Ibrit sat back on his throne. He looked annoyed, as he always looked annoyed. It was hard to say whether Duffskul was responsible for his ill humour or not.

‘Spit it out then, or will a great load of mushrooms come out with your nonsense?’

Ibrit’s cronies laughed weakly. Their king was known for his bad jokes, and for his belief that he was the funniest goblin in the Worlds Edge Mountains. And, as he was prone to caving in the heads of those who disagreed with a squig pacifier, who would argue?

Duffskul looked around himself, eyes spinning. He beckoned to the king, and then drew closer himself. ‘A way, my lord, a way!’

‘A way for what, magic boy?’ Ibrit was bored, that much was clear. He kicked a snotling away from his throne with an iron-shod foot.

‘A way,’ Duffskul lowered his voice. ‘For you to be rid of Skarsnik.’

Ibrit sat upright, suddenly interested. ‘Oh yeah? Do tell.’

Ibrit and five of his hardest skargobboes followed Duffskul down a narrow stairway.

‘In there!’ hissed Duffskul from behind his hand. He was enjoying himself immensely.

‘What, in that storeroom?’ said Ibrit. His skargobboes scowled.

Through a square, unadorned archway came the sound of crashes and snuffling and shattered objects. The smell of pickled mushrooms and spilled beer wafted through the door. They were the sounds and smells of something large and hungry rootling without regard for the things it rootles through.

‘Yes!’ said Duffskul. ‘It’s Gobbla! He’s all alone, and he’s hungry. Skarsnik’s been too scared since you came back, see? He’s not been getting any ratses or stunties to gobble. Foolish Skarsnik! Oh!’ He held his hands to the air, beseeching the gods. ‘Now he has no protection!’ He grinned wickedly. ‘Or he won’t soon, will he, boss?’

‘So, what you’re saying is we go in there, and nobble Gobbla, and then we can get Skarsnik?’ said Ibrit. ‘Why don’t we just go and get Skarsnik now?’

‘Do you know where he is? Because I don’t, always up to something that one.’ Duffskul hiccupped and belched. Ibrit reeled from the shaman’s gases. ‘But he’s got to come back sometime, ain’t he? And when he does…’ Duffskul drew his finger across his throat. ‘Leastaways, if there’s no Gobbla, eh?’

Ibrit held a finger under his nose and inhaled deeply of its dungy smell. He nodded slowly. ‘You got a point there, magic boy, you certainly do.’

The skargobboes had ceased to leer and look mean and now looked decidedly worried instead. ‘I dunno, boss, that Gobbla’s a bit mean,’ said one of them.

‘Nah! He’s hopeless without Skarsnik to direct him, don’t you worry boys,’ said Duffskul.

Ibrit punched the skargobbo. ‘Shut it you, it’s just a squig! A stupid little squig! You’re skargobboes, ain’t ya?’

They nodded warily.

‘Good! I thought you was a bunch of snotlings, the way youse all shuffling about and looking at your feet. Get in there! Kill it dead! Go on!’ Ibrit cajoled.

Another goblin warboss might well have sent in his lackeys and claimed the credit for the deed, but that was not Ibrit’s way. He was brave, for a goblin, and liked to do his own dirty work, a sentiment that extended beyond squashing excrement for amusement. He was keen on stabbing foes.

The chief of the Crooked Moons rotated his shoulders, took his great axe from his back and went into the storeroom.

Duffskul peered in through the door. The snuffling stopped.

‘Er, boss, what’s that buzzing noise?’ said one of Ibrit’s bodyguards.

‘Sounds like… cave hornets?’ said another.

There was the sound of a large pot breaking. That would have been the pot with the cave hornet nest in it that Skarsnik had put there earlier. Screams followed.

There was a short war cry that ended with a squeal, and many more crashes. A fair amount of oaths were uttered. A skargobbo tried to flee the door, but something grabbed at his feet, flipping him onto his stomach, and dragged him into the store. His nails broke on the flagstones as he went. His eyes locked with Duffskul’s pleadingly.

A scream. The loud noise of gobbling. Another loud bang. A ball of flame bellied from the doorway. Squig oil, placed there, again earlier, by Skarsnik.

Gobbla skipped out from the store. A brawny arm hung from his mouth, its hand stained brown with drops-mess. Gobbla sucked up the arm, sniffed at the hand, made a noise of disgust and bit hard through the wrist.

Ibrit Dungstrangler’s hand dropped to the floor.

‘The chief of the Crooked Moon is no more!’ said Duffskul with great gravity. He tittered and burped and scratched Gobbla’s forehead.

‘I guess,’ said a voice in the shadows, ‘that means there’s a vacancy.’

Skarsnik stepped into the open from the storeroom opposite.

‘Oh yus, boss,’ said Duffskul. ‘That it does. That it does.’

When Skarsnik brought this up to the other chiefs and petty goblin princes of the city, not one of them had any objection to his taking Ibrit’s place. And nor did they complain when he insisted that they call him king. They were stupid compared to Skarsnik, but none of them were that stupid.

‘Right then,’ said the new king of Karak Eight Peaks. ‘Let’s sort those stunties out.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE WOES OF THE MOUNTAIN FOLK

Skarsnik grew tired after relating this part of his tale to me, and I grow weary in my turn. And yet I will tell you another story before we finish for the day, the story of the mountain folk, and their return to the halls of their ancestors.

Skarsnik dismissed me curtly that evening. He seemed preoccupied with something and had been prone to bouts of irritability all day. It may seem odd, but I did not feel in any real danger. The source of his annoyance lay elsewhere.

I was taken once more to the dungeons beneath the great throne hall. I was by now certain that these had been kitchens, large enough to prepare a feast for an entire throng of dwarfs. What devilishly schemed tortures were cooked up there I would rather not bring to mind, even though I am forced to by the caprice of memory, and therefore do so constantly.

I was seized by the most violent of stomach cramps upon my entry to my cells, and was forced to void my bowels in a corner of the room. My waste was a spray of liquid warmth. As I squatted, wretched, cold and stinking, I knew that I would not survive many more nights under the mountain. I lay down as far away as I could from my own excrement, and slept awhile.

Braknar, son of Brangar, was of a more talkative mind my second night in the dungeon, although his mood had taken a turn for the blacker. After some hours, I was awoken by his rough voice from across the way that separated our cells. There was no preamble to what he said. He merely began. Sat there, a boulder in the dark, only his words let me know that he was alive at all. He huddled over the other dwarf, another dark and massy shape, whom I took to be asleep.

He spoke in an odd manner, halfway between song and speech. I was too weak to move. I lay there helpless and listened to his dirge. As I fell under his singsong recount, his voice soon became all the world to me. In the dark, down there, one can so easily lose oneself, you see. I clung to that dwarf song, that hummed history, as a drowning man cleaves hard to a plank of wood, and gradually the clenching pains of my stomach receded.

This is what he sang.

‘Lord Belegar Ironhammer, son of Karegear, son of Molden-krag, of the line of Lunn, rightful king of Vala-Azrilungol, below and above, and all the lands for many leagues abouts, decreed seven years ago that he and his clan would leave his exile in Everpeak, the realm of the High King, and take back what was once his.

‘Many times have the dwarfs attempted to retake the city of the Eight Peaks. Every attempt has been a failure, every lord who set out upon the task slain or driven home in disgrace. My lord Belegar was not to be dissuaded. A dwarf’s mind, once set, is carved in stone.

‘In true words I say how it came to happen.

‘At the beginning, Belegar resolved to come here and take the treasures of his ancestors, and he would return home in triumph, and that would be that.

‘Long was the period of planning for that first expedition. Finances were raised and bargains struck between the hosts of the dwarf lords. Clans provided surety and arms. The kin of many a prince trod the Ungdrin in Belegar’s train, for the treasures of Vala-Azrilungol were beyond compare, and success was assured. Of this, Belegar gave many guarantees.

‘Belegar is a wise king. For many months before he set out, he employed the services of doughty rangers from all over the everlasting realm. Few are those brave enough to venture within the city of the Eight Peaks. Grunfin Goldfinder here was one.’

Braknar stopped a moment, and looked to his unmoving companion.

‘Grunfin was a son of Karak Norn. Drawn to the great lost holds as a beardling youth, there was little that Grunfin feared. Of all the songs that called to his heart, none sounded louder nor sweeter than that sung by the city of the Eight Peaks. He and his cousins drew ancestry from this place, and they could not resist its call, as I could not, as Lord Belegar could not. But Grunfin was braver than both I or my lord, a bold, courageous dwarf, a hero of our kind. Long before Belegar’s invitation, he had travelled the hallways of Vala-Azrilungol, above and below. From the peak of the citadel at the heart of the city, to the seventh deep, he charted the changes wrought upon our home by its vile occupiers. Every rockfall, every disrupted pathway, every foul skaven burrow or goblin lair he duly noted. He bore this information back time and again, slipping in and out of the hold like the very ghost of his ancestors.

‘Were it not for Grunfin, Belegar would never have dared to set his mind to the first expedition, and had he not, there would never have been the second expedition, and had there been no second expedition, Belegar would not now sit in the citadel as rightful king. It is to Grunfin we should offer our thanks. Without him, Vala-Azrilungol would remain in the hands of our enemies.

‘Grunfin entered the sole employ of Belegar. The oath was long and rightfully complicated, and sealed by consumption of the finest ales in the Everpeak. By dint of his courage and his skill, Grunfin marked many treasure chambers upon the ancient maps of Clan Lunn. The last we saw of him was in the fourteenth deep of Karaz-a-Karak, where he intimated to me and my lord that he had found the base of the stair that led from the Ungdrin to the lower part of the fifth deep of Vala-Azrilungol. Upon this thoroughfare, hidden in plain sight, was said to be a great store of weapons and crafts the like of which are rarely seen in these terrible times. He provided us a map, and left, his head held high, to mark more of the treasure houses of yore upon his charts for my lord’s useful strategies.’

In the dark, I discerned a heavy dwarf hand stroke the hair of the prone ranger.

‘Grunfin was not seen again, and we presumed him dead. We hoped it so, for the fates of dwarfs taken alive by the grobi are too terrible to contemplate. How were we to know that as we followed his map up from the Ungdrin, and blasted our way into the Stair of Undying Fire, that he had languished but yards from our treasure house? This I have learned from his ravings, that he was held for nigh upon a year by the greenskins in a chamber twenty pick-swings from the hidden arts of his ancestors. The torments inflicted upon him by the grobi were grave indeed, yet he never told them of the store. Perhaps it was the proximity of so much treasure that he could not hold that finally broke his mind, and not the torment. That would be more fitting, and I believe it so.

‘After we had breached the stair, with Grunfin’s maps we swept through the hold, often unseen, using ways hidden to the grobi and ratmen who squat within our home. Many treasures were ours again. Lord Belegar was pleased with our progress. The first and second deeps seemed barely infested by the spawn of Chaos or by orckind, the city above near-empty. Cradling the heirlooms of King Lunn in his arms, Belegar swore there and then that he would return, and in force. After three thousand years, he said, the time to come home had arrived.

‘In Everpeak a host assembled, three hundred dwarfs and more, glittering in war harness and bearing the finest weapons our craft can provide. No treasure hunting quest now, we set out to further the prime efforts of our kind: to take back what is ours and rebuild the glories of the everlasting realm. I and my clansmen, exiles of Vala-Azrilungol ourselves, stood amongst their number. I had ascended the Stair of Undying Fire in that first return, and now a flame that would not be quenched burned within me, a fire to return again, this time to retake our land. Oh! What I witnessed in the caverns of our city hardened my heart. Not even the pleadings of all my ancestors could have prevented my second journey, not if Grimnir himself had shown me my end in this dungeon would I have hesitated. If it is my fate to die here in furtherance of my lord’s goals, if it is my fate to dishonour myself and my clan so that dwarfs will one day drink in these halls again, so be it.

‘Before the throne of the High King, Lord Belegar knelt. High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer took the tome of kinship from his whitebeards, and reading the pages aloud himself described the long ancestry of our lord. He declared Belegar a master of his own hold, the rightful heir to Karak Eight Peaks, king of Vala-Azrilungol. Lord Belegar knelt, King Belegar stood. The throngs of Everpeak cheered, and the mountains shook to our songs.

‘From Everpeak we marched to reclaim our home, our hearts light and our faces grim; we would pay in dwarfen blood to reclaim our lands, and we would pay the price in full. Orcs and other beasts stood in our way as we travelled the Ungdrin and surface roads, but we were gladdened to see everywhere the activities of our kind, and not merely our ancestors, for of late we reclaim ever more. Roads that were impassable a generation ago are safe, and everywhere is the sign of our turning fortunes. Here, in Vala-Azrilungol, we felt assured it would be the same. Now is the time of the dwarfs come again!’

For a moment his fervour of the prior night returned, but it passed fleet, and his voice dropped again.

‘Our scouts met us on the way, and informed us that the grobi and the skaven had fought a great conflict, and that the skaven had been driven away. All the better, said our lord, to face but one enemy and not two. This was an omen, he said, the hands of the ancestors aided us. We left the Ungdrin for the last time. The tunnel we had hacked through the rock to the base of the stair for our first adventure was too small for our number. Overland we came instead, determined to install ourselves in the citadel, whose mass sits above the earth. A fortress it had been in the golden years, and it would become a redoubt from which to stage our reconquest.

‘We arrived in the high passes by night. We camped upon the slopes of Karag Rhyn, where a secret way snakes over the redstone cliffs. We were undetected. How our spirits rose as we saw the sunrise, its rays hitting the eight sacred peaks of Vala-Azrilungol one after the other: Karag Nar, the sunrise mountain; Karag Zilfin, the windswept mountain; Karag Yar, the sunset mountain; Karag Mhonar, the shadow mountain; Karagril, which men call Silverhorn; Karag Lhune, the crescent mountain; Karag Rhyn, the redstone mountain upon which we camped; and finally, and most beautiful of all, Kvinn Wyr, the white lady, whose snowy peak flushed with the light of the rising sun is as beautiful as the first bloom of love upon the face of the fairest of dwarf maidens.

‘We waited for the full light of day before we descended into the valley, for the greenskins are creatures of the dark. With the sun high overhead, the air crisp and clear as only true mountain air can be, we made our way down the hillside, and into the surface city of Vala-Azrilungol.

‘We were dismayed to see the great walls across the passes broken, the sacred gateways leading to each mountain gaping wide. Our anger at this desecration lent strength to our arms. When we came upon the grobi in the city, we fell upon them like a thunderbolt, smashing them asunder. Their wolf bandits and war chariots were little use in the rubble of our glorious yesterdays, and we drove them back into the slighted building they use as their lair.

‘Marching shield-to-shield, we made the main gate of the citadel. While our warriors kept the greenskins at a distance, our engineers destroyed the gates with blackpowder, although it caused them great anguish to damage the work of our revered ancestors.

‘Orcs made their home there. They waited for us at the citadel’s inner gate like cowards as their comrades died under our axes. A wall of flesh and wood, they were, their shields locked. They have learned their lessons in pain from us well. Together, the shield walls pressed, orc sinews straining against the stolid might of our Ironbreakers. The orcs were confident and did not expect their rear to be vulnerable.

‘Our scouts came from below, through a secret door never uncovered by the greenskins. Runes glowed and stone creaked open. Forty brave dwarfs came through, silent as snowfall as they formed a firing line. Crossbow bolts brought righteous death to the interlopers. They unstrapped their axes and, wielding them in both hands, charged hard into the unprotected backs of the orcs. They felled them as surely as trees are felled. Flesh is no match for steel. The orcs were cut down to the last.

‘Fifteen of ours were dead, a score wounded. It was my great honour to invoke the mercy of Valaya and heal their hurts where I could, although it gave me great regret that some were beyond the goddess’s help to make whole, and were crippled for their bravery.’

He looked at his empty fist, and clenched it.

‘We secured the citadel. Our rangers had marked out the paths into the fortification. Clansmen hunted the remaining greenskins down as our engineers, smiths and rune masters set to work. Old gates were reinstated, runes refreshed. Where we could not hold a way, we blocked. We went into the first deep, the cellars and bastions of the citadel. This we took swiftly. The greenskins appeared leaderless and in disarray. Soon we were patrolling as far as the Hall of a Thousand Pillars in the second deep unopposed. We worked tirelessly, and our citadel was made a fortress once more. Word was taken back to Karaz-a-Karak, and other exiled families flocked to our banner.

‘I will not say we became complacent, human, for a dwarf is not capable of such foolishness. But we did underestimate our foe. Pride, that is our weakness. At first, things went easy. The greenskins would attack us piecemeal, always head on, on the surface and underground. They charged us heedlessly, their inferior weapons breaking upon our armour. We cut them down by the hundred. Their cave beasts came at us. They died. Their fanatics were useless in the tunnels we held, their magic sputtered as our runes shone.

‘And then things changed. The first deep became quiet. We saw no greenskins for many days.

‘When the attacks recommenced, they had changed. In ones or twos we would be taken, sometimes from near the citadel itself. We mourned those gone as if dead, and sealed ourselves in the tighter. King Belegar ordered the patrols to be doubled in size. In the first deep, beyond the citadel’s bastions, we became aware of being watched. Grobi sign became more evident. We dug in further and halted our forays into the lower deeps.

‘And then the usurper struck. Goblins formed up in front of a patrol in the Hall of Bookkeeping. I was there. Glad to see the hated foe face to face at last, our warriors set themselves for battle in unbreakable lines of steel and gromril.’

He stopped for a moment; this part was difficult for him, the account of his own dishonour. ‘They brought out the captives. The first that died was Arntholf Vargson. The grobi had him bound, and shaved. He had been taken from a camp a week earlier, and he had been cruelly treated since. He was scarcely alive, and yet still their torturers managed to rouse screams from his ruined mouth.

‘At first, our warriors held firm. The ways of grobi are evil ways, we are taught that from birth. Their hatred for us is only bettered by our hatred for them, such are the insults they have given us. Of all creatures, the black deeds of the night goblins occupy the greater part of our grudge keepers’ time. We older dwarfs, sorely provoked, nevertheless knew the trap for what it was. But there were many young beards among us, not long since beardlings. Their energy was an asset to our venture, but their inexperience proved their undoing, their rage unblunted by wisdom. When the grobi used Arntholf’s own axe to cut his feet from his legs, three cruel, clumsy blows for each, and they lifted their robes and soiled him as he lay dying…’

The runepriest choked; his voice grew thick.

‘The young broke their line, they ran at them, and I could not restrain myself. Enraged beyond tolerance, I sprang forward with the warriors, sure in my abilities that if I were but to reach Arntholf, his life could be saved. If I had but held myself for a moment, if I had but thought, I could have called most of them back. I should have called them back. The axe of Grungni’s judgement hangs heavily over me, and it sways when I think this, oh how it sways. It was my fault for not holding them back…’ He shook his head, and his voice betrayed tears. ‘Cooler heads than mine could do naught but follow, or lose more dwarf lives. My people ran into the grobi. Those caught upon the edge of our fury died far better than Arntholf had.

‘As I knew in the deeps of my own heart, it was a trap. By the time I reached him, Arntholf was dead. Arrows came at us from everywhere. From the darkness, either side the goblins charged. Our warriors were overwhelmed and brought low. So many young warriors lost. I was singled out. Their net casters attempted to bring me down. I was set upon from all sides. I was forced to abandon my duties as a healer and concentrate on my own survival. My runestaff burned with the goddess’s anger as I smote them left and then right. Their nets parted into nothing when they touched the staff. For a moment, it looked as if we would prevail. The remainder of my brothers formed around me. Until there came a terrible bellow, and Skarsnik unleashed his trolls upon us.

‘There were but two, but one troll is a foe worthy of a lord, and we were all in disarray. They plucked warriors from the ground in their black claws, desperate axe blows were turned aside by their stony hides. Dwarfs were crushed and gouged, sent hurrying to the eternal holds of the ancestors.

‘I was dragged back from their onslaught as the staff was wrested from my grasp. That day, I saw him for the first time, as he stood upon a rock: Skarsnik, watching all, that great monster cave beast beside him. He directed his troops in a way I have never witnessed in a goblin, sure and certain. I saw him rub his hands and laugh as the staff was brought to him.

‘As the door to the armoured redoubt at the base of the first deep slammed shut behind me, I understood – the trap had been set for me. Skarsnik had coveted my staff, he had planned to take it, and taken it he had. The shame I felt at not anticipating his avarice and the trap that sprang from it burns me still, hot as dragon flame. Arrogance and pride. A dwarf is proud, and rightly so, but we must be wary that it blinds us not, and blinded I was, to my unending shame.

‘It was but the start of our troubles. Those making their way through the mountains to join us were ambushed and killed, or dragged away. At night, the first deep and surface rang with the screams of dwarfs tortured to death, the air was thick with the smell of roasting flesh as they were baked alive in their armour. Outside, poles were set up within sight of our walls out of rifle range. Every day, goblins would hang fresh beard scalps from them to mock us. Any attempt to take down these affronts would be met with overwhelming force, and the following day, more bloodied beards would hang alongside those we had sought to remove.’

His singsong recitation faltered, his anger and sorrow overcoming him, his words now a near babble of disbelief and anger. ‘This foe… He is not like any grobi we have encountered. He understands... he is like no other… Skarsnik.’ He spat the name. ‘We learned his name, carved as it was in crude runes upon the back of Gundar Thronkisson. He was but a beardling, proud to accompany his father. Sixty years old, no more, taken in a raid in the third deep, blinded, no hands, no feet, no tongue, no beard: unable to craft, or sing, or fight. Left as he was like that, he would have been better dead, and Skarsnik knew it. He sent envoys offering us safe passage out of the city. All lies; those that took him at his word were killed and their screams added to the night’s dread chorus. He wrote to us in our own secret language! How can this be? And then, my staff… you recall the great trident?’

I swear to you now that the atmosphere in that prison grew thicker, the dark darker, the awful place made worse by the dwarf priest’s shame. I murmured that I did recall Skarsnik’s weapon, that I had seen it glinting green and deadly behind the goblin king that very day.

‘It has the look of magic to it,’ I ventured.

The dwarf nodded, his heavy head a dark shape in the cellar. ‘Dwarf magic, bound to metal by rune and craft, so!’ He slapped the back of his hand into his palm. ‘My staff. His trident. Once it was a mighty talisman of Valaya. With it, I could salve the hurts of the wounded and bring peace to the dying, or ruin to our enemies. He had his cursed spell-flingers,’ he coughed a word in the angular speech of the dwarfs. ‘They remade it, an insult to my people and our ancestor-gods. They besmirched it with their foul smithcraft and unclean magic, making it what you saw.’ He turned towards me, his one eye glaring, sparks of fury glinting in its depths. ‘Its loss ate at me. Night after night, I listened to the screams, tormented, unable to rest. In the end, I had no choice. I resolved to take it back, I could not tolerate such an insult to my honour! My clansmen came with me. King Belegar said we should reconsider, and that he could not order us to ignore our duty, but that we should wait for vengeance. We were not for the waiting. Our rangers had sight of the staff, and we had little time to waste.

‘Our axes were sharp, our resolve the sharper. In through our stolen halls we came, through the Abyss of Iron’s Dream, hewing and cutting and slaying the grobi by the score as we walked the stairs that lead down its side. On a platform jutting out into the abyss, a place where once priests performed their sacred rites, was the staff. It was in my sight, within my reach!’ He reached out through the grille as if he could see his staff before him. ‘The steps were brought down behind us, their cave beasts beset us on all sides. We killed and killed, but were tangled by their nets and brought down and into dishonour. Fourteen of us were taken, only I now remain. In front of my very eyes, they remade it. They chained me to the wall and remade the pure instrument of Valaya’s mercy into something evil.’

Braknar hung his head, the stubble on his head glinting in the meagre torchlight. ‘So you see, manling, he is cunning. I fully own we were outwitted, by a grobi. Until today, I thought if I could keep Grunfin alive and bring him home, I could wipe away some of my dishonour. I prayed and prayed to Valaya, that she grant me the strength to bring Grunfin out alive and return him to his kin, but she has forsaken me, she will not listen, I…’ He sighed deeply, and his breath shuddered. ‘I think only the oath of the slayers can fully atone for my arrogance now. For you see, I was too proud. With the goddess behind me, with King Belegar my lord, I thought myself capable of anything, anything…’ His words trailed off into incoherent gasps. His shoulders shook, and he wept openly.

‘I trusted I would leave this place, and I think now that is an unlikely prospect.’ He hung his huge head. What had come to pass, what had happened in the space of a day that could have changed his tone so?

‘Go, human man, go back to your people,’ he said. ‘If you can find it in your heart, seek out my kind, those that dwell among men. Speak with the sons of Grungni and Grimnir, and tell them this, so that they might bear the news to our kin in the halls of the Everpeak.

‘Tell them Braknar, son of Brangar, and the one they call Grunfin Goldfinder, are dead. He already, I soon so to be. With his death goes my chance at atonement.’

He arranged the hands of the dead Grunfin so they crossed upon his breast and retreated to the back of the cell. I heard no more from him. I can only pray that he languishes in that terrible place no more.

I drifted back to sleep. Later, I was shaken awake. Skarsnik’s skargobboes dragged me from that place for the final time. As we passed Braknar’s cell, the light of the goblins’ torches lit up his broad back. I spoke his name, once, twice, then the gaolers clubbed me hard on the leg, causing me to stumble. Braknar did not look at me.

My face was brought close to Grunfin’s. I tried my hardest not to look at him, but my eyes would not obey me.

When my gaze fell upon Grunfin, his injuries fully illuminated by the goblins’ lights, and I saw what had been done to him, I knew my fate was sealed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A SECOND NIGHT AT THE ASYLUM

Heinz, little Heinz, why had his mother insisted that he come too? He had never liked his cousin. The boy’s mother was a burden, his father was dead, and Heinz was sickly beyond all belief. The boy was plagued with the hot sweats. He missed more lessons that he attended, and was praised mightily when he spent a month out of his sick bed. Kaspar resented the attention Heinz got. He tried hard to be good towards him, to pray to Shallya to make him well, to Sigmar to make himself appreciate the boy better, but too often, Kaspar’s patience turned to irritation, his games to bullying, and his prayers to darker avenues, where Kaspar would ask fervently for Heinz to go away.

Young Kaspar liked to travel by carriage. He liked the lullaby a carriage sang, the wood and leather’s gentle groan, the clop of horses’ hooves. Heinz had stopped crying at going away from his mother at last, and the summer evening was a delicious tonic of light and insect buzz, warm and golden and glorious. The grass was brilliant green, the forest trees majestic.

In the rocking bower of the carriage Kaspar dreamt he was at home, and younger. His mother held him close and sang a song – she had kept him close as a babe in arms, the wet nurse barely employed. Suspended in that lucid place between sleep and wakefulness, he felt warm and loved.

A loud knock on the wood, the thocking of a rock thrown against a barrel, interrupted the song. He awoke in confusion. He opened his eyes, unscrewing them slowly against the bright evening. He was hot and confused.

A few inches from his face, something stuck out of the wood that had not been there before.

It took him a moment to recognise the sharp, barbed object for an arrowhead. He reached his hand for it.

‘No!’ Their tutor, Magister Almeric, grabbed his hand. ‘See the blackness upon the tip? Poison.’

Kaspar was about to speak, but his words never left his mouth.

‘Goblins!’ The shout of the coachman was wild and laced with panic. ‘Goblins!’

Soon little Heinz would have much to cry about.

Wollendorp sat bolt upright. He looked to the left and the right, a man fearing that he has been caught in an act of indiscretion. He sighed and ran a shaking hand over his face. These damn dreams, so vivid here in Werdentraum.

He settled back onto his pillow, his eyes wide. He doubted he would sleep now. He would be glad to leave the schloss. Very glad indeed.

Judging the hour to be late, but not so late he might rise, he shut his eyes.

An unearthly howl had them snap open again. Another followed, and another.

He pricked his ears and listened. There was a lull, and then all bedlam broke loose. The air filled with wails and screeches, moans and screams. He got up and padded to the window. By the glass, the commotion was louder. All the lunatics in the asylum were shouting, and no wonder. As he watched, the unhealthy, leering face of Morrslieb heaved itself into the sky, full and fat. Mannslieb was absent tonight. These were the worst of nights, those lit solely by the unholy green light of the Chaos moon, times when the many evils that beset this poor world walked abroad in force.

Wollendorp stood by the window, mouth open. In Morrslieb’s light, the gardens of Werdentraum became a sinister place of shadow. He could imagine them full of goblins. That shape, not a rosebush, but the pointed hat of a night goblin, that bush a green assassin, that sundial a shaman, skull in hand, that…

The door burst open, and so nearly did Wollendorp’s heart. He spun round, hand upon his chest, eyes starting out of his head in fright.

‘Meisen!’ he shouted, his voice a girlish scream. ‘Don’t you knock, man?’

‘Damn you!’ panted the captain. He leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees. ‘I did! There was no reply.’

Wollendorp mastered himself, and his voice. ‘I did not hear, the inmates…’

‘They are baying at Morrslieb like, well, lunatics.’ Meisen managed a smile.

‘Did you run here?’ Wollendorp said. His question carried traces of disbelief and distaste. A gentleman did not run.

Meisen nodded. ‘From the kitchen, to Bickenstadt’s room, from Bickenstadt’s room to here, and now we must hurry back. I was in the kitchen sharing a drink with Krest when the boy came down. Come, dress quickly. We do not have much time if you wish to finish your interview.’

The shadows in Bickenstadt’s cell were even more disturbing than those outside, flickering, capering things cast by the fire. There was no wind that night, and yet the fire danced madly. Bickenstadt was in his chair, again facing away from them, again as deeply lost in the shadows of his madness as of the cell. He was agitated, his head rolling from side to side.

Meisen hurried in first with Krest, Wollendorp panting behind. He had not had cause to run for a long time.

‘Herr Bickenstadt! The captain and I have brought the scholar, as you requested,’ said Krest.

‘Good, good!’ moaned the playwright. A strangled peal of maniacal laughter escaped him. ‘I feel the influence of Morrslieb tug at my mind as surely as the moons tug upon the tides. I think my time is short!’

‘It is always so,’ said Krest. ‘When he is slipping away into his fugue, this is how it happens.’

‘Is it the influence of the Chaos moon?’ asked Meisen. He was transfixed by Bickenstadt’s rocking silhouette.

‘I can hardly think it helps, Meisen!’ snapped Wollendorp. He set out his pens and his manuscript quickly, his hands trembling.

‘The doktor is correct, it is an influence,’ said Krest. ‘But that is all. He comes and goes into lucidity to the tick of his own clock. Now, herr doktor, captain, please, he is at the end of his purse of sanity. Do not push him hard. The sisters are not happy you are still interviewing him, but I took the liberty of mentioning Herr Doktor Wollendorp’s letter.’

Wollendorp gave a nod. ‘Fine, fine. We will be quick.’

‘I near the end of his tale!’ shouted Bickenstadt. Whether in response to the other men’s conversation or at the prodding of some dark imagining was impossible to say. ‘Nrggh! Quick, quick, he will have you hear it all!’

Wollendorp and Meisen sat. Wollendorp cursed as he knocked his inkpot awry in his hurry to be ready, spilling a small pool of it. Krest dutifully wiped it up. Unlike before, this time Krest stayed in the room.

‘He was in the temple of the dwarf goddess Valaya,’ began Bickenstadt, ‘when he received his trident...’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

OF DWARF MAGIC AND PRODDERS

Skarsnik stood upon the lip of the dwarfs’ platform temple, Gobbla beside him. Images of the goddess glared sternly at him from all around, dumpy and unforgiving. She did not look much, thought Skarsnik. He preferred Gork and Mork, not this ugly dwarf with no beard.

At his feet, the Abyss of Iron’s Dream plunged down. The iron faces of the dwarfs’ gods and heroes stared at him once more, only now, he was here as the place’s master, and not as a wayward runt. A further difference was the deep lake that filled the bottom third of the chasm. He leaned out over it, and spat. His gobbet of phlegm fell down for many seconds before it was swallowed by the water.

‘Going to have to do something about that, boss,’ said Duffskul. ‘The Shroom King’s shaman told me they’ve got water leaking into their new caves.’

‘Yeah. I know,’ said Skarsnik. ‘So what? Who cares if a bunch of runts gets their shoes wet?’

‘Just saying, boss.’

‘Yeah, well, it’ll be done soon enough. Kruggler’s got his runts working hard. Nearly time now. Your lot ready?’

Duffskul sniffed and looked behind him. Goblins were setting a forge upon the cracked altar stone of the goddess. Shamans worked around its edges, smearing their own magic symbols over the dwarf runes. There was a loud clatter as a smith dropped a pile of iron rods close to the altar, but otherwise the runts, smiths and shamans worked silently. Snotties, spawnlings and little ’uns puffed under buckets of coal and faggots of wood. Four big goblins strained as they carried an anvil and placed it on the altar. All did so with not the smallest squeak or oath. Any noise that was made earned a sharp stare from Duffskul, and they all feared him.

Duffskul plucked a pouch of smokeshroom from his belt, and tamped it into his pipe bowl. ‘Quiet aren’t they, boss?’

‘It’s this place,’ said Skarsnik. ‘It’s so big.’ He looked down on Duffskul. He was much bigger than the shaman. For some reason, that made him feel old.

‘Nah.’ Duffskul shook his head. ‘It’s this business, Skarsnik. This is serious.’ He placed his pipe in his mouth and sparked it up with a large match. It sputtered and burned crimson. ‘Tonight we’s gonna call up Gork and Mork. It’s all special this, it wouldn’t work for just anyone, and even though it’s you, boss, it mightn’t work. We got to be careful. Tonight we’s going to have the gods here, both of ’em.’ Duffskul made a strange sound in his throat. It might have been a laugh. His eyes spun around in his face, wheels of madness and magic. ‘You ready, boss?’

Skarsnik swallowed. He did not care to admit it, but he was scared. ‘Do we really need to have him hanging around?’ He pointed his chin at the dwarf whitebeard hanging from the wall.

Duffskul glanced at their unconscious captive. ‘Oh yus, boss, serious business, boss. All to do with hate and magic and power and showing those stunty bossgods that Gork and Mork are mightier than the lot of them. That’s why we need that too.’ He gestured with his pipe at the dwarf’s runestaff leaning against a statue. It shone with a cold inner light. Surrounded by the ruddy glow of torches and the forge fire, it looked out of place. ‘So much magic in that stick, boss, so much of it hammered in by them stunties, carved in with their little stick glyphs.’ He waggled his fingers and chuckled. ‘Our magic’s better, you’ll see. We’ll take it and remake it and make it strong! We’ll make it angry, and then it’ll be all yours to do some serious bashing with.’

Skarsnik touched his long tongue to his teeth one after the other. ‘What’ll it do?’ he asked.

‘Ooh, lots. You wait and see.’ Duffskul inspected his claws with a speculative look. ‘I’m doing this special like, for you, boss. No charge.’

‘If it works, Duffskul, and I’m pleased, you’ll get what’s coming to you.’

‘Oh, boss, it’ll work, and you’ll be pleased. You’ll see. Now, sit down, I got work to do.’

Skarsnik sat in a corner, out of the way. He watched the shamans and smiths go about their business. The smiths wore no robes, only trousers and thick dwarfskin gloves and aprons. A grindstone, braziers, quenching barrels, and a tool rack were set up. The fire was coaxed to a fierce heat. The head smithgoblin nodded. The shamans were all in their most magical finery; hats heavy with bones and trinkets, faces painted with esoteric designs. Their daubing of the altar stone done, they sat cross-legged as one, a ring of five of them, and began to chant. Their song was low and reverential, not the frenzied praises to Gork and Mork that Skarsnik usually associated with the shamans.

Duffskul waddled over, his hat and the bone through its point wobbling. He held out his hand. ‘Eat this,’ he said, and dropped a leathery piece of old mushroom into Skarsnik’s hand. ‘And drink this brew.’ He proffered a cup.

Skarsnik took both. He ate the mushroom. It was tough and hard. The drink was beer of a kind he had never tasted, so bitter it made him retch.

Duffskul grabbed Skarsnik’s face and held his mouth closed. ‘Keep it down!’ he growled. His face and voice were hard. His red eyes sparked with green flashes. ‘This is gods’ business, you got to do exactly what I say, boss or not.’

Skarsnik choked it down and nodded.

‘Good, good,’ said Duffskul with satisfaction. ‘Now, watch the show, boss, watch the show.’

The chanting became louder. The shamans swayed from side to side. A goblin took the runestaff in pincers from the wall. Duffskul made passes in the air and shouted something in a language Skarsnik did not know. The fire flared right up to the ceiling, lighting up a section of the abyss. Faces of orcs and goblins materialised in the fire, howling, and melted away. Five times Duffskul did this. When he finished, the fire died down. It burned green, hotter than ever.

The goblin smith with the pincers thrust the staff deep into the furnace. Metal glowed red, and runes glowed blue, in the magical fire. The chief smith muttered. The staff was drawn out and laid upon the anvil. He brought his hammer down to touch the staff, gauging his mark. Once, twice, thrice. Then he raised it high, and brought it down hard.

The metal rang loud. Sparks showered from it. A scream of dismay sounded from somewhere a long way away, then another close by. Skarsnik lifted his head – it felt heavy, like it was stuffed full of rocks. The longbearded dwarf was howling. He staggered to his feet, pulling his knife from his belt. The ground tilted under him. The faces of the goblins in the temple warped and twisted, becoming those of daemons who whispered awful things. The hammer came down in time with the chant. The ringing of it did not die, but stayed in his ears and grew and grew as more hammer notes laid over the top of those preceding them, drowning out all else. Skarsnik felt sick, he rubbed his hands on his robes. He was too hot, and the dwarf would not be quiet.

Sparks from the hammer turned into strange things and flew away. The rivulets of sweat running from the smiths’ naked backs became serpents that slithered across the ground. Skarsnik frowned and looked for Duffskul. The shaman had split in two. One of him wavered in the air, gesticulating and chanting; the other sat smoking his pipe on a barrel, that enigmatic, knowing look on his face.

The dwarf howled again as the hammer came down on his staff. Skarsnik snarled and turned on him.

‘Shut up, stunty! I’ve got a headache.’ With a swift, well-practiced movement, he slipped his knife edge under the dwarf’s skin and tore his beard scalp free. The dwarf bellowed in pain, his back arching. A fresh beard of blood appeared on his chin and chest. Skarsnik held the long white beard over his head and cackled. He turned to show Duffskul, but he tripped on something that hadn’t been there before. With horror, he saw the floor had gone. A deep green hole that went down forever was in its place. With a scream of terror, Skarsnik plunged headlong into it.

He fell for an age, down the hole, turning over and over, his head spinning with vertigo. The walls were of green light shot through with black. Hungry things looked through the green and tapped their claws against it.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he lay on the ground, although it was like no ground he had ever seen. A plain stretched away in all directions, all of it – rocks, ash, bones, sand, trees and dead grass – in shades of green. Armies of phantom orcs and ghostly goblins fought one another. They were locked in combat, but the noise of it was muted, as if heard from miles away. Skarsnik shouted to them, but they did not hear. He walked towards them, but for every step he took they receded from him so that they were always just as far away. He looked at himself. He was more solid than the others about him. Clutching his bloody prize in one hand, his knife in the other, he stared around in amazement.

‘The Great Green!’ he said in an awed whisper. The spirit land the shamans went to! He was in the home of the gods themselves. No ordinary goblin could come there.

As he thought it, a shadow fell across him. He looked up.

Two orcs stood in front of him, big as mountains. They were so big Skarsnik had to crane his neck to see their heads. The one on the left had a huge club rested upon his left shoulder, the one on the right an identical weapon upon his right. They were mirror images of each other, identical in every respect. Sprung, it was said, from beneath the same giant mushroom at the beginning of all things.

Gork and Mork.

‘Little goblin,’ said Gork, or possibly Mork. ‘You have come home. That is good. We likes a gobbo what listens to us.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mork, or possibly Gork. ‘Yeah, we do. We watched over you for a looooong time.’ The orc gods had fierce expressions. Their eyes glowed dark red, red as the hot rocks under the mountains. Their teeth were as long as lances and yellow as soiled snow.

‘You have done lots of biffing, and we likes that. But youse got a lot more biffing to do,’ said Gork, or was it Mork? Skarsnik could not tell them apart. He looked hard at them, trying to decide which was the cunning but brutal one, and which the brutal but cunning. He could not. They were the same. ‘You is not like all the other little goblins. You will be the bashiest gobbo what ever there was since fat old Grom went all the way to pansy land and gave them elves a kicking. You will stomp the stunties! You will smash the ratties! You will give those humies a right old scare! Wear that beard what you got in your hand as a sign of your greatness. Get more, come to that, make a belt.’

‘That’d look nice that,’ said the other approvingly. ‘Dead killy.’

‘Make the stunties fear you! And when you kill them, tell them that Gork and Mork sent you. Then you is going to lead the biggest Waaagh! ever dreamed up by cave runts!’ Gork, Skarsnik was pretty sure it was Gork who was doing all the talking, swung his club down to point at the longbeard’s beard. Skarsnik ducked.

‘What, me?’

As one, the twin gods laughed. The god that Skarsnik had decided was Gork (or maybe Mork), said, ‘You is my chosen one.’

‘Soon you will return to the world of the not-green,’ said the other. ‘We’re sorry about that, lots of good fighting here, but there it is. First we got some real important stuff to say. There are two great battles ahead, so pay attention, got it? The first…’ Mork, or possibly Gork, frowned. ‘Hang on a minute, I thought he was my chosen one.’

‘No, he’s my chosen one. We agreed.’

‘We didn’t agree nothing!’ roared Mork, or maybe on second thoughts it might actually have been Gork. He pushed his brother.

‘Don’t you push me!’

Within an eye blink, the two god-brothers were fighting. They fought without reserve, lambasting each other with their clubs so hard they staggered. Gork (or Mork, it really was very hard to say) grabbed the arm of the other, and threw him onto the floor. Mork (we will have to agree that it was him, whether it was or not), pulled at his brother’s ankle. The other fell hard, and they wrestled on the ground, biting and gouging and roaring. They faded away, until they were as ethereal as the phantom orc armies that fought on the plain. They joined the ghostly orcs. The warring greenskins looked up in alarm when their gods emerged in their midst. They scattered as the twin deities rolled willy-nilly over their battleground, punching and biting each other.

With horror, Skarsnik realised he too was fading, was he dead as well? He wasn’t ready for the Great Green, not yet! He had so much to do, such big plans.

‘Gork! Mork! Wait, wait! What’s coming, what’s coming?’

The ground shot away from his feet, the armies and the gods shrinking to the size of ants before being lost in a viridian fog. He felt as if he were falling up into the sky. He tumbled as helpless as a leaf in the wind, and went back up the hole, with its parade of monsters scratching against the orcy green, trying to get at him. There was a hard smack, and he woke up.

‘Wait!’ he croaked. ‘Wait, please.’ The floor was cold on his back. A rough hand grabbed his arm and shook him until his shoulder ached.

‘Boss! Boss! You back?’

‘Duffskul?’

‘Yeah, boss.’

Skarsnik opened his eyes. The holes at the top of the chasm let in watery daylight. The furnace had died to ash-frosted coals. The dwarf hung from the wall, bloodied and unconscious. Goblin smiths sat on the other side of the altar, polishing something, while the shamans snored loudly in their circle.

‘It daytime?’ He winced. His head hurt abominably.

Duffskul laughed. ‘It’s four days later, boss.’

‘I had a dream,’ he swallowed. His head pounded. His mouth was dry as sand. ‘About the gods.’

Duffskul’s eyes gleamed. ‘That weren’t no dream, boss. Only real big bosses like you gets to see them. Warbosses, and us shamans, course.’ He sniffed. ‘It’s a good sign. They’ve picked you for great things, and you’ve made them happy, oh yus.’

‘They were going to tell me something, and they didn’t.’ Skarsnik propped himself up on one elbow. He felt shaky and ached all over.

‘That’s the gods for you,’ Duffskul shrugged. ‘No, boss, don’t stand up yet, you’ll be…’

Skarsnik was violently, noisily sick. Duffskul patted him on the back. ‘There you go, god sick, let it all out. Makes them happy, don’t it?’ He nodded behind him. A goblin acolyte hurried over with a leather cup. Duffskul took it. ‘Drink this, boss, it’ll stop you chucking up all over the place.’

Skarsnik took a tentative sip. It tasted good. He glugged it down. Almost immediately, he felt better. He stood straighter and wiped his mouth on his arm. ‘Right then, let’s see what you made me.’

At this, the smiths sprang up. There was a large object hidden under a cloth in the hands of their chief. They whipped the lower portion back as a long shaft of painted red wood was hurried over. The smiths worked quickly to attach the object to it. Skarsnik saw the glint of metal.

Duffskul went over and took the weapon, still covered in its cloth, and carried it over to Skarsnik. ‘You got a big squig, boss.’ He nodded at Gobbla, who was greedily licking up Skarsnik’s vomit. ‘So you need a big prodder.’

With a flourish, he removed the cloth.

In his hand, Duffskul held a weapon like a trident. Skarsnik told me its proper name is a prodder, a tool for herding squigs. He brandished it at me as he described the first time he held it. His was huge and made for fighting, the blades atop wickedly sharp. The weapon had fittings of brass, and a chain ran between the lower two blades, hung with arcane talismans – the bad moon and the wicked eye prominent among them. Its blades held a greenish hue where they caught the light. Duffskul handed it to the king. It crackled with uncanny energies.

‘Now, you wanted to know what it did, your bossness. Point it at that wall over there.’

Skarsnik did as was asked; he extended his arms, aiming the prodder’s three points at a statue over the chasm. The prodder was well-balanced. If he held it in the right place, it felt like he held nothing at all.

‘Think bad things, boss, think things of hate, think of power!’ whispered Duffskul.

These things came easily to Skarsnik. He narrowed his eyes and he thought. He thought how much he wanted to crush the dwarfs, how he wanted the ratmen out of the city, of how he would take his crusade beyond the halls of the peaks and smite the–

There was a loud crack, as of thunder, and a weird whoop. The prodder jolted in his hands. Three green bolts of fizzing energy sped across the chasm, slamming into the statue on the far side and engulfing it in an explosion of yellow and green fire. Chunks of rock flew into the air. Slowly, the statue’s top half turned on its shattered middle and toppled into the chasm, where it hit the water with an almighty splash. The echoes of its destruction rumbled around the abyss.

‘Ooooooh,’ said Skarsnik. He snickered evilly. He pointed it again. He thought his bad thoughts. Nothing happened. His joy turned to anger. ‘It don’t zogging work!’ he yelled.

Duffskul held up his hands. ‘Yes it does, boss, it just needs a bit of encouragement. You need some boys behind you, then it’ll charge up and fire again, just from the sheer orcy and goblinyness all round ya. Orcs is better than gobboes for that, it’s true, but either’ll do. You get a bunch of really, really excited boys behind you and it’ll bring down half a mountain.’

‘Really?’ said Skarsnik. He put the weapon’s butt on the floor and looked it up and down with happy eyes.

‘Yes, well, no.’ Duffskul wiped dribble from his chin and did a little jig. ‘Not really, not a mountain, that’d be a bit much. But what you just seen is only a teeny part of what it can do for you. Happy?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Skarsnik, examining the weapon. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘And, it’s still well sharp.’ Duffskul beckoned him over to the chained priest. ‘Want to try?’

The other goblins understood his malicious leer. They went to Braknar and threw a bucket of water over him. He groaned and stirred. One yanked his head up by his hair. Skarsnik held the prodder level with his face.

He waited until Braknar had awoken fully before he pushed the centre spike into Braknar’s eye.

The dwarf’s screams echoed around the chasm, chasing the aftershocks of the explosion.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A PLAGUE OF RATS

Gobbla sniffed at the dark. Something was not right.

On the bed, his master lay snoring, oblivious to the world. The lamps were all out. In the days of the dwarfs, the room had been the office of a minor functionary, it had not been a lordly apartment. There was not one aperture that looked upon the outside world or the caverns of Karak Eight Peaks, but Skarsnik valued his security. Skarsnik’s foetid possessions lay heaped around it. Only in one corner was it neat and tidy. This was his plotting desk, the place where he sat for hours on end, scheming and making his plans by the light of dwarf-fat candles.

It was dark in the chamber, stygian dark, but light enough shone from lichens glowing gently on the ceiling for Gobbla to see by all the same. A creature of the deepest, darkest holes in the world, any light at all allowed the beast to watch his surroundings, and his sense of smell was keener still.

He sniffed at the air. A scent like straw and urine. Ratstink.

By his master’s bed, a darker shadow pulled itself together from the dark, taking on the form of a cloaked figure. Slowly and in utter silence, the figure unsheathed a blade. It glowed a sickly green, a burning beacon to Gobbla’s single eye.

Gobbla hated this thing. He hated anything that would hurt his beloved master, the one who had saved him after the nasty goblin put out his other eye. The one who would have killed him.

Gobbla pounced, one push of his legs sending him sailing through the air. He landed, mouth open.

The assassin was bitten in half.

Gobbla munched on the ratman’s top part. He picked the legs up carefully.

‘Oi, Gobbla, get off, get off!’ said Skarsnik drowsily. ‘I’m sleepin’!’ He rolled over, his calloused feet poking out from under stinking blankets. He wore a long nightcap, decorated with moons and stars with wicked faces.

Gobbla nuzzled his master, licking him to wakefulness. He deposited the remains of the skaven assassin on the pillow next to Skarsnik’s head.

Skarsnik sat up and fumbled for a candle. He struck a light with flint and tinder.

‘What? Gobbla! Gork’s fists, not again!’ He stared at the mutilated rat corpse. ‘That’s the fourth one this week!’ He chuckled and slapped Gobbla playfully on the face. The great squig grumbled happily. ‘When are they going to learn? Good old Gobbla.’

‘That’s a lot of ratboys trying for your head, boss,’ said Duffskul.

‘That’s cause they is up to something, Duffskul,’ said Skarsnik. ‘I reckon they’s going to try and get it all back.’ He tapped a claw on a dwarf-vellum map. ‘But we won’t let them, will we boys?’

A clamour of agreement replied. Skarsnik and the chiefs of the greenskin tribes all around the Eight Peaks crowded around a stone table. Gritgag of the Creepy Gits was there, so was Ukbof, Dukmak from the lowest levels where the ratties dare not go and strange things splashed through stinking puddles, Grishbog from the Red Mount, Snikkle of the Stranglehands, Tolly Grin Cheek, Orkun the Awesome, Boddle Scumblesneer, Hugamuk the Unpleasant, and Nice Gritnok the Snikker, who had been granted his name by being anything but nice. There were more besides. Kruggler was there for the plains goblins, and a fat, squat fellow by the name of Burkfang Arsewangler, Big High Wallop of the mountain goblins.

Skarsnik looked to the faces of his vassals. Now Ibrit was dead, Bograt had been sent back by Gorfang to keep an eye on this new power in the mountains, and he stood for the Broken Tooth adventurers and the Red Fang outcasts. Two other orc chiefs were there with him, towering over the sea of black hats and horned helms sported by the goblins. Skarsnik had many hundreds of orcs now. He was happy for their strength, and if any of them got a little uppity, he had Gobbla eat their bosses until they backed down.

Many greenskins of all kinds had flocked to Skarsnik’s domain, drawn by rumours of the most cunning night goblin ever to have lived. Something big was building in Karak Eight Peaks. There were whispers of a crusade, and oftentimes whispers are all that are required to set the greenskins upon the warpath.

‘The ratties are going to try something soon,’ said Skarsnik. ‘They is trying to kill me so youse lot will all fall out and fight each other, and then they can walk in here as easy as you please.’

One of the orcs nodded its bucket head and muttered to Bograt. ‘He is a shaman, ain’t he? He can see the future.’

Skarsnik caught this exchange. He slammed his fist down. ‘No! I is not, it is just thinking, see? Thinking, that’s what I does.’

The goblins and orcs nodded and grunted. To them thinking was as impressive as magic.

Skarsnik tapped his finger against his head. He had his new boss hat on, a tall hood that hid an iron helm, the tusks of squigs jutting through the cloth. ‘Although it is true, I do have the ears of the gods.’

‘What, on your head?’

‘No Hugamuk, he means they listens to him,’ said Tolly Grin Cheek, his teeth showing through where his cheeks had been mutilated.

‘Gork and Mork speaks to you, does they?’ said the second new orc. He was less impressed than the other orc chieftains by this goblin upstart. ‘No they doesn’t.’

‘I’m a gobbo, but so was Grom the fat,’ said Skarsnik.

‘You ain’t fat Grom,’ said the orc. Orcs are incredibly literal creatures.

‘No I ain’t, and if you think you can take me in a fight, come over here and me and Gobbla will have a word. No? Right then. Kruggs, how’s the special project coming on?’

‘Nearly done, boss,’ said Kruggler. ‘Nearly done.

‘What, er, speshul projeck?’ said the doubting orc.

‘Never you mind! We can’t have them ratses finding out about that, so them what needs to know, knows already, and them what don’t need to know don’t know and won’t know. We got to stop the ratties when they come, and then we can do them in for good, get them out of the top five deeps at least, that’s all you need to know. I’ve got Fuggrak and his squig hunters rustling up a real special surprise for them and all. The rest of youse lot, pay real careful attention to what’s I’m going to say…’ He pulled a map towards him. He began to speak, but a commotion at the door interrupted him.

‘Stop, you can’t…’ said a goblin guard. Then, ‘Argh!’ as he came flying over the table and hit the wall.

An enormous orc, huge as an ogre, pushed his way into the room. He ducked his head to avoid banging it on the door lintel. Three disreputable-looking orc thugs trailed in his wake, eyeing the crowd of greenskins with gimlet glares, daring them to try something.

Gorfang Rotgut was paying a visit.

The goblins in the room shrank back, as did the two new orcs. Skarsnik saw Bograt stand his ground, his hand resting on the worn handle of his cleaver. The goblin king noted that well.

The giant orc swayed like a tree in the wind as he walked. Like all orcs, his legs were short and ape-like, bowed at the knees, topped with an enormously muscled torso and arms that hung nearly to the ground. He wore a suit of scale armour, an enamelled plate depicting the Evil Sun in glaring red covering his belly. A sword the weight of Gobbla hung at his side. On the top of his head was a close-fitting helm. He swung open the orc-faced visor attached to it and snorted like a bull. He ignored everyone in the room and stared directly at the king of Eight Peaks. ‘You Skarsnik?’

‘I am,’ said Skarsnik. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘And I was expecting an orc, name like Skarsnik, that’s an orc’s name. You want to be careful, calling yourself that,’ Gorfang said in a voice as slow and as deep as the rumbles of a mountain glacier.

‘Have some respect orcy! Gork called him that!’ said Duffskul.

‘Right, I bet that’s all real true. Like I bet it’s true you saying you been expecting me. It’s not like you’re just saying that, because if you was expecting me, you can explain to all your little pals here why I could walk in here without any bother. Rubbish,’ said Gorfang.

Skarsnik smiled and cleared his throat. ‘Yesterday, you killed Jurk the Strong for cheek. After the sun came up, you had breakfast, and that was...’ He cocked his head on one side, making a show of remembering. ‘A dwarf steak, fungus beer and fifteen meatshrooms. At noon you took fourteen sacks of gold from a caravan of gobboes taking slaves into the Darklands and ate one of their big bosses for cheek. Again. Then you had a nap. You went to the drops where you were bitten by an ’urty bits chomping squig… You want me to go on? I was expecting you all right.’

Gorfang snarled and looked around. ‘Your stunty house is bigger than mine. That won’t do, you being a gobbo and all.’

‘You’ll not take it off me, Gorfang.’

‘Suppose not. I’m not here for that anyways. You and me, gobbo, you and me oughta make a deal. Me and me Red Fangs have the north of the pass, you have the south. Don’t see no reason to be scrapping when we got ratses and stunties to be a-bashin’ at. We can be…’ His face wrinkled. ‘Allies, yeah, that’s the word all right. Them stunties are here again, and I fancy having a go at them meself, just so’s they don’t get any ideas about coming back to the Black Crag.’ He sniffed and stood up on his toes, hitching his trousers up. ‘You’re pretty big for a cave runt warboss. I reckon it’s no shame doing a deal. Big is best.’

Skarsnik smiled his most cunning smile and rubbed his hands together. ‘You’re on, Gorfang me old mate, you are on.’

‘Good.’

‘Yeah, good. Hey.’ Skarsnik’s smile grew a little wider. ‘How do you fancy a nice big scrap?’

Three nights later, Gobbla’s eye opened. There was another rat in the room. He belched and rolled over, and went back to sleep.

The Clan Eshin assassin’s heart slowed back down to a rate commensurate with life. He took a relieved breath. With a muffled squeak of triumph, he drove his poisoned blades deep into Skarsnik’s bed.

Duffskul watched the creature from a spyhole. It checked the room, took Skarsnik’s hat from the floor as a trophy, and squirmed into a crack in the wall too small for a goblin to get into.

‘Oh, that’s where they’re getting in. Wriggly, aren’t they? I wonder how they know where you is sleeping at?’ said Duffskul.

‘They don’t though, do they?’ said Skarsnik. ‘Gubin did well, didn’t he? Great acting. Performance of a lifetime.’

‘Oh yus, very convincing.’

‘Shame he had to die.’

‘Shame,’ said Duffskul.

‘Reckon they’ll fall for it?’

‘Oh yus,’ said the shaman. ‘Oh yus. They wants you dead so bad, I think they’d believe it if you walked down them stinking tunnels and told them you were dead yourself.’

‘You see, humie,’ said Skarsnik to me, ‘that’s rule eight. Play dead when it suits ya.’

I wondered what rules six and seven were. I never did get to find out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE BATTLE OF THE THOUSAND COLUMNS

The news of Skarsnik’s demise went out into the skaven Under-Empire with rapidity. Skarsnik hid from his own men for several days. Even though he had told them he was going away for a little while, his men found out about his ‘death’ and fell to fighting. It took five days to restore order once he revealed that he had not, in fact, been killed, and still some of the slower goblins were unconvinced. As Skarsnik saw it in his terms of calculated risk, the strife between the greenskins would only help to reassure the skaven of his successful assassination.

The response to the news of Skarsnik’s end was a full-scale invasion of Karak Eight Peaks. War-Chieftain Skruk Spittle-tail, lord of the lower dwarf deeps and the unfathomable pits beneath, pulled in many favours to assemble a host of ratmen such as Karak Eight Peaks had not seen in many a hundred years. Skarsnik’s spies observed them gathering in such numbers that he knew that this would be a battle like none other, and he started to plan in earnest.

He had his goblins pull back from the lower levels. Some of the clans weren’t disposed to follow his orders, but again, Skarsnik was happy for them to remain where they were, for it made his trap all the more convincing.

Overland and from underground the skaven came. Thousands of warriors, twice that number of slaves, many of their stormvermin, diseased monks, great beasts and terrifying machines. Skarsnik and Duffskul stood in a ruined dwarf tower on the outer shoulders of the white mountain and watched a sea of furred bodies spill from tunnel mouths way down on the mountainside. They made their way up towards the bowl that contained the dwarf surface city in verminous multitude; so far away, the army looked like a thread of yarn winding its way slowly up.

‘Heheh,’ Duffskul chuckled, his throat rough and raspy from the prior night’s drink. ‘Looks like you got their attention now, Runt.’ He patted Skarsnik on the shoulder, and pulled out his pipe.

The skaven horde was half-heartedly harried as it approached Karak Eight Peaks, above and below. Dissident tribes of mountain goblins were swatted aside, disobedient clans of night goblins were destroyed, and orcs who thought they knew better than to take orders from a runty goblin were ground into dust.

Skarsnik called it a nice big clean out.

The skaven were confident, despite the number of unexplained incidents that affected their advance. An avalanche killed a hundred warriors and severely delayed the skaven overland force. Dozens more were mysteriously taken ill. A cohort became lost in the passes. Wild squigs appeared at the most inconvenient moment to carry ratmen away. Tunnels that were open only the day before were found blocked by cave-ins. But the mountains are dangerous places, and the skaven took this in their stride. Believing Skarsnik dead, they attributed most of these setbacks to the unkindnesses of chance, and only a few to the work of the goblins, whereas in fact, all were the master plan of just one.

Skarsnik.

Skarsnik let the skaven penetrate into the city before he set his goblins to work properly. Ambush followed ambush, whittling down the skaven’s numbers further. He stiffened his resistance as they drew closer to the great throne room, the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, and there he met them in pitched battle.

Under the unwavering light of the dwarfs’ magical stars, Skarsnik’s army waited, ten thousand strong. The hall, as I saw it, was filled rim to rim by goblintown, but at the time of Skruk Spittletail’s invasion, it was an empty place, the ideal battlefield. It was, perhaps, not so different to the battlefields we men are used to. Steps filled the place of hillsides, stands of mushrooms took the stead of forests. At the centre of it was the prize, the stepped dais of the old dwarf kings. Whoever took this strategically vital point would carry the day.

Skarsnik stood at the front of his army, Gobbla by his side. In the half-dark of the mountain hall, the serried ranks of his goblins stretched away into the blackness. There were so many tribes, so many kinds of evil creature – trolls, their numbers at nearly two dozen, bolstered by recent troll hunts into the mountains, squigs, a giant they’d lured underground with a vat of ale, Kruggler’s plains goblins, and many mountain goblins clad in rancid goatskins.

The goblins were in two main lines, a skirmish line of archers some way out in front of those. Skarsnik’s vanguard contained mostly night goblins. His trolls stood close by him so that he could direct the moronic beasts the better in the conflict. The giant waited in the second wave with the mountain goblins; they had some experience with giants, after all. Behind the second line, a number of what he described as ‘speshul surprises’ he hoped would drive the skaven away were hidden by other troops and the rubble and the multitudinous columns of the hall. Orcs made up the rearguard. Many more greenskins lay in wait all over the hold, waiting to ambush any relief forces that might come up from below, or catch the fleeing army should Skarsnik’s plans be a success.

Artillery was ranged behind all this, huge stone throwers, squig pot casters, fire throwers, and other fiendish weapons of war. Kruggler’s bolt throwers were once more in elevated positions in the different galleries of the hall, their numbers swollen threefold with newly minted constructs. The Hall of a Thousand Columns resonated to raucous goblin singing. Their lord had made sure they had had a good measure of fungus beer each; it would not do to have them run away from skaven.

The scratch of claws and rattle of armour, the pad of thousands of rodent feet came from across the hall. Skarsnik had funnelled the skaven army through the southern parts of the hold. He directed them with a careful series of rockfalls, floods, and weak goblin resistance. All so he could hold the broader north of the hall, opposite the great doors. The skaven army, though numerically superior, would be trammelled by the hall’s shape and unable to use its numbers to best advantage.

‘Here they come, lads,’ Skarsnik shouted, ‘here they come!’

A swarm of ratmen came from every doorway, every tunnel, every crack, opposite the greenskin lines. Down from the surface, through the great hall’s gates, they marched, rivers of fur and rusty metal merging into a nightmarish horde.

Imagine a plague of rats such as dog the poorer districts of our own cities from time to time; this must have looked similar, only these rats walked upright in the twisted semblance of men and bore spears, swords and shields. Teams of slaves pulled war machines behind the army. A construction the height of fifteen goblins rumbled forward at the heart of the skaven force. A bell big enough for a clan of goblins to live in swung ponderously within its framework. A white-furred skaven with horns gesticulated from a platform at its front. A giant ratman, as big as one of Skarsnik’s trolls, pulled on a mechanism, and the bell began to sway back and forth.

The skaven army lined itself up. There were thousands of them. More of the giant ratmen stood in groups amid the swarm. Giant rats ran ahead as a vanguard, guided by the deft flicks of the skaven packmasters’ whips.

And the floor. The floor squirmed. Skarsnik peered hard. The ground was deep in rats, hundreds of thousands of rats.

He sneered. So what? They were only rats.

If the skaven were surprised to see that Skarsnik lived, for with Gobbla by his side he was obvious at the centre of his host, Skarsnik could not tell.

‘Watch out for that bell, boss, that’s wizarding stuff. Could be nasty,’ Duffskul advised. ‘That white-fur, nasty wizard. Don’t worry though, I’ll sort him.’ The shaman was intoxicated. He had been up the entire night overseeing the finishing touches to the army’s beer in the city’s main brewery, recently refurbished for the purpose. Duffskul had taken a large number of unusual mushrooms to keep fatigue at bay, and his eyes rolled more than ever.

Skarsnik nodded. He licked his teeth and scratched Gobbla between his eyes. The great squig purred. ‘That’s their boss, right there, isn’t it?’ He pointed the prodder at a large ratman in armour atop a palanquin borne by lesser skaven.

‘Oh yus, boss,’ said Duffskul. ‘That’s him.’

‘I’m having him,’ he muttered. Skarsnik turned to face his army. ‘Boys!’

Their songs and giggling became a shout. ‘Skarsnik!’ The regiments bellowed it raggedly, even the goblins within each regiment out of time with each other. The goblin king’s name rippled chaotically across the army, barely coherent.

‘We’s not letting these ratties back in! This is our place now, and it will be forever!’

‘Yeah!’ roared the army back.

‘Let them have it!’ roared Skarsnik.

The goblin lines surged forward, stamping on rats as they went. Skarsnik’s trolls moaned. They stopped moving and looked puzzled, the noise and sheer number of creatures in the cavern confusing them.

‘Get on, you lousy rocks!’ shouted their handlers. Prodders and squig pacifiers were deployed, goblins hammered at the trolls’ stony hides. They achieved a semblance of order, and the stone trolls lumbered towards the skaven lines.

Skarsnik and Gobbla broke into a lope. Skarsnik was at the front of the first wave of attackers, just like an orc. No skulking at the back for him, and his goblins tugged each other’s sleeves and pointed with open mouths at his courage. Spear-sized arrows whistled overhead, skewering entire ranks of the ratmen. A sharp snap cut through the tumult of war cries as one of the bolt throwers broke under the strain. Skarsnik did not care, there were plenty more.

The skaven held their lines, tightly ranked, spears held forward over their triangular shields, waiting for the goblins. The bangs of gunfire sounded in the cavern. Green streaked the air. Goblins fell dead around Skarsnik. Gobbla squealed as a bullet nicked him. They were targeting the king and his pet.

‘Magic’s coming, boss!’ panted Duffskul.

The bell had attained a sufficient swing to toll, the rat ogre at its mechanism tugging on its rope hard. The bell sounded, its peals ringing out across the battlefield. The power of it rocked the goblin advance. The little greenskins faltered.

‘On, on, on!’ shouted Skarsnik. Horns and gongs conveyed his orders to the horde, and chiefs in the regiments relayed them to their boys, hitting and shoving. Skarsnik glanced over to the left. A section of his army had stopped, a squabble had developed, and goblins fought one another, the enemy forgotten. The remainder of his troops held true, forging on through the carpet of rats.

Duffskul’s eyes blazed green, empowered by the excitement of the goblins. He shouted out uncouth syllables, and extended his hands. Green fire shot from his fingers.

A barrage of missiles rained down on the ratmen from the goblin back line – boulders, clays pots of thick pitch that burst into fire upon impact, others containing cave hornets or facebiter squigs. The skirmish line of goblin archers ran ahead of Skarsnik’s boys, halted and let loose a shower of black-fletched arrows, then ran on and fired again. There were so many skaven, every arrow found a target no matter how poorly aimed. The ratmen held firm, their courage bolstered by the ringing of their monstrous bell.

Lightning skittered around the bell, earthing itself through spears, arcing up to caress the cavern roof. Ancient glowstones exploded as the bell’s magic touched them. A discordant buzz came with it. The ground shook.

Blocks of masonry fell from above, squashing goblins by the score. A statue slid from its seat by the wall. Skarsnik glared around at his minions and shouted, flag wavers and musicians sending orders to continue to the unit bosses.

There was a deafening rumble, and the ground tilted under Skarsnik’s feet. Goblins fell over each other as they tumbled backwards. Vapour shot from the ground as rock melted. Goblins fell screaming into the cracks, their black robes bursting into flame. Those that escaped the fall flapped their sleeves as steam scalded them, running in tight, wailing circles.

‘Get on!’ roared Skarsnik. ‘Get on!’ His prodder thrummed with power. He thrust it forward. Bolts of green lightning leapt from the prongs, slamming into the superstructure of the bell. It rocked at the impact, and a couple of braces gave way.

Duffskul stopped, a sea of goblins rushing past him. A nimbus of light shone around him. The white-furred ratman upon the bell’s platform was waving his hands high above his head. The air crackled with pent-up magic. Skarsnik decided it was best to let them get on with it.

He waved his goblins on. He was at the head of a regiment of two hundred or so of the little greenskins. Another goblin war-chief would have placed himself in the ranks of his skargobboes, the big goblin veterans the chiefs keep as a retinue. But Skarsnik knew his larger minions were less likely to run away if left to their own devices than the smaller goblins. They got back to their feet, encouraged by his presence, and stumbled on over the fractured floor.

At a hundred paces from the skaven lines, strange weapons were deployed by the ratmen. Skarsnik caught sight of one of these ratmen teams drawing down on him with the muzzle of their cannon. He blasted it to pieces with his prodder, sending bits of rat and shrapnel everywhere. A circle of ratmen fell dead around it. Skarsnik laughed and shook his prodder. ‘Good old Mork! Good old Gork!’

His goblins were not so lucky. Half of the Cave Clobberers were incinerated by a gout of wyrd-tinged fire. The remainder faltered, turned tail and ran, running straight into another mob following behind them. His trolls roared with anger as a hail of bullets hammered into them from one of the portable cannons, its barrels spinning madly as it spat fire. The trolls’ flesh bubbled as it struggled to heal itself under such an assault. One groaned, stumbled and fell, and did not rise again.

The toll was high, but then the goblins were in range, and it was time to put the first of Skarsnik’s devilish schemes into play. He shoved his lead hornplayer. Three horns and a squigpipe blared out rising notes. Gongs rang.

The skirmish line of archers got his orders mostly right, falling back through gaps in the lead mobs. Only a couple got stuck, or went the wrong way, or forgot they weren’t actually running away and carried on pell-mell for the rear of the army. The rest retired behind the first line of warriors, spread out their lines with discipline, and recommenced firing over the goblin infantry in front of them.

Skarsnik came to a stop. The line of goblin infantry lined themselves up neatly with his mob, more or less. ‘Release the fanatics!’ he screeched.

Shrieking goblins were pushed forward, their mad laughter audible even over the ringing of the skaven’s infernal bell. They were shoved from their regiments, dozens of them.

Duffskul had been busy.

Spinning madly, the fanatics wavered towards the skaven lines. About half of them did not make the full distance. These spun about in front of the ratmen, giggling manically. Several were shot down as the panicked skaven turned their bizarre weapons on them. There was a satisfying explosion as a flame-throwing device malfunctioned, spraying burning fuel all over a ratman regiment.

The rest of the fanatics hit home.

They rattled around the skaven regiments like musket balls shaken in a box. Skaven were squashed or tossed high into the air by the impact. One of the giant ratmen was decapitated as a spinning ball hit it in the face, another fell to the ground, its leg broken. The fanatics were wreaking carnage.

Glass balls came over from the skaven side, shattering on the stone floor to release choking gas. Lightning seared the air, projected by cannons of brass and crystal. Thunder boomed. Stones and bolts and firepots were the goblins’ replies.

Skarsnik held his trident high, but the magic within would not function. He looked at the skaven wizard, and saw him dismissing the weapon’s power with a paw.

‘Gah!’ shouted Skarsnik, but at least the enemy wizard’s counter-magic was spent. Duffskul sent bolts of fizzing light into the skaven’s ranks. A regiment collapsed into disorder, the skaven slapping themselves as cave spiders appeared all over them, crawling into their snouts and eyes.

‘Charge!’ shouted Skarsnik. His flag goblins fluttered their flags. Horns blew. The goblins let out a reedy ‘Waaagh!’ and ran at full tilt at the skaven.

The skaven line was reordering itself from the fanatics’ impact when the goblin vanguard hit. They ran through their own fanatics, those that had not made the distance, the crazed goblins killing many of their comrades. It did not matter, for Skarsnik’s horde numbered in the thousands, and they were all quite drunk.

As Skarsnik had planned, the majority of his goblins hit at once, preventing the skaven from flanking his regiments. Archers fired volleys over the heads of their comrades, felling skaven in the back ranks. The fire from Skarsnik’s artillery intensified. The battlefield was narrow here. The dais broke the front in two. The forest of columns and rubble between them created numerous chokepoints. There was no room for manoeuvre. The skaven were pressed in tightly, and suffered for it.

Skarsnik led his goblins into the centre of the skaven army. The skaven line bowed back. Nets cast from the middle of the goblin units tangled their spears, disrupting their formation further. Skaven came at Skarsnik and were felled. Gobbla snapped and howled, killing the ratmen by the brace with every bite. Skarsnik fought like a daemon, his heavy prodder adding to his strength. When he could, he discharged its power. Further magical blasts blazed across the battlefield, as Duffskul set the power of Gork and Mork against that of the white-furred wizard and his awful rat-god. Lightning burst from the skaven cannon.

Skarsnik killed all those within reach of him. The skaven regiment he faced crumbled before his onslaught, leaving many dead behind. Another unit marched forward to take its place. In the lull, Skarsnik looked about for the skaven warlord. He was well away from Skarsnik, a hundred yards to the right. A dent had formed in the goblin line, black-furred stormvermin threatening to break through to the base of the dwarf throne dais.

The bell’s tolling took on a greater urgency. The air had the tang of metal. The peals grew in volume, far louder than the bell should have been able to produce. Goblins clutched at their sensitive ears, squealing in agony. Blood ran through their fingers. The skaven fell upon them with renewed ferocity.

Skarsnik stumbled. The pain was unbearable. A spear struck at him, he clumsily parried, and it ran over his ribs, piercing his mail. He hissed and staggered back, but the hot kiss of steel shook him from his confusion. He grabbed the shaft of the spear, and his prodder ended another rodent life.

The bell’s reverberations died back. The goblins were losing heart. Gobbla felled several skaven as his master recovered. Skarsnik’s ears rang still. He found a hornblower, and had him sound the retreat.

Goblins ran gratefully for the safety of their back line. Many were brought down by the skaven’s arcane technology. The skaven army let out a triumphant squeak and gave chase, catching many fleeing greenskins. Things looked ill for the goblins.

It was, naturally, all a trap.

Skarsnik gave a smile. This was the moment of truth. Now he would see if his goblins had taken his drilling to heart.

He halted and signalled his remaining flag wavers and musicians. Cymbals rang and horns blew as flags snapped urgently in a complicated dance. If the goblins did not hear or see this through the tumult of battle… he shook the thought away.

They did.

The back line parted, regiments of mountain goblins marching with admirable discipline swinging open like the gates of the hold itself. A large gap two hundred yards across formed across the goblin’s second line of infantry.

Kruggler’s wolf chariots were first out. A stream of night goblins ran past them the other way, retreating and forming up again behind the second line.

Twenty ramshackle carts thundered forward, crammed with goblins firing arrows.

They barely slowed as they slammed into the skaven line, carrying themselves deep into the enemy before their wheels were clogged with broken bodies.

Behind the chariots came a wall of squigs. Goblins were mounted upon some, goading them to great speed. The squigs, irritated beyond measure, leapt high, bouncing all over the battlefield. They bit and snapped wherever they landed, the goblin riders whooping and stabbing. Those unridden formed a wall of teeth, driven on by Fuggrak’s herders.

The view clear, Skarsnik could see his orcs battling against black-clad skaven who had gained the hall from one of the tunnels at the back. There were not many of the skaven, but Skarsnik was glad he had left the big greenskins as a rearguard.

He gave another order. At the blast of a horn, the squigs surged forward, the dread wail of squigpipes and sharp prodders sending them wild. Another blast. More horns joined it. The tunes they played were precise, not the usual blarings of goblin war music, and the goblins responded as they had been trained.

The majority of the fleeing goblins immediately rallied. They quickly redeployed, spears to the fore, and moved forward to re-engage.

The skaven line was strung out, broken by their desire to pursue Skarsnik’s feint. A horde of snotlings poured through tiny holes in the blocked western gates, falling directly onto the heads of the skaven right flank. Skarsnik’s remaining trolls stood in a sea of furry bodies, slapping down ratmen and stuffing their bodies into their wide maws. The skaven tried to bring their own monstrous infantry forward to engage with the stone-skinned monsters, but the way was blocked by the lesser ratmen and the hall’s pillars. Goblin bolt throwers were steadily picking the bigger creatures off.

The squigs ran through the gap in the goblin lines, following the bloody trails carved by the chariots.

The wizard atop his bell shouted at the rat ogre manning it. The giant rodent redoubled its efforts, heaving upon the bell rope with all its might.

‘Take that thing down!’ shouted Skarsnik, brandishing his prodder. His flag wavers fluttered their pennants at the goblin artillery.

Stones clanged off the bell. Spear-sized arrows thunked into its wood. The great rat died with a roar, a bolt through its heart. The bell, impelled by some magical agency, continued to chime.

‘I said, take it down!’

A boulder sailed over Skarsnik’s head, turning gracefully in the air. The skaven wizard’s head followed it. Even from that distance, Skarsnik could see his eyes widen in dismay before he threw himself from his platform.

The boulder hit, destroying the bell’s left support in a shower of splinters. It sagged heavily to the side. Wood creaked as it struggled to support the weight of the bell. With the groan of sundered timber, the bell fell to the floor and rolled in a ruinous semicircle. Skaven ran in all directions as their companions were crushed.

Another horn blast, and Fuggrak revealed his surprise.

An explosion cleared the blocked tunnel entrance Skarsnik had used to such great effect in his previous battle in the throne room. Skarsnik was very much of the opinion that if it worked once, it would work again. This time, he had stacked the odds higher in his favour.

A bellowing and hooting came through the dust. Two wobbling, round shapes came through the hole, teeth shining.

Great cave squigs. Bigger even than Gobbla, chained together at the ankles.

Fuggrak straddled the head of one, more of his herders by his side. Others ran by the creatures’ feet, poking the squigs and goading them in the proper direction.

‘Heheheheh,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Manglers.’

Fuggrak employed his knowledge of squig anatomy expertly, jabbing with his weighty prodder. The squig he sat upon howled in outrage. It tried to bounce away from the source of the pain, but its leap was brought short by the chain holding it to its fellow. It fell back into the other squig with a leathery slap, and immediately began biting at it. The other squig retaliated. Unable to get away from one another, the squigs bounced and bit madly, becoming a frenzied blur of teeth. The goblin herders leapt around them, poking and shouting, driving them into the skaven where the enraged squigs ploughed a bloody furrow.

‘Charge! Charge! Charge!’ roared Skarsnik. His goblins needed little encouragement. The second line broke into a run. The giant came with them, the regrouped night goblins following.

The unruly mobs of the mountain tribes smashed into the skaven, followed by a mass of flapping hoods and pointy spears. There was a crash. For a moment, as the skaven line rocked back, it looked as if it might hold, and then the giant, a massive thing as tall as the hall’s pillars, waded into the skaven, and they broke in terror.

The entire right flank of the skaven army turned tail and fled. The throne room became even more chaotic as goblins broke ranks to hunt down their enemy. Skarsnik gave another order. A horn blast brought Kruggler’s wolf riders out. They passed through the gap in the goblin back line, and went hunting their fleeing quarry with vicious abandon.

Skarsnik looked at the battle. The orcs had despatched the skaven’s infiltrators and were moving up to engage the main body, desperate to get into the real fight. The larger part of the skaven army had fled, but a core remained, some of the more drilled units of the centre, Skruk’s personal bodyguard, and a portion of the left flank and rearguard.

Atop the dais, the skaven warlord Skruk Spittletail had taken up position. His most steadfast warriors were arrayed upon its steps, supported by some of the skaven’s terrible weapons. The skaven’s white-furred wizard was among them, using his spellcraft against Skarsnik’s goblins.

A globe of poisonous gas smashed down near Skarsnik. The skaven were surrounded by the greenskins. They could not retreat, but they were not defeated yet.

‘Right then, Gobbla,’ he said. ‘We got one more job to do.’ He called his skargobboes to him, had a boss round up his trolls, and reordered his lines.

A stone from a war engine demolished a pillar, bringing a tumble of rock down from the ceiling and killing fifty goblins at a stroke as Skarsnik led the charge.

Seven times, Skarsnik assailed the skaven, one assault after another crashing like waves on a rock. His own war machines silenced those remaining to the ratmen quickly, leaving the contest to be decided steel upon steel. The giant scraped ratmen from the steps with its hands. Trolls fought rat ogres, goblins battled skaven, snotlings rolled in the dust with the rats.

In the end, victory was inevitable.

Gobbla bounced from step to step through the depleted ranks of the ratmen, swallowing his foes whole or biting them in half. He dragged Skarsnik after him. The goblin king’s trident blazed with magic. He blasted skaven at close range, lofting them through the air to be smashed upon the cave floor. He stabbed and cut, even the stormvermin were no match for his and Gobbla’s might.

Duffskul was the focal point of a storm of magic below, his duel with the skaven wizard unfinished. The two had turned their attentions upon one another entirely, the rest of the combatants forgotten.

Skruk sat on his palanquin, his bodyguard arrayed about him. Skarsnik and his skargobboes attacked, charging up the last flight of stairs. Several of the big Moonhats were pushed from the edge hard enough to miss the steep steps entirely. They fell screaming to their deaths.

‘Oi, you, Skruk! Come out and fight me like the rat you are!’

Skruk did not move. He stayed upon his throne, he blinked black eyes. His warriors appeared unperturbed by his cowardice. Even a goblin would never be that low. ‘All right then,’ shouted Skarsnik, ‘we’re coming to get ya!’

The ratmen fought as hard as the doomed will. Skarsnik lost many of his biggest goblins to their blades, but in the end, there were too many greenskins for the ratmen to hold back.

The last few ratmen were embattled on all sides by goblin veterans when Skarsnik reached Skruk. The skaven warlord pulled a pistol from his belt. Skarsnik ducked. The bullet took Gobbla in the side. The squig barked in pain and bit the head off a skaven black-fur.

The skaven warlord stood and cast his pistol away. His palanquin bearers lowered him to the floor and moved aside. They went for their own weapons. Gobbla killed them before they were drawn.

‘Very well, green thing, we fight.’ Skruk said. He was steely, unafraid; courage is not the chief virtue of the ratmen, but he had a surfeit compared to others of that ignoble race. He made to draw his sword.

‘Nah, mate, you had your chance,’ said Skarsnik. He jumped forward with speed that surprised the ratman and ran him through with his prodder. Skarsnik’s leap over-balanced them, and Skarsnik fell on top of the ratman.

‘Nyyyyeergh!’ he said, grinding the weapon in the skaven’s gut. The warlord scrabbled at it, his paws growing weak. He coughed a clot of dark blood, and then was still.

Skarsnik stabbed him several more times to make sure he was dead, and then threw back his arms. ‘Hai-eeeeeeeee!’ he screamed, as loud as he could.

The white-furred wizard, protected by the last five of the ratmen alive on the platform steps, twitched his nose. There was a crackle and a pop, and he was gone in a blaze of magic.

Skarsnik grunted out a laugh as the last skaven were felled. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘You can’t kill them all, can you?’ He pulled his prodder from the body of Skruk. He grunted as he lifted the dead warlord in his arms. He walked to the edge of the dais and held the body high. ‘I am the king of the mountain! I am the king of the goblins! I am Skarsnik! These mountains belong to us! To us greenies and no one else! I am Skarsnik, and I is the best!’

He hurled the limp corpse of Skruk from the top of the stairs.

The cavern resounded to the sound of his name.

‘Skarsnik! Skarsnik! Skarsnik!’

Those skaven that could, fled. Many were killed in the tunnels by goblin ambuscade. A large contingent staged a fighting retreat through the hold doors. They gained the surface town, only to find Gorfang and his orcs waiting for them outside the city.

The skaven were wiped out to a rat.

It is said that Gobbla ate so many of the ratmen that day, he had to be rolled from the battlefield like a barrel, and he could not move for a week.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

DROWNING RATS

Kruggler’s project had come to an end.

The river was trapped behind a wall of massive blocks stolen from the city above. Huge stone beams had been dragged by teams of sweating runts and orcs to buttress the dam. Thin spouts of water sprayed from gaps, but the majority of the torrent was contained, backing the river up all the way to the Abyss of Iron’s Dream. The river bed was exposed, smooth and dark as a throat. Water puddled in potholes in the glistening stone, white cavefish swimming blindly hither and yon, unable to comprehend why their world had shrunk so.

Goblins worked with baskets of rubble, blocking the river’s original passage. Day and night, runt teams piled stones high. Skarsnik’s trolls laboured in heavy harnesses, dragging boulders into place to the steady crack of whips and the shouts of goblin runtbosses. The last blocks were being put in place as Skarsnik looked on.

To the left of this second dam blocking the original watercourse, a fresh tunnel had been hacked from the stone, chipped away by industrious goblin engineers to a route scouted by the best pathfinders Skarsnik had. Through sealed galleries and ancient stream beds, old dwarf ways and abandoned greenskin tunnels the new waterway went, each branch blocked where necessary, ensuring the water went exactly where Skarsnik wanted it to go.

At the end of the new river passage, a thin shield of rock had been left in place. Carved with muffled hammers, from the outside, the rock appeared undisturbed, but the stone was eggshell weak, ready to be breached by the coming flood.

The cap on the new waterway was situated directly over where the main skaven thoroughfare opened into the base of the hold.

Skarsnik’s feet slapped through puddles, his robe trailing wet, prodder clacking on the stone. Behind him, the dam spat jets of water, the river in a state of indignation, powerless to do naught else but splutter in protest.

‘This better work, Krugs,’ said Skarsnik. Kruggler shuffled alongside his warlord, one eye on Gobbla. His hand and arm were still bandaged from the battle with Skruk’s army.

‘Should work, boss, these digging gobboes you given us have been hard at it.’

‘Them walls hold?’ Skarsnik pointed to the piles of rubble blocking the old riverbed.

‘How should I know, boss?’ Kruggler scratched at his injured arm. ‘All this creeping about under the hill is not my style.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Thing is, boss, me and the lads were wondering when we could be going home. We had a nice little thing going on down there on the grass.’ Kruggler got a faraway look in his eye.

‘Want to be Griff do you, Kruggs?’ said Skarsnik.

‘No, no, boss. I just want to go and ride me wulloff about and stab things under the sky.’ The plains goblin looked to the ceiling. ‘Not under all this rock. Scares me, so it does, like it’s going to snap shut on me and gobble me up like what Gobbla does.’

Skarsnik stopped. ‘Kruggs, me old mate,’ he said. ‘This mountain has been standing since before the stunties came down here with their picks and that, it’s been here ever since, and it’ll be here a lot longer than us. Even when that goes,’ he pointed at the dam, ‘it won’t fall down.’

‘But, boss…’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ said Skarsnik. He waved his hand. ‘There’s one last thing to do. When that’s done, you and whatever gobboes what likes can go back to your wulloffs and your big carts, all right? But I’m your boss forever, got that?’

‘Sure boss, thanks boss, whatever you say boss.’ The despondent goblin perked up. ‘Kruggler’s boys will always be the gobboes of Warlord Skarsnik!’

Skarsnik smiled wryly. ‘Warlord, eh? I likes that.’

Kruggler looked at his feet, his cheeks and nose tip colouring. ‘I means it, boss. And it’s not just me as is calling you that now. You killing that rattie big boss, Grom hisself couldn’t have done it better.’

Warlord, the highest of all the ranks of orcdom. There have been few goblin warlords in history, so Skarsnik told me proudly, secure in the knowledge that he was one of them. He dared to dream, to be the next Grom the Paunch, but the title spoken out loud almost sounded like an affront to their twin gods. The word hung in the air. For the goblins, this slip of Kruggler’s was as significant and embarrassing as an unexpected kiss between friends who wish to be lovers, but neither dare say.

Skarsnik cleared his throat. ‘Let’s get this sorted shall we? I’ve been waiting to do this for ages.’

The final blocks were slotted into place, plugging the river’s original course with a dam forty feet thick. When freed, the flow of water would not be able to go the way it once had.

Skarsnik gave a nod to his chief engineer, a gnarled old goblin with a thick, leather apron over his black robes and skin pocked by a nasty puffball habit. The engineer nodded to his assistant. His assistant waved a flag. The assistant’s assistant gave a shout. Someone blew a horn. Someone else kicked a snotling. The snotling squeaked.

‘That’s the clear signal, boss,’ said the engineer. ‘Best get out of the way.’

Skarsnik and Kruggler went up rough steps of wood that had been built up the river side. The stairs led to a ledge. The ledge had been created by knocking down the wall to a side tunnel, and had originally been used as a place to dump off the rubble and blocks that had started the dam. Now it was crowded with goblin potentates, all Skarsnik’s bosses, waiting for the show. Over the top of the dam, they could see their new lake, its surface dark and still.

On a ramp that led to another hole in the wall below, runtbosses coaxed harnessed trolls into position with squirming snotlings on spikes. Goblins ran about, hooking up heavy chains to the base of the central stone beam propping up the wall. This done, they waved and hurried away. Other goblins heaved on the chains, pulling them onto fastenings attached to the trolls’ harnesses. Squigpipes blared and drums rolled as the goblins got into a festive mood. Mugs of fungus beer appeared and were handed around. Skarsnik took none of it, his attention fixed entirely on the culmination of his grand project. The trolls looked on, bemused at the activity going on around their enormous feet.

Flags waved, whistles tooted, the goblins in front of the dam ran for cover. Below, alone on the exposed riverbed, stood Grobskab, his glowing blue head tilted back as he looked up to the ledge.

Skarsnik nodded. ‘Let it go! Free the water! Drown the lot of ’em!’

Goblins whooped and a mass of instruments gave voice to a braying cacophony.

Grobskab gave a little salute and marched out of view, hefting a large troll prod. Shouts and the cracking of whips came from below, followed by the deep bass complaints of trolls. The chains clattered, unspooling from the piles they had been laid in and snapping taut so fast water droplets sprang into the air.

The chains hummed with tension. The main beam shifted, the screech of stone on stone drowning out the music and shouts and the racket of trolls. The beam juddered forward, then lodged against a rock, resisting the strength of the trolls for a few seconds.

The beam snapped.

Blocks toppled from their place as the centre of the dam gave, a sheet of water as smooth as rippling silk pushing them aside. More blocks fell as the river pulled at the goblin dam with hands of foam and fury.

With a colossal rumble that must have been heard by King Belegar up in his citadel, the dam collapsed. Rocks the size of carthorses tumbled away like leaves kicked by a child. The freed river burst out of its confinement in a froth of joy. Its snout battered hard at the second dam blocking its old route. Denied egress, it hurried on, slapping angrily at the walls. It sighed as it plunged into the new tunnel, gladly taking the route provided it by the goblins.

All this took place in less time than a single breath, yet for the goblins on the ledge it seemed longer, like they were watching a living creature loosed from a cage. They stood gaping, little red eyes wide, fungus beer forgotten.

The new river bed filled with foaming water that roared and growled.

No one witnessed what happened down in the new waterway, and if there were anyone there they surely died. But we can imagine. The river raced down the tunnel. Stymied at the paths it might more naturally have taken, it thundered on down the goblin-path. By the time it reached the skaven holdings it was moving with the speed of a charging dragon. With hammer-blow force, it hit the weakened tunnel wall, burst through, and poured into the skaven holdings like the very wrath of Gork and Mork.

There were many thousands of skaven killed in the Battle of a Thousand Pillars. Who knows how many remained in those tunnels? They are a numerous breed, and doubtless there were thousands there still as the water poured into their warrens. What did they think as the icy flood thundered upon them? Did they look up in astonishment at the rumble of water, to be swept away seconds later? Did they blame Skarsnik as they whirled in its merciless arms and were drowned? Did their machines die in showers of green sparks as their caverns filled? How far did the torrent go before its impetus was spent and it was reduced once more to a mere river?

Who knows indeed. What Skarsnik did know is that the upper levels of Karak Eight Peaks were forever cleared of the Chaos vermin.

‘Dey never really got over dat,’ he said to me. ‘We got lots ov new tunnels off of dem through dat. Ha!’ he slapped at his thighs. ‘Some of ’em are still under water. I fink dere was sumfink going on down dere. We gobboes like a fight as much as the next fing, but dem skaven! Always scheming and fighting and plotting. For what? When we’s fought, we’s all friends again, but dat lot down there?’ He shook his head. ‘Furry maniacs, da lot of ’em. So anyways, after dat dey was always tryin’ to make deals. So I let’s ’em! Dey is so proud dem skaven, fink dey’re the bosses of da world. I’d make a deal, and den I’d break it. And den some uvver idiot’d come along, and make another deal. So I’d break dat. This war-chief, ’e gets all cocky, so I gets all, “Sorry me lord, oooh, I has been a bad little goblin.” Know what I did?’

He tugged at his chin and winked. ‘I got Fuggrak and his squig boys to round up an ’undred cave squigs. And den we fed ’em all up on fungus beer. Dem skaven are always after monsters and dat, dey is mad for it! So I had dese sleepy squigs, all boozed up, taken down dere, and handed over wiv much hand-wringing and sorry noises. “Ooh, here’s dese special squigs, docile like, sorry about the battle and all that!”’ He sniffed. ‘A day or so laters, da squigs wake up, and boy, are dere heads sore!’ He laughed uproariously. ‘We had us listenin’ pipes in. We lissened and lissened to all dat squeaking and snappin’ and chompin’. Ha!’ he said. ‘We got ’em so good, dat when me boys went to mop up, dere was only like three of ’em ratboys left. Didn’t take long. Sent in some topside orcses to clear ’em off, job done. Den we got to dat big tunnel of deres, dat road dey have. So, I fought to meself, I dun water. What about some fire for da ratties, dry ’em all out nice like? I stacked it high wiv barrels of squig oil and blew da lot. Da roof comes crashin’ in, flames shootin’ everywhere, Kruggler’s boys says you can see ’em whistlin’ up out of holes in da ground all over da mountains. Got meself a bigger place for dat, dey couldn’t get back in, brilliant. And all dose dead ratties, good sproutshroom food dat, so soon I had a load more boys too.’

He nodded at me eagerly. ‘S’good, innit?’ He rubbed his chin. ‘I means, dey was a bit upset after dat, water and squigs and den da fire. Dey stopped trying to make deals den. I mean, dey can only be so stupid, can’t dey?’ He sighed and tapped his fingers on the iron throne. ‘Still, can’t get rid of dem. It’s a real headache, I tells ya. Dey got so many holes, dem skaven, it’s hard to tell where’s they gonna poke up their horrid little pink noses next, and dey always do, they always do! Just when I fink I’ve got ’em on the run, they pop up somewhere else and make all kinds of bother. But they’s out ov da top deeps now, they’s stuck down dere in da dark away from all da best bits, so I don’t care.’

He looked thoughtful for a long time. ‘And now it’s da stunties give me my main troubles. Gor, always coming down here, always looking for a fight. Dey’s easier to deal wiv dan dose ratboys, not so many ov dem, but still…’ He hiccupped. ‘We all likes a big fight, don’t we? Good job too.’ He leaned forward and hissed at me, glancing comically from side to side with mock seriousness. ‘Dere’s a load more on da way! But don’t you worry about me, humie, me and me old mate Gorfang will sort them all out, so we will. Bish, bash, bosh. Mostly bash dough!’ he laughed loudly to himself.

The few of his followers atop that dais ceased laughing long before he did. Finally, he stopped. He wiped a tear from his eye with his finger, and stared down at me.

‘Now then, humie,’ he said. All the humour went from him, just like that, quicker than the water from the dam. ‘That’s me story all done wiv. So what we gonna do about you, eh? What we gonna do about you? You been seeing all right? Not too hard in this dark to write, is it? Humie eyes are weak, ain’t they?’

I laid my pen down. So our interview was over. I swallowed nervously. My stomach cramped, I was still wretched with sickness but to show any weakness then would have doomed me. Skarsnik’s gaze bored into me, those inscrutable red eyes staring at me from the depths of his hood. He looked at me from across the gulf that separates our kinds, a broad gap of charity, mercy, and kindness that divides men from greenskins. But there was understanding in those eyes, a malicious appreciation of my own intellect, and it chilled me to the core.

I was horribly aware that whatever I said next would have the greatest importance to whether I lived or died.

There was half a bottle of Tilean wine left on the table. I grabbed it in my hand, poured, and drank it, I think, in one draught.

‘I am fine, my lord. I can write well enough when the lights are low.’

‘In the dark?’ asked the goblin warlord. He raised his eyebrows, turning one side of his head towards me.

I hesitated, wary of lying to this perceptive king, and nodded.

‘And your ’membrings, I suppose them’s good too, eh?’

I must confess that pride, or maybe the wine, probably both, got the better of me then. My apprehension was put to one side. ‘Oh, yes, my lord, my memory is fine! I am renowned for it, in fact it is a necessary trait in a playwright.’

He looked at me long and hard, his face flinty. He stroked his chin. ‘Right then. I thinks you is telling the truth.’ He waved a hand. Two of his Moonhat goblins appeared at my either shoulder.

I felt a little relief.

‘Make sure you tell all those humies, humie, make sure you tell ’em good, make sure you tell ’em about the king in da mountain. Tell ’em all about me, Skarsnik, tell ’em all about my life, leave nuffink out.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ I said. My heart was in my throat. Was I to be allowed to live?

He dropped down off his throne and came towards me. Gobbla was awake instantly, his massive bulk shuffling around so he could follow his master’s progress with that one, beady eye. He snuffled and grunted. As Skarsnik approached me he let out a long, warning growl.

Skarsnik stood over me, hand on hips. At that dwarf-sized desk, my papers in front of me, I felt like a schoolboy before an angry master. The goblin leaned his outsized head close to my face. He had a strange odour; he was not as filthy as the other goblins, I think he may even have bathed, but he smelled of must and mushroom fields and fox dung and dry leaves long piled in forgotten caves.

‘And then, when you’ve told them all that,’ he whispered, his eyes blazing with menace, ‘tell all the other humies that I’m coming for them too.’ He nodded. It was a nod that demanded a reciprocal nod, an agreement. I obliged.

‘Right.’ He stood up straight and looked to his henchmen. ‘Take him away. You know what to do.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

OUR TALE IS DONE

‘And so, Herr Doktor Wollendorp, Herr Kapitan Meisen, our story is done.’ Bickenstadt’s chains clinked. Meisen prodded Wollendorp. He looked up to see Bickenstadt approaching the bars across the room. Wollendorp drew in a sharp breath when he saw the man to whom they had listened these last two days.

Bickenstadt was a ruin of a human being. He limped, dragging a crushed foot. In hands missing several fingers, he clutched a bundle of dog-eared papers. Those parts of his arms that were visible under his crusty robes were covered in old burns. His head was a mess of scar tissue punctuated with greasy wisps of grey hair. Worst by far was his face. His nose had been slit, and part of it was missing. His cheeks were a criss-crossed mass of knife wounds. And his eyes, his eyes were gone, his hollow sockets filled with knotted scars.

‘Skarsnik was gentle to me, he truly was, he only took my sight. It could have been so much worse.’

Krest stood, suddenly alert. ‘His chains, he has broken his chains! Boy!’ he shouted. ‘Boy!’

‘I pose you no threat. Please.’ Bickenstadt held out the papers. ‘Please take these. It is my life’s work. I have decided, herr doktor, that you should publish them. You and I have enjoyed a fine dialogue. I would be honoured if you were to publish it alongside your account of our interview, a play in four parts, my “Life of Skarsnik”. Talk to Guldenberg at the Orb and Sceptre in Altdorf, he should receive the manuscript gladly. We put on a few shows in our time. I pray he remembers me fondly.’

Krest put a restraining hand on Wollendorp. ‘Do not approach the bars,’ he warned.

‘Do not fear, dear Krest, I will leave it upon the floor, so.’ With trembling hands, he patted the bars and pushed the manuscript onto the floor. He walked away then, towards the fire, as if he would warm himself.

‘Sigmar’s mercy! Where is that boy!’ shouted Krest. He snatched the bell off the table and rang it furiously.

Wollendorp picked up the sheets where Bickenstadt had dropped them. They were covered in near indecipherable spidery writing, overwritten countless times. He peered hard at the sheets, trying to glean some meaning from the mess. His frown cleared, his eyes opened wide.

It was just one name, written thousands of times: Skarsnik.

‘And now,’ said Bickenstadt, ‘if you will excuse me, I am cold.’

How he had done it, the men were at a loss to say, but Bickenstadt had broken his chains and done some mischief to the fine metal grille that prevented him from touching the fire. Previously bolted to the wall, it came free at a touch. He picked it up and put it carefully to one side. Without warning he thrust his hands into the fire and pulled forth two fistfuls of glowing coals. His flesh sizzled. He held the coals in his hands a moment.

‘I have lived too long, I fear, and it is so cold in these caves, so very cold.’

He let the coals drop onto his robes. Flames engulfed him with unnatural speed. The burning man stood a moment; he let out a long, unearthly cackle that ran fingers of dread up Wollendorp’s spine. He held his ruined arms aloft and ran at the window, his burning limbs touching flame to the curtains across it. He could not penetrate the glass, bounced from the wall and fell to the floor ablaze.

‘Gods!’ yelled Krest. In the flames’ light, he became even more raven-like, his eyes black pebbles, his nose a beak. ‘Boy! Boy! Fire! Fire!’

Wollendorp shielded his face. The flames spread as if the room had been soaked in oil.

‘How is this happening?’ shouted Meisen. ‘This is no natural blaze!’

The boy finally arrived. His eyes widened at the disaster unfolding in the room. ‘Get help, sound the alarm!’ shouted Krest. The boy was rooted to the spot. ‘Now!’ Krest said. He grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him out into the corridor.

Wollendorp staggered back. He tripped on the chair. He went down with a shout, banging his head. Meisen quickly had him under the armpits, dragging him backwards.

Wollendorp was never sure if he saw what he thought he saw, but from that day on, a new nightmare joined the endless repetition of Heinz’s kidnap.

A face made of green fire whirled into being, a bone through its nose, a face surrounded by a pointed hood hung with strange charms and ornaments. Wollendorp blinked. The goblin regarded him with a knowing look, winked, and was gone, spun by the fire into other, less recognisable shapes. For only a moment he saw it, but that face stayed with Wollendorp forever after.

Meisen pulled him free of the room and slammed the door on the inferno. Bells clanged. Shouts went up. Every corridor rang with the cries and gibbering of lunatics.

Wollendorp watched the smoke rising from Bickenstadt’s rooms, blending with the morning fog. The fire was out. No major damage appeared to have been done to the schloss; the castle was thick-walled and designed against such exigency, but Bickenstadt’s quarters had been gutted.

‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’ asked Meisen.

Wollendorp turned his attention to the captain. It took a moment for the man’s face to come into focus. He felt so tired, and old. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘What the hells is that supposed to mean?’ Meisen said. The scent of burned flesh and fire had been added to the smells of last night’s wine and unwashed body that he carried with him ordinarily.

‘I mean he told us a playwright’s truth, a heroic truth. His story was far too polished to be entirely fact, and the goblins evidently treated him with greater cruelty than he would admit.’

‘I have seen lesser hurts send a man plain out of his wits.’

‘There you are, then,’ Wollendorp said, too tired to restrain his ire at the captain.

Meisen was undeterred by Wollendorp’s waspishness. ‘So you’re still saying what he told us was like those plays where you see men like the Baron of Unterbergen depicted as playing parts they have no right to claim for themselves?’

‘Exactly so. The siege of the Red Orcschloss took place, did it not?’

‘It did. I was there. At the front, unlike the baron.’

‘And I do not doubt there is a green king in the dwarf halls of the Eight Peaks.’ Wollendorp tucked his hands into his sleeves. He was cold. He felt detached from reality, his mind woolly and slow. ‘But how much else of it is truth? I suppose we will never know.’ Wollendorp shuddered. In part at least, he was glad of that.

Meisen said, after a considered pause, ‘And there was that fire.’

‘There was that fire.’

‘Well, Wollendorp,’ said Meisen with forced cheer, attempting to rekindle some of his former character. ‘I have no idea how pleased the Graf is going to be at receiving our reports, but at least you’ve got yourself plenty of material. Probably as close as you’ll ever get to a real greenskin. Do you still find them so interesting?’

Wollendorp’s anger at Meisen’s assumptions was as wet ash, cold and lifeless, but bitter-tasting still. He stared at the other man until he returned his gaze.

‘When I was nine years old, my cousin Heinz came to live with us,’ said Wollendorp quietly. ‘His father had been killed in the service of Count Marius, and his mother – my mother’s sister – sought company for herself and her boy. I loathed him. He was small and weak and endlessly sick, and all the attention I once had was given to him. “Was he well? Had he triumphed over the hand the gods had dealt him and mastered his classical? How were his letters? Oh, such a good boy, such a clever boy, despite his illness…” On and on and on. To me, it seemed the adults of my household worshipped him, and I was ignored. Nonsense, obviously, but I was young and I was hurt. I prayed vindictively, as I am sure all small boys will, that something would take him away and that I would be the centre of my mother’s life again. I got my wish.

‘The summer of my thirteenth birthday, mother and my aunt sent us both to foster with their brother in Middenheim, where, it was hoped, we would learn some of the skills we would need in later life to be successful gentlemen. They were insistent, against my father’s wishes, who said the roads were too dangerous. My mother won through. But my father was right.

‘On our way through Middenland, our coaches were waylaid by goblin bandits. They rode spiders as big as ponies and took the first coach in our pair and all aboard it. I escaped, my coachman whipping his way through the greenskins and making for the open road. Before we broke free, a monstrous spider grabbed the side of our carriage and Heinz was dragged from the window by the greenskins. He reached for me, but I was paralysed with fear, and did not extend my hand. Then he was gone, and it was too late. We escaped, he was never seen again, alive or dead. Ever since, I have dreamt of that moment, and I wonder what I could have done to stop it, if I could have saved him if only I had reached out. And I wonder too, even to this day, if my prayers were to blame for his death.’

Meisen was uncharacteristically quiet. ‘You seek atonement? Through study?’

Wollendorp began a shrug. He stopped himself. He looked away, at the smoke-blackened walls above Bickenstadt’s cell. ‘Yes. Yes I do.’

Meisen blew out a plume of steam. ‘Well, my friend, we all seek forgiveness for our sins. Me,’ he clapped his hand upon the academic’s shoulder, ‘I look to my soul’s salvation with spirits.’ He smiled, not unsympathetically. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a drink when we get back, you need one, and I do not think we are welcome at Schloss Werdentraum any more, letter from the Graf of Averbad and Nord Wissen or no.’

The yard was crowded with people. A pile of fire-damaged furniture lay broken on the lawn. Where Wollendorp saw faces, they looked back at him with hostility.

‘No, I suppose we are not.’

Wollendorp summoned his coachman, and told him to make the carriage ready. Wollendorp’s servants were as eager to be away as he was, and with unusual speed, the coach horses were hitched and the vehicle brought out of the coach house into the courtyard.

Wollendorp, soot streaked and weary, climbed into his carriage without a word. When Meisen was aboard they began their journey back to Averheim.

On the way home, neither of them spoke.

HEADTAKER

David Guymer

PROLOGUE

It had been a good trap.

Despite the simplicity of its conception – which was only to be expected from simple minds – it had not lacked a certain ham-fisted elegance in its execution, and now the grand Feasting Hall of Karak Azul was transformed into an arena of death. Blood slicked the roughly worked basalt tiles like warm mead. Trophies of war and peace had been torn from their wall mounts and lay strewn about. Some were spattered with blood, ancient weapons and wooden plaques still embedded in the shattered skulls of the dwarfs they had slain. Others lay chipped and broken, battered by orcish hands into the carved reliefs that ringed the hall until they all fell shattered about the dead.

The screams of dying dwarfs mingled with the cries of their vengeful kin, those few still battling to be heard above the animalistic grunts of the encircling orcs. The struggling torchlight threw the brutish warriors in and out of darkness and cast skeletal shadows of the upturned and sundered remains of wooden furnishings onto the carved walls. From those same walls looked back the broken faces of grim ancestors, patterned with wavering stripes of dark and light like the strokes of a lash.

‘For Kazrik!’ bawled one of the dwarfs, crushing an orc skull with a swing of his improvised weapon, a wooden pin more suited to rolling pastry than battling greenskins. ‘For Karak Azul!’ he cried again, as an orc scimitar impaled him through his unarmoured, flour-dusted chest.

The dwindling circle of dwarfs tightened still further, as hard and resolute as rocks before the remorselessly rising green tide. The orcs bellowed with bellicose joy, every grunt and shout edged with their impatience to hurl themselves against the faltering dwarfs. Those in the front ranks laughed as they threw themselves into the fray. They continued to grin, even as repurposed kitchen knives and blacksmiths’ hammers stove in heads and ribs and hacked limbs from powerfully muscled bodies, all while those caught behind hollered and roared, desperate for their turn. The din rang through the vast hall, circling the one-sided contest like a jackal, harrying at the scrap of shadow that clung to the extinguished torches of the north wall.

It was as if it could smell the skaven that trembled there.

Sleek watched the bloodletting, his upper lip twitching with every fractured bone and bloodied hammer. The scent of death was appalling and heady: spilled blood and warm meat, voided bowels and sweat. His tail swept the basalt flags of its own accord as it was wont to do when he was anxious. And, by the cruel grace of the Horned Rat, was he anxious!

The stupidity of these dwarfs!

He stamped his paw, trying to funnel his helpless panic towards anger, claws scraping pale tracks in the dark rock.

It was common knowledge that the dwarf-things were a race of limited intelligence, possessed of a rudimentary cunning perhaps, a base instinct with metals and stone, but lacking true intellect, and here was the proof of it. No skaven would ever have been duped by such a blatant ploy. He had wisely hidden himself at the first scent of the green-things. He had watched as they dragged in kettle drums made from beaten breastplates before setting about them with bronze-headed mallets and a bestial enthusiasm to create an unholy din from which his ears were yet to recover.

He didn’t know what the dwarfs had been thinking, or whether thoughts had ever intruded into their flat, stubby heads, but in they had charged with scarcely a weapon between them. They had even had the temerity to look surprised as a horde of green-things spilled from behind pillars and vandalised statues to smash into their rear.

Yes, he thought bitterly, it had been a good trap.

Another dwarf fell, turning a graceless pirouette as a black-fletched arrow ripped through his leather skullcap.

Sleek shuffled anxiously on the spot, torn between the desire to flee and the need to hide. Why couldn’t the selfish dwarf-things just hurry up and die, and then the green-things would move on? They were beaten. He knew it. They knew it, yet on they fought, as though their own lives meant nothing. Sleek knew this was yet more evidence of the turgid thinking of the dwarfs, their inability to feel such decent skaven emotions as fear or its drive to honest self-interest. He knew this, yet part of him couldn’t help but admire them for their stalwart refusal to panic and die as they should.

A particularly barbaric roar assaulted his still-tender ears, followed by the metallic crunch of a dwarf breastplate crumpling beneath an orc mace.

Sleek winced. Time to move.

‘Hurry-scurry, quick-quick,’ he squeaked, comforted by the sound of his own voice as he sidled along the length of wall. Sleek pressed close to the wall, as if by proximity and effort alone he might force his way into the mortar and between the hard dark stones. His wet snout misted the stone with each panicked breath, a visual reminder, if any were needed, of the heart that pounded within his chest. It raced a little faster as he spotted the bulging cloth sack that lay undisturbed at the edge of the battle.

Good. He would not want to survive the green-things, only to return to the City of Pillars without the warlord’s treasures.

The sack lay unattended in the middle of the floor, exactly where he had dropped it in his fright. He sniffed nervously at the battle that raged around it. He would have felt better about reaching out to lay his paws on the Chaos moon. Gripping hold of the wall with both trembling paws behind him, Sleek sank to the floor, lying flat on his back and stretching out a leg towards the bag, but it was just out of reach. His snaking tail strained to coil itself about the shoulder strap but to no avail.

Thwarted, he scrambled back against the wall. He stared longingly at the heavy sack, willing it closer. Sleek started as the nearest green-thing received a crossbow bolt between the eyes. He gave a short scream, ducking from cover as the orc-thing’s heavy body crashed against the wall where he had just been, squealing again as he looked beyond its fallen bulk at the bloody-bearded dwarf sighting right for him down the track of his crossbow. His claws skittered horrifyingly loudly on the hard floor as he scurried through the fray to his treasure’s side. He heaved the sack over his shoulders, swaying unsteadily under the sudden weight. Nose twitching in the thick fug, he glanced about, but the dwarf he had spotted had disappeared into the riot of bodies and nobody else seemed to be paying any attention to the dark-furred skulker in their midst. He risked a nervous titter.

He had always been a lucky rat.

Keeping on all fours, he scrambled for the great colonnaded hallway he had arrived by. The entry was not far, he could see it behind the hulking shoulders of the crazed orc-things. He paid no heed to stealth now, escape was his only desire, the taste of freedom like nectar on his whiskers. Heart in his mouth, Sleek abandoned the charnel chamber at a sprint. Closing his eyes, he fled the hall as though a pack of howling daemons were on his tail. Broken columns and vandalised statues passed in a blur. Screams pursued him as if they blamed him personally, their death cries seeming to issue from the very walls themselves.

Throughout Karak Azul, the dwarf-things were dying.

He scrambled to a halt at a junction marked by a towering stature of a dwarf-thing queen. Frantically, Sleek commanded his memory into some kind of order.

Left at the breeder-thing.

He stared at the statue. Was this the one he had passed? It looked different; its sceptre was missing, its eyes crudely gouged from an impassive face, its limestone crown riddled with holes.

Curse these orc-things. They are like children. They can leave nothing alone!

Still cursing he hurried left, on down a widening corridor. The statuary was becoming larger and ever more ornate, sculpted from finer rock with eyes picked out in precious stones and very real rune-encrusted axes in their stony grips. Sleek cringed impulsively, feeling the weight of their combined stares on his back. Instinctively, he gravitated towards one wing of the passage, weaving between the giant pillar-like legs of the colossal statues as he ran.

He scampered towards a doorway. Like everything else here, it was vast, towering upward in reach of a ceiling he could not even see. The gate was ajar and firelight flickered intermittently on the other side, throwing wavering shafts of light that grasped at the marble flags like a tortured soul. Foam flecking his lips from exhaustion and terror, he crashed bodily into the wooden frame. His claws scrambled at the reassuringly solid thing as he wheezed. Pressing his muzzle close, he smelt red paint and rich pine, his claws seeking solace in the strong bands of iron that crossed it.

The door shook with a violent tremor and Sleek squealed softly. He didn’t even want to be warlord of Eight Peaks. It was a foolish ambition. He just wanted to go home. He’d even give the warlord all of the treasure instead of keeping the best for himself.

He recoiled from a sudden uproar as the chamber beyond erupted with brutish snorts and cries, a hundred orcs or more howling in approval and stamping their heavy feet into the stone floor. Sleek sank to the floor with paws clutched to his ears as the din grew impossibly louder. The orcs were working themselves into some kind of frenzy, brutal cheers working their way through coarse, animal throats accompanied by the pounding of weapons on shields.

A single dwarf screamed, the sound of his agony rising above the din like a struck bell pealing above an angry crowd.

Unable to resist a look, Sleek poked his snout around the gate, blinking in the sudden glare. The vision that greeted him almost made him choke and he jerked back. The afterglow left purple stars swimming before his eyes. Numbly, he blinked them away as his heart, unheeded, threatened to leap from his throat and skitter across the floor.

No way out that way.

‘Away-run!’

Without a backward glance, he hurtled back the way he had come, trying not to think of what he had seen. Hulking orcs in thick black armour with weeping red fangs daubed in blood. A throne and… Sleek shook the vision from his head. The very memory made his paws quiver and his pace unsteady. The image returned. He couldn’t help himself. It had been, quite simply, the largest orc he had ever seen, and easily the most terrifying. The monster had had his back to him, fixated on the throne and whatever broken dwarf-thing he had glimpsed upon it. Another scream sounded. It echoed through the cavernous passage as the giant beings of stone took up the call as their own. Sleek picked up his pace. Flattening his ears against the rising screams, he hastened on, returning at last to the ruined breeder-thing.

That left only one way.

He took the last passage that was open to him, hoping against hope that his luck still held and that it might lead him to a way out.

He accelerated into a terrified gallop, not noticing until far too late the pale, worm-like thing that snaked out from behind one of the massive grey pillars. It wrapped around his ankle and, with a deft tug, yanked his flying feet from the ground. He fell heavily, his pack tearing open as his snout ploughed into the ground, haemorrhaging coins and jewels and the looted treasures of Karak Azul as he skidded and rolled across the flags. His back slammed into a pillar, forcing a moan of pain.

Dizzily, he sat upright, clutching his empty pack to his ribs like a salve. His vision swam, coalescing around a leering brown-furred face, a rusted dirk held perilously close to Sleek’s throat.

‘Sneaky-Sleek. Thought you lost-dead.’

‘Fast-quick you run-flee from orc-things, Tiklisp. You make a terrible-poor sentry-rat.’

Tiklisp looked unrepentant. ‘You know the old saying. The rat who runs away…’

‘Calm-still, Tiklisp,’ squeaked another voice. ‘Warlord say-squeak no kill-kill. Dwarf-things not to know we come-steal.’

Fangleader Ratklett stole from the shadows with a paranoid gait, freezing and looking over his shoulder with every distant scream.

‘Warlord not need know. Think-think. More reward for us, yes?’

‘No-no!’ hissed Ratklett, planting a heavy, black-furred paw on the slighter skaven’s shoulder and dragging him firmly back. ‘Warlord says no kill-kill.’

Tiklisp bared his fangs in annoyance, toying with the dagger in his paws before evidently realising the foolishness of challenging two skaven twice his size. He lowered the knife and treated Ratklett to his most contrite expression before turning to grovel at Sleek’s feet. ‘Tiklisp did not mean for Sleek to get lost. Tiklisp simply try-make a distraction for scary orc-things. Lucky Sleek-sneak always Tiklisp’s favourite.’

Sleek growled, too anxious even for the flattery of his lessers to soothe his nerves. He shoved the whining ratman off him and hauled himself to his feet. ‘Just help-help gather gold-treasure, or I tell-squeak the warlord that coward-meat Tiklisp lost it.’

The wiry skaven leapt to obey. Even Ratklett momentarily dropped his guard to help gather dwarfish riches in his paws and speed them on their way. In no time, Sleek’s pack was bulging once again and the three of them were padding through desolate hallways. The screams came infrequently now, ringing hollowly from distant halls. Sleek hoped this was a good sign. Articles of clothing lay where they had been dropped, ledgers sat open in creeping puddles of ink, bowls of steaming broth rested untouched on abandoned trestles.

The dwarfs had rushed to the defence of their kin. They had dropped everything to go to their deaths.

Sleek looked about nervously. Karak Azul was a veritable labyrinth and he was assuredly lost. Only the confidence of Ratklett reassured him as the larger skaven hurried down the darkened corridor, tapping his claws periodically against the walls while silently counting off paw-steps under his breath. Sleek suffered a pang of searing jealousy. Ratklett was always much deeper in the warlord’s confidence. It was so unfair, particularly when Sleek was evidently the more loyal and trustworthy skaven. Yet another reason why he deserved to be warlord.

Ratklett paused at a section of wall, pressing his ear against the stone as he tapped out a fractured melody with his claws. A smug look lit up his eyes as he felt around the stretch of wall. Evidently finding what he sought, Ratklett slammed his fist into the wall, and the block beneath his paw depressed. There was a mechanical whir and Sleek jolted back as the whole section of wall suddenly recessed. A grinding of ancient gears followed as the secret door rose unsteadily up into the wall.

Sleek breathed deeply of the stale air that gusted from the opening.

Home.

He glanced at Ratklett, who glared back, challenging, ‘You first-first.’

He bobbed his head, indicating subservience, and turned to Tiklisp, shoving him in ahead. Sleek followed as Ratklett claimed the place of honour at the rear. Sleek sensed Ratklett hanging back, striking the wall with a different routine to bring the door crashing back down.

The passage angled downward into the heart of the mountain. The darkness was absolute, not even a glimmer of illumination escaping the seals of the door to Karak Azul. Sleek followed Tiklisp’s colour-bleached outline as the smaller skaven scurried ahead. These tunnels were unfamiliar, and the dwarfish a klinkarhun markings that were carved with a precise regularity into the stone walls were of no use whatsoever to one who could not read them.

The dwarfs had abandoned this tunnel long ago; that much was plain. It was unfinished, and he knew that no dwarf-thing would ever leave their works in such disrepair. No matter. The rock beneath Karak Azul was a veritable ant’s nest of tunnel-ways, not to mention the ancient dragon caves that sprawled even deeper still. They all connected somewhere, if a skaven was clever enough to find his way. Somewhere down here was the trail to Black Crag, and then home.

Already, Sleek found himself breathing more easily.

‘Tiklisp. Hold-wait.’

The brown-furred clanrat turned and then gasped, looking down in mute surprise at a dwarfish short sword buried in his chest, angular runes pulsing with a baleful blue light in time to the skaven’s fading heartbeat. He looked up, his mouth working frantically to frame words. ‘But, the warlord says–’

Sleek twisted the hilt, enjoying the lesser rat’s piteous moans. ‘We are not in Azul-Place any more.’

Tiklisp pawed weakly at the ensorcelled blade until his arms went limp. The body slid from Sleek’s sword with a satisfyingly wet note.

He bent down to collect the small skaven’s bag of loot. It was smaller and lighter than his own, and he could easily carry both. He turned to watch Ratklett’s approach, careful to conceal the stolen dwarfish weapon. The fangleader would undoubtedly demand it for himself if he should see it, and Sleek was going to need it if he truly wished to become warlord someday.

The larger skaven looked as though he would protest Tiklisp’s killing, but in the end he merely shrugged. ‘More-more for us,’ said the fangleader, echoing the unlamented Tiklisp’s earlier sentiments.

Sleek nodded excitedly, turning to hurry on his way. Passages branched off to left and right, both rising upward and sinking down. At each junction he paused briefly and sniffed, ignoring some, scampering down others, deep instinct and distant ratkin spoor drawing him ever further into the earth. Behind him, like a shadow in the dark, Ratklett said nothing. Sleek was thankful for the heavy pack across his shoulders that shielded him from a blade in the back. Nevertheless, he felt his fur itch, the mound of treasure piled atop his shoulders rattling invitingly before Ratklett’s following eyes like a red rag to an Estalian bull.

He just needed a little longer. And then everything would be different. The Eight Peaks would have a mighty warlord, and generations of whelps would be taught to fear the name Sleek.

His eyes roved the blackness, gleaming red pinpricks unravelling the shadow as though it were day. These were familiar tunnels again. They had come this way. He searched the ground in a panic. What if some green-thing had found it? It would be so typical of them to have stumbled upon it with their magpie eyes and moved it and…

And there it was, nestling in the loose earth where he had left it like a golden egg.

‘Wait-stop,’ he squeaked, waving to Ratklett to slow as he stooped to pick the object from the ground.

‘What is it? What do you find-smell? Give-give. Ratklett is leader, I get the good-best to give the warlord.’

Sleek tried to hide his pleasure as he thumbed the sliding switch in the object’s side before planting it in his superior’s paw.

Irritably, Ratklett brushed his subordinate’s paw from his and raised the object to his snout. It was a brass orb, smooth and perfectly spherical, seeming to twist in his paw as interlocking cogs whirred in opposing directions. Curious, he gave the device a shake. It gave off a faint, tantalising whisper of warpstone, and it seemed to be ticking.

He lowered his paw, glancing up to witness the rapidly receding shape of Sleek’s back, his waving tail offering an un-fond farewell.

He looked back down as the ticking stopped. It was the last he saw before reality screamed apart in his paws and the world turned black.

Let it be known to all that on this day the blackest of marks is made against the squatter king of Black Crag. By the most heinous of urk treachery did he breach the forgotten ways of Karak Azul to perpetrate the most egregious of crimes against King Kazador and the dawi of the Iron Peak. No oaths, no deeds, no acts of vengeance shall ever efface this shame. The king does brood, night and day, refusing both ale and rest, to the point where one less vigorous must surely wither. Even the rune-sealment of the last of those lost tunnels by Handrik Hallgakrin, captain of his Ironbreakers, summoned naught but outright prohibition of celebration until these wounds were repaid in the black blood of the urk.

The king does seal himself from his subjects and will not speak on such matters, but the Grudge price must be set and so it shall be.

For the desecration of the Third Deep: one thousand urk heads.

For the lost lives of two hundred and thirteen dawi in defiance of such barbarism: two thousand urk heads.

For the abduction of Queen Morga, the lustre of Azul, and those others of King Kazador’s blood: their safe return with five thousand urk heads, or the restoration of their remains to the Ancestor Chambers of Karak Azul and no fewer than six thousand of the greenskin dead.

Of Kazador’s son, the king does forbid our speaking beyond the pages of the kron. The prince is no longer of sound mind and the king does command his confinement until he can be found recovered. Let it be known that that for the brutal shaming of brave Prince Kazrik upon the very seat of the Iron Throne itself, King Kazador will accept no price. May this grudge against the urk of Black Crag stand forevermore.

The greatly wronged king did then rouse from his grief to issue one mighty decree: half his wealth to any that returns his lost kin, and the pick of his own treasures to any that can avenge his son’s torture upon the squatter king. The thanes did each raise voice against so rash and unprecedented an oath, but the king, so mined of passion that even the wealth of Karak Azul could afford him no joy, was resolute.

Thus is it recorded, and by Grimnir let it soon be done.

– The Karak Azul Book of Grudges
By Logan, Loremaster of Karak Azul, on behalf of King Kazador

CHAPTER ONE

Sharpwit was annoyed, and growing more so by the moment. He doubted the dolt knew who he was, but that just incensed him all the more. He should know. All skaven should. He fixed the mouse-faced functionary with his most intimidating stare.

‘What do you mean-say he is not here? He was sent messages every day since our leaving Skavenblight. He knows full well to meet-greet at this place at this time.’ To his increasing irritation the wiry, brown-furred skaven merely shrugged, betraying an infuriating lack of humility towards his betters.

All around him, skaven pushed and jostled, filling the hall to overflowing with scrambling, biting, backstabbing bodies, their susurrant chittering an ocean of noise. This was one of the busiest routes in the entirety of the Underway, that vast tangled nest of tunnels that festered within the crust of the world. At its heart were the ancient routes of the dwarfs’ Ungdrin road, but since that race’s fall it had spread far and wide like an organic, cancerous thing. No skaven truly knew how many lairs and warrens could be reached by the Underway, for new routes opened every day while old ones – and some not so old – collapsed with equal regularity. Sharpwit would not mourn the countless lives snuffed out every moment in such incidents but, gazing upward at the monolithic pillars and vaulted ceiling that stood as sturdy today as they had seven thousand years ago, he was thankful that his life was currently in the hands of good dwarfish engineering.

Taking a tight hold on the splintered grip of his crutches, he wove his head from side to side, striving for a good look at the damnable skaven, but the pest kept dodging away from his sole remaining eye. Sharpwit had long since resigned himself to losing what little sight he had left and the creature was blurrily lost in shadow. No matter. He would recall the creature’s scent and exact the most satisfying of reprisals at his leisure. He sighed, breaking into a fit of coughing that spattered the back of his balding paw with flecks of blood and gobbets of mysterious fleshy tissue. When the fit passed he flicked out his tongue to reclaim the lost flesh from his fur.

Squeaking a muffled curse at the indolence of all skaven, he buried his paws in the pockets of his jerkin. A stunning azure trimmed with scarlet and black brocade, it was cut from the finest fabrics of dwarf and elf and human design and amended to skaven needs by the most talented slaves in Skavenblight. That alone should have alerted this dullard to his rank, but evidently Clan Mors bred them for brawn over brains these days. His ferreting paws settled on the object he sought. If the idiot would not respond to threats, he would respond to this!

He withdrew the pendant and displayed it smugly to the skaven guard. It was a jet black disc with twelve claw-scratch symbols set into the outer circumference. Each denoted one of the mighty Lords of Decay and at its centre, shaped from ruby, was the thirteenth symbol, that of the Horned Rat himself. It symbolised the Council’s authority and should have had simple-minded cretins like this one begging to learn how they might please him. Instead, the skaven licked his lips with unchecked avarice, glancing shiftily at his companions in the rickety guard shack, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to extort outrageously inflated excise on the endless stream of traffic headed into the City of Pillars.

Sharpwit felt their eyes on him, assessing his worth. He noticed a shift in the skaven around him as ratkin who had been trying to look inconspicuous admiring the architecture took full advantage of the guards’ distraction to make a break for the tunnels beyond their shack. The excise-rats squeaked threats and scrambled after them, the whole system descending into anarchy as those skaven more cautious still swarmed the gaps left by the busy tariff-takers. The brown-furred excise-rat ignored the snarling riot at his back as though it were all in a day’s work, which it likely was, and shuffled closer to Sharpwit.

Sharpwit’s heart thudded arrhythmically. He knew what he looked like: a haggard hunchback with one eye gouged from his face amidst a mess of scar tissue, the other clouded with cataracts. He limped with the aid of a pair of worm-eaten crutches and had barely enough brittle, bleached fur on his withered frame to clothe the skinniest of whelps. He was old, but he was still an agent of the Council of Thirteen. He was their chosen. He bore their mark.

Young skaven today, he thought disdainfully.

He lashed out with one crutch, catching the guard a crunching blow to the kneecap. The skaven squealed in agony and toppled to the earth at Sharpwit’s paws. Hobbling closer to the mewling ratman, he allowed his full weight to be borne by one crutch, using the other to stab vindictively at the guard’s shattered knee. Weeping with pain and contrition, the skaven tried to roll away, to shield his knee with his body, but Sharpwit would not let him, maintaining the pressure and forcing the penitent skaven’s knee into the ground. The guard howled, begging mercy, his cries working like magic to open an expanding hole in the otherwise unbroken press of dodging and hurrying bodies.

From the corner of his eye he scanned for the other excise-rats, in case any fool should consider coming to their comrade’s aid, but they were nowhere to be seen. They had blended so successfully into the continually flowing masses of furry bodies that it was almost as if they had never been.

He grinned cruelly, illuminating his face in the shadow-light of the warpstone prostheses that stabbed from his diseased gums, rising like menhirs above the blackened ruins he could not yet afford to replace. The injured rat jabbered unintelligible remorse, quailing like a man-thing child stolen from its mother. Good. That would be one more worthless rat taught to respect his elders.

‘Tell-squeak again where Queek is.’

Queek gripped the haft of Dwarf Gouger tightly as the weapon smashed home. The impact thumped up his arm, a beautiful electricity that sent sparks of delirium flying through his mind. He watched the dwarf’s eyes go dark and savoured the moment. He squealed his triumph and wrenched back, heavy gauntlets of warpstone and scarlet steel grinding around the grip of the spiked maul that had embedded in the dwarf’s helm. His biceps strained, muscles rippling beneath coarse black fur. The dwarf rose partway off the ground, feet dangling, arms flapping like the wings of some overweight flightless bird before the gore-slickened spike at last came free. The lifeless body crashed to the ground between his footpaws.

It was so beautiful.

A scream dragged him from his reverie.

Another dwarf fell, guts drooling over the blade of a halberd. He snarled at the unwanted interruption, hissing at a stormvermin as the dark-furred warrior tugged his weapon loose. The stormvermin slunk back and Queek glared after him. For an instant of confusion he forgot where he was, reality reasserting itself in a riot of colours and sounds; screams, blood, shattered armour, the scavenged, russet-dyed livery of his warriors as they ducked and flowed around the dour, grey-cloaked dwarfs, the ripple and crack of warplock jezzails. Of course, he reminded himself, another of the dwarfs’ mine workings.

How many holes into the Eight Peaks would Belegar and his dwarfs burrow before learning that there was no hiding place from Queek?

He could smell them.

He took a deep breath, relishing the scent of blood and fear, all of it mingled with the delicious tang of warpstone. Rusted chains hung from the ceiling, swaying with the ebb and flow of battle, the corroded metal gleaming darkly with the reflected glow of a dozen fires. Great stacks of coal burned in pyres, although whether they had caught a stray warpstone shell or been deliberately set alight to upset skaven dark vision and cloud keen skaven noses was a mystery.

The dwarfs had certainly been prepared this time. Rocks and scree and upturned carts had been piled into barricades, channelling the skaven hordes into killing zones and choke points to die by the axe and by the quarrel. Queek watched as a score of clanrats attempted to surmount one such barricade. Rather than defend their position, the dwarfs leapt clear and an instant later, just as the skaven were trilling their triumph, that section of barricade erupted in a geyser of rock shards and dirty flame. The explosive force of the concealed blackpowder device fired still-celebrating skaven high into the air. Body parts mingled with blasted rock, plummeting to earth like rain.

Even standing a hundred tail-lengths from the blast, Queek staggered under the shockwave. The aftershock sounded thunderously through the ancient mine, echoing through arterial tunnels and buried shafts like a systolic rhythm.

Queek took it all in and grinned. Yes, it was good to be Queek.

His gaze returned to the ruined corpse at his footpaws with an expression almost of love. He crouched down, reaching out to paw at the auburn beard that had become tangled and knotted with blood. The gooey blood came away in his claws and he licked at it hungrily as he whispered: ‘Who kills you, dwarf-thing?’

Lowering his head, he pressed his ear to the dead dwarf’s lips. He smiled at the words he heard, crooning with delight as he gathered the dwarf’s limp head into the crook of his arm, rocking the bloody thing like a fretful child. ‘That’s right, dwarf-thing. You kill-slay by Queek Headtaker!’

The warlord bared his fangs and plunged them into the dwarf’s throat, spitting out ringlets from its gorget as he gnawed down to the spine. There was a snap of bone and Queek felt the head fall slack in his lap. Gripping it with both hands, he tugged, twisting from side to side as it fought wetly against his strength, strands of flesh and ligament sucking loose as it came free.

Queek stood, raising the dripping head so it was level with his own. Its eyes stared emptily into his and he returned its gaze, tracing a claw over the contours of its face. He held his newly claimed trophy aloft, showing it the battle that raged around him. ‘Tell them, dwarf-thing!’ he yelled. ‘Tell the Eight Peaks that invincible Queek comes for them!’

An insistent whisper worried at his ear, and he cocked his head to listen. He reached up with his sword paw to offer a reassuring pat to the three gnawed skulls that followed proceedings. From atop wooden spars affixed to a stanchion on his pauldrons, the skulls followed the battle with keen interest. ‘Yes-yes, you are right. Dwarf-thing falls too easy. Only strongest-best can come-stay.’

Opening his fist, he allowed the fresh head to roll free, already forgotten as it bounced clear, rolling between a clanrat’s legs and out towards the continuing carnage. Queek shoved the skaven warrior out of his way. ‘What do you wait for, coward-meat? Queek shows how dwarf-meat die-die!’

Perhaps two dozen dwarfs, barely a third of what they had once been, stood shoulder to shoulder, shields locked into a wall of iron. Axes and hammers flashed over the shield wall as spear-rats ventured too close. Furry bodies and broken spears fell in pieces at the dwarfs’ feet as the line edged ever backward, the rhythmic beat of dwarfish boots on rock like a drumbeat in time to the dwarfs’ retreat.

Queek barged his way through the milling skaven, those too craven or too wily for the front ranks, and, with a shrill challenge, flung himself bodily onto the shield wall. He saw a pair of eyes widen as he shot from the press of clanrats: icy blue gimlet stars beneath an iron helm, white beard frothing from the open face. The dwarf ducked and angled his shield to meet Queek’s strike. The warlord’s spiked maul drove hard into its steel boss, cleaving through the shield as if it were ratskin parchment, the steel rim buckling around the old dwarf’s pulped fist. The longbeard gritted his teeth in dour defiance and spat in Queek’s face as the warlord followed through, running his serrated blade through his belly.

He had the nagging thought that there was somewhere else he was supposed to be, but he buried the thought along with Dwarf Gouger in the helm of another dwarf.

He was Queek, and he was always exactly where he wanted to be.

Sharpwit stepped away from the squirming functionary at the sound of armoured paw-steps clanking from his rear. The instinct to spin around and grovel was immediate, but he suppressed it with a great effort. He struggled to ignore the seep of musk down his inside leg, cursing aged glands and wizened sphincters both. The flesh between his shoulder blades crawled, seeking sensibly to cower from imagined blades beneath what scraps of fur remained.

But he held firm, with only the barest shiver of effort. It was important they remember who he was.

At the last moment, point made, he turned, his milky eye appraising the three muscular skaven. Even after several days on the Underway, Sharpwit struggled to tell them apart. Their fur was as white as the hides of tunnel-bred man-thing slaves; their ears, paws and tails an anaemic pink. They were albino stormvermin, the elite warriors of the Thirteen, the best of the very best, their presence as much a seal of authority as the token he carried in his paw. The warriors were mute, the better to keep their masters’ secrets, but they bore with them a wordless ferocity that would have had Sharpwit quivering with glee at the power at his command.

Would have, he thought resentfully, had they been at his command.

Behind the broad shoulders of the albinos, Sharpwit noted the approach of the extravagant palanquin of their glorious leader. From Sharpwit’s vantage it seemed to ride the skaven masses like an ocean barge, swaying with the footsteps of its bearers. The effort of eight wiry skavenslaves bore it aloft and two score more trailed with bowed heads in its wake. The bare-furred chattels dragged behind them great mats woven from the black bulrush stalks of the Blighted Marshes, bearing crates heaped with warptokens, weapons, supplies and other assorted sundries required by the Council’s emissaries.

As discouragement to prying eyes and loose paws, the supply train was flanked by surly black-furred warriors in mismatched armour bearing a host of fearsome-looking, if not entirely practical, weapons. Sharpwit caught the eye of the broadest of the bunch, a scar-faced skaven called Toskitt who led this band of Clan Rictus thugs. Toskitt had the good sense to look away rather than meet Sharpwit’s gaze. Toskitt, at least, knew who he was, who he’d been, and who he now served. He knew enough to be afraid. He watched with amusement as Toskitt covered his own discomfiture by slamming the haft of his poleaxe onto a passing skaven’s paws, loudly accusing the poor creature of stealing.

Sharpwit looked away, content to let the Clan Rictus clawleader have his moment, allowing the gurgling squeals of the clanrat to wash over him as he focused his rheumy eye on the palanquin. He’d heard it said that the curtains were of purple satin, weighted with gold and platinum thread and picked out with tiny pins of jade, resembling the phosphorescent algae in the bottomless warpstone wells of Karak Varn. No matter how hard he squinted, he could see nothing but grey, as if colour had fled the world, its borders beset by an encircling legion of shadow. The slaves set it down carefully before scurrying back to hide themselves among the other slaves. None wanted to be present to suffer for any sores their master had endured on the journey here.

Sharpwit scratched his muzzle irritably as he waited for the skaven to emerge. He had hoped to get to Queek first, to prepare him in some way for this encounter. He suppressed the urge to sigh. Some things could not be prepared for.

The curtain of the palanquin was tossed aside by the brass-banded ash of a sorcerer’s staff. The albinos knelt down and pressed their muzzles to the dirt. Sharpwit, whimpering at the fiery needles from his arthritic knees, struggled to do likewise. He was a proud skaven. He had seen much in his long life and achieved more, not that any now remembered, but he was not above a tremor of fear at the chilling aspect of the skaven that climbed free of its palanquin.

His fur was pure white. Not in the colourless sense of the albino stormvermin, but rather like the radiant glare of a furnace that burned with the heat of a fanatic’s devotion, marred only by the black sigil of the Great Horned One that the zealot had branded into his own cheek. His robes, also white, were cinched at the waist and wrists with golden circlets, each inscribed with insidious scratchings bearing the thirteen secret names of the Horned Rat. His black horns, a sure sign of his god’s favour, were bedecked with tinkling chimes, while his gaunt neck was hung with yet more talismans and charms both magical and mundane.

The grey seer planted his staff firmly into the earth, leaning on it with both paws as he glared down at his minions, Sharpwit included.

With every ounce of willpower, Sharpwit tried to meet the seer’s gaze, but couldn’t. His eye seemed dragged away by those of the Horned Rat himself, his likeness rendered in pure warpstone atop the sorcerer’s staff.

‘You are quick-quick for such an old-thing. I shall keep eyes on you. What business could you have that demands I not hear-smell, hmmm?’

‘Grey Seer Razzel, most-wise prophet of the Horned Rat. The divine glory of his chosen should not sully paws in such inauspicious of tunnel-ways.’

Razzel preened under the blatant flattery. ‘Where then is Queek? Did you not send-send runners-rats as you were told-bid?’

‘Yes-yes. One each day as I was, in your wisdom, commanded.’

The grey seer shook his head, sorrowfully. ‘Is so sad. That one so high in the Council’s graces as Queek can fall-fall so far from the Horned Rat’s smelling.’

Heaving himself up on his crutches, Sharpwit struggled to his feet, wheezing heavily as he leant on their support. Razzel regarded him with an expression of amusement as he recovered himself.

‘Queek… remains the favoured of… of the clanlord. You would do… do well to remember that, Razzel.’

‘Grey Seer Razzel.’

Sharpwit inclined his head.

‘I still don’t see-smell what you bring to this expedition. What purpose-use could a cripple-rat like you serve?’

Sharpwit glowered. He yearned to tear the flesh from the arrogant zealot’s bones and send his soul screaming to his beloved god. But the seer was powerful, in magic and in standing, so he bit his tongue. ‘My patron is mighty, Razzel, and his business is his own. Remember that too. Even you would not cross-cross Gnawdwell.’

Razzel paled. The telling twitch of his lips exposed the limits of his faith.

And rightly so.

Even one as insane as Grey Seer Razzel would scurry far from the wrath of Clanlord Gnawdwell. Lord of Decay.

The grey seer sneered, unholy iconography tinkling about his person as he shifted. ‘What now then, Old-thing? Sharpwit know-sees so much, where then is Queek?’

Sharpwit glanced thoughtfully down at his feet. The excise-rat had ceased his whimpering and stared in dumb horror, tear-stained eyes flicking nervously between the chilling grey seer and his three giant albino guards. With a vengeful jab at the guard’s ruined knee, Sharpwit summoned a fresh howl of pain, drawing the skaven’s dread back where it belonged.

Young skaven today. No respect.

Leaning his weight on the writhing vermin’s knee, Sharpwit took a moment to enjoy his suffering, only easing up when it appeared the guard-rat might pass out. ‘You take us to Queek now. Hurry-scurry.’

Razzel licked his lips in agreement. ‘Grey Seer Razzel commands this on pain of your immortal soul.’ The seer leant closer. Amulets hovered above the terrified ratman like portents of doom. ‘Bring-take to Queek!’

Two of the powerful albinos hauled the ratman up between them and dragged the protesting skaven in the direction of the City of Pillars, the teeming stronghold of Clan Mors. Razzel and his remaining bodyguard chased after them with an eager, youthful, pace.

Sharpwit heaved a deep breath. He could not find Queek soon enough. Events were already well in motion, and if there was one thing that many long years of experience had taught him, it was that no plan was so perfect that somewhere, somehow, some scheming ratkin wasn’t going to bring it all crashing down on his head.

The sooner he was in Karak Azul in person, the better everything would be.

All around, clanrats in russet-coloured cloaks bustled over the reclaimed mine. They snuffled at the fallen in search of valuables – and in this, so-called ‘friends’ received no preferential treatment over foe – before piling the carcasses themselves into rusted mine carts converted to this purpose. Queek caught sight of one as it made ready to leave. He thought he could see the latest of Grey Seer… Something’s… messengers buried under a heap of bodies. He saw its limp limb wave. He snickered and offered a wave in return.

Sat atop the precarious mound of bodies, the cart’s driver cringed, obviously under the delusion that a rat so worthless warranted the attention of Queek. The skaven was plump, evidently accustomed to gorging on his stock as soon as the warlord was out of sight, his paunch spilling out from beneath a straining jerkin. The driver snapped his gaze away and lashed his whip over the backs of the two giant rats yoked to the cart’s front and, with a squeal of rusted iron, the cart was away, crunching through the gravel-strewn mine towards the City of Pillars. Fresh grist for the mills.

He bit his tongue thoughtfully as he surveyed the meaningless pit that his unrivalled ferocity had wrested from unworthy dwarf-thing paws. The heaped coal still burned and the thought now occurred that perhaps the act was one of deliberate sabotage rather than some clever new tactic. Not that that was any discouragement to the more entrepreneurial scavengers who circled the bonfire, stabbing into it with long iron poles to send white-hot stones tumbling loose to be swaddled in piss-soaked rags and swept through a cloud of stinking steam to the fences of the City of Pillars. Clanrats swarmed down the newly conquered mineshafts in search of machine parts, good timber, freshly hewn ore. Anything light enough to be carried away was dragged into the open and bickered over by snarling skaven. He didn’t think he’d had so many warriors during the battle itself as there now appeared to be. Thinking about it, he should probably have fewer. He was still mulling over this imponderable when he caught sight of his lieutenant, Ska Bloodtail, weaving his way between the busy clanrats and their indecipherable industry.

Queek looked up at his underling’s approach and felt an immediate annoyance at the lack of proper deference. Ska, for his part, recognised the error almost at once. A look of panic crossed the giant fangleader’s gore-spattered muzzle before he dropped his massive shoulders into an obeisant hunch, offering the warlord his unguarded throat. For a brief moment, Queek was tempted to tear it out with his bare claws. That would teach the insubordinate wretch a lesson! He decided to be merciful this one time. He was in a good mood and Ska was usually so well behaved. Ska Bloodtail was most unnatural in his devotion to his better. It would have been perverse had he been anyone else’s underling, but Queek Headtaker knew that he deserved no less.

Sensing his master’s approval, Ska rose ever so slightly, careful to maintain a respectful crouch. Even hunched, Ska Bloodtail was huge. He stood almost a head taller than Queek himself, with a neck like a felled log, and he was built into an almost geological immensity by the overlapping plates of gromril he wore. The giant warrior had pieced together the scavenged parts of dwarfish rune-metal himself in order to fit them around his monstrous frame.

‘A glorious battle, yes-yes?’ Queek said. ‘Only thing better than watching dwarf-things run is watching dwarf-things die and we see both.’

‘Unkillable Queek-Warlord is a most-fierce fighter,’ agreed Ska.

Queek’s eyes narrowed as he was struck by a sudden thought. ‘And where is Ska Bloodtail as Queek kills dwarf-things?’

Ska cringed, dropping his head ever lower. ‘Queek is too fast and too strong. Humble Ska is unable to keep up with mighty fast-quick warlord.’

Queek eyed the cringing warrior distrustfully. This was the problem when underlings managed to survive so long. It got to the point where they always knew what to say. ‘Fine-good,’ muttered Queek, barely placated. ‘What do you want anyway?’

The fangleader swung his muzzle over the serried ranks of dwarf-things that still awaited transport. ‘Dwarf-things grow bold. This is the second mine they try to reclaim in as many days. And look.’ For the first time, Queek noticed that, in addition to his usual long sword, Ska was carrying a long-handled axe that he had no doubt pilfered from one of the corpses before it was carted away. Ska laid the weapon across both paws for Queek’s inspection.

The warlord gave it the briefest of glances, unsure of what he was expected to see. With a scowl, he knocked the axe aside, following up with a swipe across the side of his unsuspecting underling’s helmet. ‘Is an axe! Fool-fool! How many dwarf-things you fight and not see an axe before?’

‘These axes are different. Better. Cut sharper. I think the dwarf-things are getting good weapons from somewhere. Look.’ He flipped the axe in his massive paws as though it were weightless, presenting the blade for Queek to see. ‘They have special scent-marks, like this one. Pretty gold-thing, see?’

Queek frowned and snatched the weapon from Ska’s paw. He hefted it, feeling its weight before giving it an experimental swing. The blade was perfection. It keened through the air like a ghost. He halted his swing and inspected the axe again, this time more carefully. On each side of the blade was a golden rune. It was shiny, but he gave it no further thought. It looked exactly like every other dwarfish symbol he’d ever seen: hammers, crowns, anvils. So dull, so boring.

‘Bah!’ he squeaked, shoving the axe back into Ska’s trembling paws. ‘Queek does not care anyway. Axe is an axe. Keep it, eat it, melt it, feed-shove down plague priest throats. Queek does not care.’

Already the thrilling distraction of battle was waning. Much as it pained him, there was more to being warlord than gorging himself on dwarf-meat and a grey seer dispatched from the Council of Thirteen could be ignored only so long. Maybe the sorcerer-priest came with something interesting, but he doubted it. Sometimes he wished someone else could be warlord. If only for a bit.

But that was ridiculous. There was none mightier than Queek. It was more realistic to wish for more numerous enemies. Then, perhaps he could justly excuse himself from suffering the inanities of grey seers and their games. Cursing the purgatory of his existence and the dearth of worthy foes, Queek trudged for the City of Pillars. His tail trailed limp in his despondent wake.

Forgotten, Ska studied the axe in his paw, pressing his nose thoughtfully to the shiny golden rune, marvelling at how the blazing coal fires summoned dazzling reflections from its keen-edged blade. It was a good axe. He would keep it.

Sitting cross-legged before an ancient doorway far beneath the deepest levels of Karak Eight Peaks, Thordun Locksplitter brought the runehammer to his lips. He planted a kiss on the golden rune as he offered a prayer to Grungni and to the humans’ god of thieves, Ranald. The rune was of ancient design, depicting twinned hammers crossed over an anvil and, above it, a crown. The circlet was decorated with minute characters of the klinkarhun, a true masterpiece of the engraver’s art, and too fine for Thordun’s eyes to read. It was the seal of Thorek Ironbrow, Runelord of Karak Azul, and his one piece of home. His heart fluttered at the thought.

Home.

He wasn’t even sure what that meant. What would he find in Karak Azul once he arrived? Would it be the earth-defying work of ancient genius that the very name conjured in his mind? Would it steal his breath and still his thoughts as his father’s rapt remembrances had once done when he had been naught but a beardling on the old dwarf’s knee?

He saw it when he closed his eyes, the passing shadow of a dream. He saw walls of rock, impenetrable, enduring, testing the sky with the rugged strength of the mountain itself. Towering above its neighbours, the mighty karak casts a long shadow over the Worlds Edge Mountains, the sun reflecting in rainbow hues from its frosted peak. As the sun rises above the mountains, he sees himself on the road to Karak Azul, the Iron Peak. The rising sun glints from gun barrels that bristle from the guard towers that pepper the mountains. And then he sees the gate itself; five hundred feet high and wrought of iron ten feet thick. Runes taller than a dwarf blaze with their own brilliance, shining all the brighter for the sight of the sun and standing as eternal testament to the strength and immutability of the Karaz Ankor.

Thordun let the hammer drop as the dream faded, as all dreams must.

Or would it be like the Ungdrin Way? He looked around. It had been a long journey through these forgotten ways since first joining the Ungdrin at Black Fire Pass, within sight of the crumbling majesty of Karak Varn. As a triumph of dwarfish mastery over stone it must surely rank alongside other such wonders as the great ancestor guardians carved into the gates of Karak Hirn, or the vertiginous skyways that once linked the pinnacles of Karak Eight Peaks, great bridges blazing golden in undiluted sunlight, arcing over white clouds and frost-bitten mountain tops like precious rainbows.

Now it was a ruin; a haunt of ratmen and goblins and unsafe even for a dwarf to travel alone. A miracle of ages gone, plunged into the bitterness of decay and the memory of lost glories. Retracting the steel pin from the lock that was the subject of his attention, he set it between his lips while he rummaged in his belt pouch for another. His golden beard was soggy with perspiration, his woollen vest itchy beneath his mail hauberk. He grunted as his fingers brushed the tool he sought, inserting it carefully into the door’s lock.

‘Can I help?’ inquired the deeply accented voice of Bernard Servat. The Bretonnian was one of the nine soldiers of fortune that accompanied him. He held up a flickering torch to illuminate Thordun’s work.

‘You can sod off,’ muttered Thordun around the metal wire between his lips. ‘That’d help no end.’

Thordun cursed, exploiting his limited grasp of his ancestral tongue to its fullest as the door began to sink into shadow. ‘Get back here, you oversized oaf. I need that light.’

‘I thought dwarfs could see in the dark.’

‘Just hold still.’ Quietly, he bent back to his task, hoping the grizzled Bretonnian would take the hint.

‘I remember back in Nuln, something like this would be sprung in a blink.’

Thordun scowled. ‘We never had to crack dwarfish locks. If this were regular human craft we’d be on our way already.’

‘You sure that’s all? I heard you’d gone straight. I thought you must’ve missed the old days when you turned up in the Blind Pig with this job. Le bon vieux temps. But it’s been a long time. Maybe you’ve lost that famous Splitter edge. The old Splitter wouldn’t have trod on a dead block, brought that wall down, and got us all trapped in a satané tunnel.’

He heard the muted mutterings of the other men, their faces buried in darkness bar the occasional glimmer of reflected torchlight from teeth, eyes, and silver rings.

‘What do you suggest then?’ Thordun struggled for calm, but couldn’t keep the flint from his voice. ‘You think if you got rid of me now you’d ever see daylight again? Shut up and calm down. There’s no lock I can’t break.’

I hope, he added to himself. He thought it best not to mention where exactly they were; likely only a few hundred feet of rock between themselves and the uncounted thousands that laired under the Eight Peaks. He swallowed heavily. They had passed a good dozen sealed doors to reach this point, avoided every trap and dead end bar this one. It was impossible that the skaven could have made it this far. And yet he couldn’t help but notice the bite marks on the angular reliefs that were carved into the walls, couldn’t stop himself imagining some vile rat creature using the icons of his ancestors as some kind of gnawing post. He suppressed a shudder and tried to concentrate.

Dwarf locks were a cut above the standard that Thordun had routinely broken in the wealthy houses of Nuln. He had enjoyed little experience of dwarf-made things, save those which his father had borne with him from Karak Azul. It was that same inexperience that had sealed them here. A true son of Grungni would have seen the trap. He shook his head to clear it of self-pity and got back to work.

Bernard laughed without humour, looking to salvage some face in front of the other hired swords. ‘Don’t forget, I used to pay you to do this sort of work. And I don’t remember you being such an uptight piece of–’

The human’s colourful language fell on deaf ears as Thordun felt the mechanism click under the applied torque. The dwarf whooped in triumph as the door edged marginally outward. The mercenaries glanced over in surprise, having never witnessed such an outburst of emotion from their usually taciturn paymaster.

Thordun stood up, dusting grit from his breeches and shaking out his cloak. He turned to Bernard with a broad grin. He didn’t have to speak a word.

Grumbling in his own tongue, Bernard turned and stomped back towards the waiting mercenaries.

‘Que pensez-vous de cela?’ Thordun shouted at his back, with a grin.

Bernard tensed. Thordun knew full well how much it annoyed him to be spoken to in his own language. If Thordun hadn’t known the Bretonnian for as long as he had, he might have suspected that to be his primary reason for opting for the delights of Nuln over his native Brionne, and dismissed rumours of the murder of Châtelain Rémy and the abduction of his horse and daughter as mere tavern talk. Unfortunately Thordun knew Bernard all too well. Since before the big man had stubble on his chin. Now, the man’s dense black beard was speckled silver and his hard face riven by deep lines. To the human’s eyes, Thordun would not have aged a day.

‘Get your men on their feet. That’s enough rest.’

The men complained as they always did but decamped with professional efficiency, seeing first to their weapons before gathering up bedrolls and baggage packs.

Thordun brushed grit from the doorframe he had just opened, his fingernails excavating the ancient runic marks from the stone. He shook his head sadly. A fuller grasp of the klinkarhun was not the only lesson of his father’s he had failed to heed. He started at a distant pattering, like clawed feet, seeking reassurance in the ivory-gripped brace of pistols holstered at his belt. Much as he treasured his father’s hammer, he knew which he’d prefer to have in his hands in a fight.

‘We’d best hurry,’ he whispered. Keeping one hand at his holster, he knelt to gather up his wide-brimmed leather hat, blowing off the grime before setting it on his head. ‘We are passing under Black Crag and the Eight Peaks. There is probably nowhere in the Old World more dangerous.’

‘Black Crag?’ Bernard asked, eyeing the ceiling as if goblins might spring from it in ambush. ‘Isn’t this where we were headed for?’

‘Karak Azul first. We need the king’s consent if we are to claim his reward.’

‘This prize of yours better be worth it,’ Bernard muttered.

‘It will be. I promise you that. Kazador is wealthy as only dwarfish royalty can be.’ Thordun’s eyes unfocused, his fears momentarily forgotten at the vision of the mountain of gold that would be his. Theirs, he grudgingly corrected himself. ‘Even with half his wealth split ten ways, all the kings of men will be paupers beside us.’

Bernard grinned, readjusting the flail that was wrapped under his left arm, prodding into his armpit despite the stained padding of old wool.

‘In that case, mon vieil ami, lead on.’

CHAPTER TWO

It had been so long. Aside from the immense granite columns that lent the lair its name, little remained of the City of Pillars that was familiar. This had been a glorious place once, its beauty the envy of a beauteous empire, and the great pillars stood eternal testament to that lost grandeur. They extended far beyond what Sharpwit’s clouded vision could report, towering hundreds of feet above the petty masses and skaven shanties like uncaring gods among their flawed creations. They were bones of constancy within a decaying husk of change.

Sharpwit could not see well, but he could smell the sour musk of fear as it seeped from ten thousand glands. The rancid stink had permeated the very stones, infecting the air where it hung like a maleficent presence, perhaps later even to condense into nebulous clouds of dread that would rain down on the seething masses in a twisted parody of natural cycles. The City of Pillars offered no hiding places. Every crawlspace, every cranny, was a battlefield that had been contested for three thousand years and showed little sign of being won any time soon. It was a place where death came from the walls, the ceiling, from up between a cautious ratkin’s own footpaws, as often as it ever did from a foe that could be smelt, heard or fled. The goblin warlord Skarsnik loved ambushes and trickery, and his cunning, allied to the brute strength of his sometime ally Gorfang Rotgut, had left a trail of corpses and terror halfway to Skavenblight. The dwarfs were troublesome too, as if these skaven hadn’t woes aplenty. The descendants of those who once ruled this mountain were fortified in the upper levels and, now emboldened by warriors and armaments from Karak Azul, continually sought to reclaim more of what had once been theirs.

And then there was the Headtaker.

He did not need his sight to see the haunted looks in these skavens’ eyes.

Sharpwit stood in the midst of it all with the whimpering excise-rat and the three albinos around a hole in the ground, right in the pulsing black heart of the City of Pillars. He twisted round to take in the teeming multitudes of Skavendom and tried, with some difficulty, to imagine what kind of masochistic imbecile would choose to lair in a place so exposed. A pair of heads had been staked into the bloodied gravel by the entrance, their leaking fluids crusted around the swollen wood. The rats’ muzzles were frozen in snarling rictuses, brown fur coming away in clumps. Their eyes had dulled to a pinkish white, and Sharpwit shifted nervously under their unseeing attention. He took another tentative sniff of the air with its reek of dank fur and old death and grimaced. He had the unpleasant sensation that these two were Queek’s idea of guards.

And it was working. He was quite happy to let Razzel explore the warlord’s burrow alone.

As he thought of the grey seer, Razzel scrambled on all fours up the angled shaft. He snarled angrily, beating grime and dark scabs from his fur with the flat length of his staff, raising a hellish cacophony from the bells and chimes that clamoured from its idolatrous head. ‘Where is Queek?’ he squealed. ‘If not here then where does he hide-cower from the Horned One’s prophet?’

The grey seer snapped his claws and gestured at the albinos. The warriors leapt to obey, dragging the protesting excise-rat between them and depositing him roughly at their master’s feet.

‘You say-squeak this is Queek’s lair,’ Razzel said. ‘Then where is Queek, hmmm? Maybe Queek is invisible. Maybe he skins himself and hide-hide under those bone-skulls.’

‘Queek’s trophies? You did not… paw-touch?’

‘I speak-squeak now,’ squealed Razzel.

The excise-rat trembled, four paws buried in the dirt. He raised one to rub tears from his eyes. ‘Queek-Warlord, he… he hate-hate when others paw his trophy-prize.’

With a snarl, Razzel extended a claw towards the snivelling ratman. Sharpwit took a measured step back as the grey seer chittered secret words. A gust of wind disturbed the seer’s horn chimes, the brass cylinders tinkling madly as black laces of power traced around the sorcerer’s arm like a mesh.

The excise-rat clasped his paws before him and wept. ‘Most wisest of prophets, please save-spare–’

Whatever the skaven had hoped to express was swiftly forgotten as dark magic arced from the grey seer’s outstretched paw. The skaven screamed as power enveloped him like a fly in a web. The spell ignited in green sparks and his fur caught alight, green-black flames spreading rapidly to engulf his entire body. The unfortunate ratkin shrieked and convulsed, writhing in the dirt, but there was no extinguishing those sorcerous flames. He continued to jerk even as fur gave way to flesh and then to bone, which itself crumbled into dust. In just a few seconds, the excise-rat had been reduced to a scattering of ash and the dying echo of his screams.

The grey seer cackled as he kicked the mound of cinders into the passing masses. The clanrats lowered their eyes and bared their throats as they passed. Only the oblivious press of ratkin at their backs prevented them from grovelling in unrestrained obeisance right there. Still snickering, Razzel turned to face Sharpwit, evidently content to have inflicted as much pain as possible on just the one skaven – for now.

‘I do not think the guard-rat squeaks lies. I believe this is Queek’s home-lair.’

Sharpwit nodded low, bowing and scraping. This was not the time for a show of pride, not while the seer’s eyes still burned with warpfire. He did not want to learn what the seer would have done had he believed the excise-rat was lying. ‘Yes-yes, most attuned of divine servants. Agreed, this is a most odd-strange place for a warlord’s burrow but, from what I hear-squeak, Queek is a most odd-strange warlord.’

The grey seer’s paw swept the watchful heads that flanked the passage to Queek’s lair. ‘Our first two message-rats. Do you not recognise them, Old-thing?’

Sharpwit peered closer, but without their distinctive musk to aid his failing vision, they could have been anyone.

‘Queek will pay for this… this… this sacrilege.’ The seer held out his free paw and shook his head. Sharpwit suspected he was talking to himself now. ‘In striking the paws of the Horned Rat, he strikes at the Great One himself. It shall not be tolerated!’ At last the seer began to settle down, returning his paw to his staff. ‘That condemned soul must return here eventually. We wait-stay.’

Sharpwit bowed in acknowledgement of the grey seer’s divine wisdom as Razzel squeaked at one of the albinos to fetch his palanquin. An expression that was almost relief crossed the stern warrior’s muzzle as he was granted permission to flee the seer’s twitchy impatience.

Convinced that the stormvermin had the right idea, Sharpwit edged back, keeping the seer’s back firmly within his narrow circle of clear vision. When the swirling mass of furry bodies swallowed him and snatched the grey seer from view, he heaved a sigh of relief, the weight of Karak Eight Peaks itself seemingly lifting from his shoulders. He would make his excuses later, once the grey seer had calmed down.

A hurrying skaven blundered into his side, causing him to squeak in alarm. He raised one crutch, ready to exact vengeance on the careless rat’s hide, but the coward-meat was already on his way, hunched low beneath a worm-eaten crate of rotten fruit. Bloated flies droned hungrily in its wake as he hurried through the press. Sharpwit cried out again as another heedless clanrat bundled into him from behind, shoving him aside and tramping on his tail as he steamed by.

Ten years ago these lowly vermin would not have dared lift their sycophantic muzzles in his presence, much less knock their bodies against his as though he were just another worthless clanrat. He snarled angrily.

He had called this place home once. The urge to taste it again was overpowering. But it was foolishness; it would not make him young again. He blinked myopically at the shadowy vastness that filled his sight. Stallholders and scrap-peddlers hung their wares from poles above their burrows where passing shoppers might sample their scent. The smell of cooking meats, spice, warpstone and stale urine permeated the space, mingling with the musky scent of the ratmen like a noisome perfume. Among the bustling masses, fat, sharply dressed skaven with sleek fur squeaked over the noise of the crowd and each other. Sharpwit squeezed by. His darkly glowing maw and rich attire served largely to discourage blundering paws. Sharpwit sensed the calculation behind every pair of eyes, considering his weakness. He coughed loudly, making a deliberate show of spraying the surrounding clanrats with bloody sputum. He smirked as the watching skaven slunk away, wary of whatever terrible contagion it was that blighted him. Infirmity had its uses.

He bit and shoved his way deeper into the under-city, starting suddenly as a brown paper bag was thrust under his snout. It was clutched in the paws of a gritty-furred creature who gave the bag a hopeful shake. Sharpwit peered inside. It was filled with earthworms.

‘Super-secret warpworms. One warptoken for them all if you not squeak-tell how Cripkit smuggles them from Clan Moulder quarter.’ The seller took one between thumb and foreclaw and let it dangle as though it were a prize catch. ‘Worms burrow for warpstone. Double your outlay. No-no, treble! Yes-yes?’

Sharpwit shooed the charlatan away with the snap of a crutch across his shins and barged past to where a bored-looking piebald slouched against one of the monolithic pillars. The skaven bore a clapboard sign with words in poorly rendered Queekish and a faded arrow, pointing towards the promise of all the cave fungus a skaven with two warptokens could eat.

Sharpwit limped by and ducked beneath an awning, the tanned orc-hide faded with age and maltreatment. Smoke lingered under the low roof like a drugged serpent, coiling around mouldering wooden joists as it slithered languidly for fresher air. He coughed chestily. The space beneath the faded canopy was crammed with skaven, clustered around a bar constructed of a scavenged sheet of pressed tin across a pair of barrels. Rats scuttled across the surface without a care, their tapping claws a strangely appropriate corruption of music. The skaven drank flat ale from leaking flagons, baring fangs to defend cracked pipes stuffed with maggot-infested pipe-weed from their jealous fellows. It was as if some crazed artist had stared into the eye of Chaos and rendered a perversion of dwarfish life. The product of a naïve god that sought to undo the work of entropy and restore this world to how it had once been. But now the ratmen ruled as thanes and kings, supping ale and smoking tobacco as they squatted in the husk of the great civilisation they unwittingly sought to emulate.

The bar-rat looked up from the stein he was polishing with an oily rag. He was a stocky black-furred bruiser with a squashed nose, a torn ear and an eyepatch. He set down his cloth on the bar and shot Sharpwit an evil look, implying the old skaven should either pay for something or get lost.

Sharpwit glanced warily over the bar-rat’s shoulder at the heavy clay kiln from which belched the smoky aroma of roasted meat – no doubt stuffed with the last poor rat that couldn’t pay his tab. Struck with a sudden desire to get back to Grey Seer Razzel, Sharpwit scurried back into the open.

He lifted his nose to the musk-ridden air, inhaling a lungful of the familiar scents before hacking it all back up in a fit of coughing. He smacked his spasming ribs as the attack passed. He sniffed again. The acrid odour of fear musk had grown palpably more intense, spreading like ripples in a disturbed pond through the densely packed skaven. The strains of angry voices filtered through the chittering horde. One of them was the familiar squeal of Grey Seer Razzel, but the other he did not recognise. It was unusually deep for a skaven and cold as a dark night on the Chaos Wastes.

Sharpwit’s blood turned frigid.

He was here.

‘Please, your majesty. All we request is understanding.’

Kazador sat motionless as a stone-carved ancestor as he regarded the envoy of King Belegar. ‘My understanding, Hrathgar of the Hammerhand clan, is that Karak Eight Peaks is pledged to offer no fewer than five hundred warriors, yet you arrive here with a mere fifty. And this, despite increasing exports from our armouries while asking nothing in return bar support in this.’

‘With respect, our defence pact was agreed when the Eight Peaks could command such forces. Fifty warriors is all King Belegar can spare and commensurate with our… temporarily… diminished circumstances. My king believed this fair–’

‘Fair,’ Kazador spluttered, rising unsteadily from his throne and the thick pile of skins thrown over its seat. He started down the steps of its high dais, catching himself before he’d taken his second step. The glittering crown of Karak Azul rested uneasily on a furrowed brow. Tired grey eyes regarded an unkind world from the haggard depths of sleeplessness and sorrow. He sank back into the coarse furs. ‘Shall I tell you of fair?’

Hrathgar stayed silent, head bowed, his grey beard scooped into his hands lest it brush the furs covering the king’s floor.

Kazador scowled, as much at his own loss of temper as at the visiting dwarf’s impertinence. He felt the disapproving looks of the assembled thanes on him as he sank back into his throne. More engine of war than seat of kingship, the high-backed edifice was wrought wholly of iron. Some holds flaunted their prosperity with grand thrones of gold and silver, encrusted with a dragon’s hoard of precious stones so that they glittered like stars in an open sky. Not so the Iron Peak. The might of Karak Azul had always lain with its ironsmiths and weaponmasters, and the throne of its kings reflected that ancient balance of power. Banded knots of matt grey alloy wrapped its frame, inscribed with tiny, masterfully rendered runes extolling the ageless triumphs of Karak Azul.

Kazador’s fingertips traced the depressions where nails had once been driven, where a proud prince’s mind had been torn from this world. His fists closed over the arms in a wrathful grip, and Kazador was thankful his ancestors had not bequeathed him a throne of gold. The soft metal would have yielded long ago before the strength in his arm and the grief in his heart. The skill still existed to repair the wounds inflicted on his throne, but Kazador lived as truly as any dwarf could by the old maxim: Never forget, never forgive.

Kazador sat back, reclaiming his hands and his self-control. He crossed his thickly muscled arms over his thick snow-white beard and shifted his gaze from the dwarf of Karak Eight Peaks to the frail old form of Loremaster Logan. The ancient dwarf’s salt and pepper beard was wrapped around his waist three times over, a pair of half-moon quartz spectacles sitting unevenly on his crooked nose. He stood beside the Iron Throne behind a marble lectern on which rested the open pages of Karak Azul’s Book of Grudges. The loremaster held a stylus in one liver-spotted hand, the instrument hanging motionless above the blank page as he followed the king’s exchange.

‘Have I lost my wits, loremaster?’

Logan blinked in confusion but the king continued without him.

‘Because I do not recall instructing you to stop writing.’

The loremaster bowed low. ‘My sincerest apologies, your majesty.’

The old dwarf dipped his stylus into a pool of blood-red ink and, giving it a moment to dry, bent his head over the empty page. Clearing his throat, he addressed the gathered dignitaries. ‘On this day does Kazador of the Donarkhun clan, monarch of Karak Azul and its surrounds, declare himself grudgesworn against Belegar Ironhammer, king of Karak Eight Peaks. It is hereby recorded that Belegar did fail to honour his oathsworn pledge and support his honourable ally and kin, Kazador – may his beard grow ever longer – in time of war. Reparation is demanded of no fewer than forty carts of galaz or other ore of similar value…’

Hrathgar Hammerhand remained silent as the loremaster droned on through a lengthy appendix of further particulars. As the recitation ceased, he rose with a stiff bow and turned to leave.

‘Hold, Hammerhand,’ said Kazador.

‘Yes, sire?’

‘An oath is an oath and without them we would be naught more than men, grubbing beneath the mountains and feuding over what scraps remain. Belegar has broken his, one made by his ancestor long ago, but an oath just the same. But you, Hrathgar Hammerhand; whether you bring five warriors or five thousand I would find use for every one. If you stay and fight, I would hold the gesture as a high measure of your king’s honour.’

A cursory inspection of the Throne Hall would have told Hrathgar he was in good company. Beneath monolithic carvings of the ancestor gods and proud kings of past ages, there hung the banners of dwarfs from the length and breadth of the Karaz Ankor. There were thanes from nearby Ekrund, and from the Everpeak, from Zhufbar, Barak Varr, Karak Hirn, Karak Norn, Karak Izor, Karak Kadrin and even the wild tangled beards and fiercely roving eyes of their kin from Kraka Drak. Nor were they the only ones enticed by the coming war on Gorfang Rotgut and his stronghold of Black Crag. Among the proud lords stood a handful of bare-muscled and vividly tattooed representatives of the Slayer cult. They gathered in a corner around a scruffy dwarf in thinning black robes. Gunngeir was his name, a nomadic priest of Grimnir known to wander the southern Worlds Edge Mountains. The thanes gave the hermit a wide berth, as though poverty were catching.

Thane Hrathgar bowed again. ‘I would be ashamed to be left behind, your highness.’

Kazador nodded once, no hint of a smile from a face that had long ago forgotten how.

Loremaster Logan coughed pointedly. ‘There remains one other item of business, my king. That of the skaven. They grow ever bolder and their numbers swell. Poor Handrik, the captain of your own Ironbreakers,’ and here the loremaster’s voice broke, for the two venerable elders were long-time friends and drinking partners. ‘Poor Handrik was merely the latest to fall foul.’

‘You know how the skaven are, majesty,’ spoke up Snorri Bogbeater, thane and treasurer of the Stonecutters’ Guild and a dwarf who knew how to put a price on things. ‘All we have they covet. It is not just ambushes but thefts.’ He looked around, garnering support from the slight nods afforded him by his fellow thanes. ‘We are all suffering this menace. It’ll not be long before we’re knee-deep in ratmen, mark my words.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Brewmaster Thengeln Dunrakin. ‘Five barrels they took from the ancestor cellar for lost ales. Old Handrik was tracking the pests when he was ambushed.’ The brewmaster looked earthwards despairingly. ‘Speckled Grobi from Grumbold’s brewery, it was.’ He took a deep breath that shook his jowls to quivering. ‘Irreplaceable.’

There was a general muttering of agreement.

Nervously, Logan wound his beard around his forefinger. ‘Your thanes propose a postponement of the campaign on Black Crag. Just for another season. Until the skaven menace is dealt with.’

With a roar, the king slammed his fist into the arms of his throne, stunning the gathered thanes to silence. ‘For fifteen years my thanes have begged me wait. Do priests and paupers and dawi from distant kingdoms pledge their shields when my own kin dare not?’

He glared at the assembled thanes.

‘You would risk the hold itself, the lifeblood of your ancestors, to sate your own vengeance, Kazador? What would your father say if he still walked among us?’

Like a glowing blade thrust into cold water, Kazador felt his wrath cool. Even kings sometimes bowed to the living ancestor, Thorek Ironbrow. He slumped against the iron back of his throne. ‘And what would you have me do, Thorek? Accept this disgrace? Let the squatter king live out his years in the comfort of Black Crag?’

‘It is our patience, as much as our oaths, that make us children of Grungni,’ said Thorek. ‘What is fifteen years?’

‘Enough, Thorek,’ Kazador breathed. ‘When your kin, when your queen, endures such a time in an urk dungeon I will accept your lectures.’

‘If Morga does still live, she would not thank you for discarding everything to rescue her.’ Thorek turned to the assembled lords, addressing them as much as he did his king. ‘The same goes for every other brave dawi captured with her. We simply cannot consider an assault on Black Crag. Not while the skaven nip at our heels.’

To the astonishment of all, the king began to laugh. It was a hollow sound, like a remembrance of laughter, something from a forgotten age. It chased the warmth from the Throne Hall like a ghost. ‘And when will that ever be? There will always be enemies at our gates. We will never, in this fallen age, be rid of fell creatures in the deeps.’ He leant forward, fists clasped to the rests of the Iron Throne. ‘You speak as an old woman, Thorek, frightened of what might be when what is remains little worthy of preservation.’

The ancient runelord’s craggy face turned thunderous. ‘Kazador, you–’

‘Enough!’ he bellowed, rising to his feet once more. ‘Get out, all of you. Out!’

Thorek threw his king a disapproving glare as the dwarfs filed sullenly out, before he too vanished under the great archway and left the king to his thoughts.

Only one dwarf remained behind. Hair as grey as stone cascaded onto broad shoulders, settling over a long beard of the same shade which had been braided through with four hundred and one glittering golden rings – one for each and every year that the longbeard had witnessed to its inevitable end.

‘That was good,’ said the old dwarf. ‘I’ve been waiting all my years to see Thorek’s face turn that shade of purple.’

‘You too, Handrik. I’m in no mood.’

‘Aye, well. In your own words, when will you ever be?’

The king’s lips twitched despite himself, something of the sparkle of old migrating to his eyes.

Handrik clapped his hands, the sound echoing through the emptied chamber. ‘Hah! I knew it. I knew my king could still smile.’

‘Did I tell you how glad I am the thaggoraki didn’t kill you, old friend?’

Grimacing, the old dwarf separated himself from the wall he had been using for support and tottered unevenly for the king’s dais. ‘I’m not,’ he complained. ‘My back hurts like bloody hell. And I can’t look these youngsters in the eye. They know I just walked into a skaven trap like some wide-eyed fifty-year-old. Oh yes, and some damned king retired me!’

‘These “youngsters” speak of nothing but how the fierce Handrik Hallgakrin will never die, how even an honest burial under a ton of rock cannot kill him. You survived a cave-in and got your charges out alive. Be proud of that. Logan tells me that the story of how you braced the passage with your own body is already the stuff of taproom legend.’

‘The furry beggars got away with the Grumbold though, didn’t they?’ He gave a dismissive wave of his thick-fingered hand. ‘Logan is too easily impressed. A fine trait in a lore-master.’ The old dwarf winced at a particularly cruel spasm from his lower back. ‘But he should know better. We were made of firmer stuff in our day.’

‘But to bear such a weight and live.’ Kazador shook his head, taking the steps down from the Iron Throne and wrapping a supportive arm about the old dwarf’s shoulder. ‘The priestesses assured me you would never walk again.’

Handrik blew a raspberry, brushing the king’s hand irritably from his shoulder. ‘Get off, you big grumbaki. A mere swelling on the spine or some nonsense. They tell me to rest it off, but the day this dwarf can’t stand on his own two feet is the day he shaves his beard and calls himself an elf.’

Kazador sighed and withdrew his arm. Neither dwarf knew what to say so they said nothing, shuffling in embarrassment as they looked up to the ceiling. The great skydome glittered down on them with the stars of Athel Maraya, jewels of a once great elven city. Standing there, his old comrade-in-arms at his side, it was almost as if he were there in the boots of his ancestor, standing beneath younger stars amidst the ruins of fallen towers and scattered jewels, the debris of an arrogant civilisation crunching beneath his boots as he walked the ancestral memories of a world where dwarfish might ruled unchallenged.

He looked down again, sundering himself from the memories. He knew how that tale ended. Which was worse, he wondered? To stand on the precipice of your own downfall, knowing you would never again stand so high, or to be the one left presiding over those last days, reigning over an empty hold rich with faded triumphs.

‘What do you say, longbeard?’ the king asked at long last. ‘You have suffered more at the paws of these skaven than any thane or lorekeeper. What would Handrik Hallgakrin do if he were king?’

‘I am not king,’ Handrik answered formally. ‘You are. If you asked me, I’d march over water on Lothern herself, and make no complaint. If you’d reinstate me to the Ironbreakers, of course.’

‘Handrik–’

‘Without me those tunnels will be overrun in a week. Lothgrim’s scarce a hundred. The beardling isn’t ready for such a burden.’

‘Enough, Handrik. Advise me. You know those tunnels better than any. Are the skaven a threat? Should I spare the squatter king and his urk their due vengeance?’

Handrik’s expression hardened. He smoothed his gold-plaited beard in fierce remembrance. His nephew, Hallar, had been among the first to fall fifteen years ago. The unavenged wrong was a hurt that grew ever more acute with each passing year. ‘No, your majesty. Never forget, never forgive.’

Warlord Queek towered over the white-furred sorcerer from Skavenblight. He regarded him warily. They were untrustworthy, treacherous liars all. He struggled to recall the grey seer’s name, but it was already lost to the seas of madness. He let it drown. He only remembered Ska’s name because his otherwise brilliant underling had somehow managed to survive this long.

The white-fur studied him impatiently, the tinkling of the chimes on his horns like torn mail grating against a serrated blade. He scratched at the fur between gauntlet and vambrace, already dreaming back to the battle with the dwarf-things. His black fur was unwashed and crusted with the dried blood and congealed tissue of countless slaughters, while still-warm blood oozed between the joints in his heavy scarlet plates like bile. He pulled away a tendrilly clot and pinched it between his claws, studying it intently in the hope that White-fur might get bored and find some other warlord to harass. His heart sank as the sorcerer-priest wittered on. He didn’t suppose he could kill him too.

‘Answer me, you imbecilic fool-warlord. I will not be ignored.’

Queek snarled and tossed the scrap of tissue aside. ‘No.’

Grey Seer Razzel simply gaped. ‘No?’

Queek tittered, making his heads break into fits of clicking laughter as they danced atop their poles. ‘When Queek says no, he means no. Queek fights who he likes, where he likes, how he likes. Why go-scurry to Azul-Place when there are plenty-many dwarf-things here?’

The grey seer regarded him as though he, most terrifyingly successful of Skavendom’s generals, was a tick on a slave’s back. ‘If Queek-Warlord were to open his eyes and sniff-scent the wind he would already know.’ He squeaked a command and one of the scrawny slaves hurried forward bearing something long and heavy wrapped up in sackcloth. The grey seer flung open the sacking to reveal a double-bladed battleaxe, exquisitely forged. Each silver blade bore the golden rune of twin hammers crossed over an anvil and surmounted by a runic crown.

Queek sniffed it lazily. ‘Queek sees these already. Queek doesn’t care.’

‘Queek cares now!’ shrilled the grey seer, dismissing the terrified skavenslave with a shove that sent both him and the axe tumbling. ‘Is not just Eight Peaks but in dwarf-places everywhere. In Varn-Lair we find these. Clan Moulder beast-hunters in the Darklands squeak-tell of dwarf-thing raiders with gold rune-axes. Is time it end-stops.’

‘Why?’ Queek shrugged.

Razzel snarled, twitching forward as if to strike him but evidently thinking better of it. ‘Think, fool-fool! No weapons for dwarf-things means dwarf-things die-die easy. Means Queek-Warlord undisputed ruler of all of Eight Peaks!’

Queek’s face wrinkled in disgust.

No dwarf-things to kill? Queek’s eyes riveted the seer unblinking as he listened to the funereal voice of the long dead skaven warlord, Ikit Slash. What will Queek do-kill with no dwarf-things? Queek would go mad!

‘Pay attention, Queek,’ said Razzel. ‘I am sent by the Council of Thirteen, the representatives of the Horned Rat on this world and I am his chosen. He squeaks through me. Yours is not to question. Yours is to go to Azul-Place as you are told. Skaven more wise-clever than you trace these weapons there, and the Council orders it destroyed by righteous skaven paws. No more weapons for dwarf-things. It will be a great victory that all skaven will celebrate. They will submit their throats to Queek and Razzel and celebrate the day that Azul-Place was destroyed to bring the ruin of the dwarf-things and the Horned Rat’s return one step closer.’ The grey seer paused for breath. He was practically foaming at the mouth, his eyes afire with zealous fury. ‘Who is Queek that says no?’

‘Who is Queek?’ Queek hissed, incredulous. ‘Queek is warlord here, not grey ones from far away. He claim he come from Council. He claims his good intent, but Queek is not stupid-slow, Queek know grey seers and their treacherous ways.’ Queek drew himself to his full and impressive height. His grisly trophies creaked ominously on his shoulder rack as they glared at the asinine seer with angry eyes. Traitorous White-fur, they whispered. He comes to take-steal what is yours. Queek stabbed his claw into the seer’s collar, feeling a rush of pleasure as the sorcerer stumbled, a brief flash of panic spreading across his face. ‘White-fur will never be warlord here!’ His waving claws took in the gruesome heads that followed him. They creaked as if in answer to a summons ‘He is never free of Queek’s sight. Queek sees him always.’

Razzel smoothed his robes and tried to conjure what remained of his authority. He glanced about for support, but found his supposed bodyguards keeping well back. He snarled in fervent outrage as he returned his attention to the warlord. ‘Many are the vermin that scurry blindly in light, denied the blessed shadow of the Horned Rat by their faithlessness. I am his prophet-seer. Through me, you will obey his will.’

‘I make the Horned Rat fat with the souls of dwarf-thing and green-thing. He is awed by the greatness of Queek!’

Razzel gasped in disbelief, his jaw working to no avail until he managed to splutter a single word. ‘Heresy!’

Queek licked his maul hungrily. ‘The Horned Rat knows where to find Queek, yes-yes?’

Razzel shrieked, foam flying from his lips as his eyes caught light with unfettered fury. ‘I am an instrument of the Horned One’s will. I will punish-flay on his behalf for such apostasy.’ The grey seer slammed his staff into the earth. The warpstone idol at its pinnacle blazed with unholy fire as it thrummed with the heartbeat of a god. A cacophony of terrified squeals erupted from the teeming masses that filled the vast interior of the City of Pillars. They burst outwards, as though the sorcerer were the epicentre of some explosion of rat-furred fury, trampling over their own twitching kin in their hunger to escape. Razzel snickered at the unfolding devastation. ‘Music to his ears, hmmm?’

Queek watched the fleeing hordes without concern. A complex of wooden shacks that had once been a tannery collapsed under the press, burying hundreds of clanrats beneath rotted beams and worm-infested thatch. He looked away. There were more. There were always more. As he looked on, the unlikeliest of shapes emerged from the terror-stricken multitudes. It was as if the mutators of Clan Moulder had crossed a skaven with a lizard. Its bald and withered shape hunched over a pair of wooden crutches. Queek clapped his paws in delight at this strange thing. Stranger still, it hobbled towards him while all around it others more sensible fled. The odd creature somehow managed to keep standing amidst the panic, employing its walking aids like bludgeons to keep the horde at bay.

‘No-no!’ it screamed at the sorcerer. ‘The Council demands Queek. They task Queek-Warlord to wage this war.’

Razzel turned to the newcomer. His eyes, blackened by the magic coursing through his fur, were bottomless pits of disdain. ‘What do you know of the Council’s will? Does the Horned Rat squeak-share his wisdom to you, hmmm? I think he does not.’

The sorcerer returned his attention to Queek, ignorant of the immense shadow that fell across his back.

‘White-fur,’ said Queek with a grin. ‘Meet-greet Ska Bloodtail.’

The grey seer yelped as a monstrous black-furred paw wrapped his wrist in a vice-like grip. The seer’s staff snapped from his paws and Razzel watched helplessly as it clattered to the floor and went dark even as another paw wrapped around his throat from behind and hoisted him effortlessly from the ground. The seer kicked at empty air, continuing to squeak threats and promises of damnation as Ska choked the breath from him.

The three albinos made to rush the hulking stormvermin, but a glare from Queek discouraged them. He snickered, doing a little dance as he watched the grey seer gasp for air like a fish.

‘Stop now,’ shouted the old-thing, bashing Ska’s gromril back-plate with his crutch. ‘I come-scurry from Clanlord Gnawdwell and you will listen.’

Queek snarled, stamping his armoured footpaw like a child in a tantrum. ‘Queek does not want to go Azul-Place.’

‘A pity,’ the old-thing responded, coming over all sly with his own cleverness. ‘Is already a big-strong garrison in Deadclaw beneath Azul. They are led by a warlock of Clan Skryre. But Fizqwik is not the Council’s choice. Queek is. Only Queek is strong enough.’

‘Strong enough for what?’

The old-thing spread his palms in a gesture of humility, speaking as though what he said should be obvious to one as great as Queek. ‘To defeat the mighty king of Azul, of course. They say Kazador has the strength of a daemon-thing, that even the orc-things fear to face him. It is squeak-said that he is too strong to be bested.’

Kazador. Ikit’s voice whispered in his ear like an echo in time. A challenge.

‘Yes-yes!’ Queek squealed. His paw twitched reflexively for Dwarf Gouger. It was already overlong since it had tasted blood.

‘My name is Sharpwit,’ said the old-thing. ‘I know Azul-Place and smell the weapons as Azul-made. The Council sends me as help-guide.’

Queek waved him away distractedly.

‘I am sure others will manage here with you away,’ Sharpwit went on. ‘The word in Skavenblight is that the dwarf-things have been driven almost to the surface and that Belegar refuses to fight you in person. I hear also that Skarsnik and his green-things tremble and hide from battles with the all-conquering Queek. It must be most frustrating for a great warrior with such zeal for purging the world of lesser races…’

Queek was not listening.

Kazador-King thinks himself strongest. He thinks himself best.

‘Kazador is wrong.’

‘Say again, most wrathful of warlords?’

‘Ska,’ he shouted. ‘Put White-fur down. We go to Azul-Place.’

CHAPTER THREE

Queek crouched amidst the ruins of the City of Pillars. The city had been levelled. At the limits of his vision hulking rat ogres, misshapen grotesques of rippling muscle and blade-like claws, made short work of what remained of the ramshackle constructions. The crack of their handlers’ whips carried over the space like the first thunder of a coming storm. In place of the living hubbub that there had once been, vast blocks of scarlet-liveried warriors scurried to the discordant ringing of cracked bells and the flat percussion of perforated drums. Black-furred chieftains snapped at their charges, weeding out the slow and the weak with sadistic precision. The hall trembled to the pounding of thousands of clawed feet, the warriors’ chittering voices resounding between the great pillars as though Queek stood at the lapping shores of a blood sea. His hackles rose and quivered with vibrant electricity. He tasted excitement. And he liked it.

None destroys a city like Queek, a voice whispered, a note of awe in its sepulchral speech. Soon Azul-Place will follow. What hope the dwarf-things faced with the might of Queek!

Old-thing had regarded him sadly as Queek had ordered what still stood pulled down, as though the warlord had eaten his favourite slave. The City of Pillars was a dead thing of wood and rot. It had been built once, it could be built again. And he didn’t want to have to walk far from his burrow to garrison his army. He looked across the seething host to where the rat ogres continued their destructive toil. He could probably have them stop now, but it was more effort than simply leaving them to it.

‘Raise an army,’ Old-thing had said. He wondered how an army was supposed to be raised. Somehow there had always been an army when he needed one.

Small details for smaller vermin.

Queek conceded the point. If he didn’t know it, it didn’t need knowing. He didn’t much care for Azul-Place and its weapons anyway. They could send Belegar all the axes in the Under-Empire and he would not care. An armed dwarf was just that much closer to offering its head to the Headtaker.

Queek’s army biggest-best. Queek’s army is unstoppable. Queek raises the biggest-best army ever seen.

He preened at the praise.

There must be thousands. No, tens of thousands. Ska told him that more arrived every day from Clan Mors lairs throughout the Worlds Edge, as well as hirelings from other clans. The rat ogres of Clan Moulder had already been put to good use, and Queek thought he saw the occasional splash of black against the otherwise unbroken sea of scarlet-plated stormvermin and russet-liveried clanrats. Clan Eshin.

Queek scowled.

He hated the night-crawlers of Clan Eshin.

‘Is a mighty-great host fitting of most gland-clenching of warlords,’ spoke a familiar voice.

Queek’s vision swam. The sea of vermin parted and blurred, depositing him on the shores of awareness like so much flotsam. Queek looked up into the worried features of Ska Bloodtail. Queek panted heavily. He was hungry. He was angry. His paws thirsted for blood.

‘Will be a hundred thousand paws at least when we arrive at Deadclaw.’

‘A hundred thousand?’ Queek asked

‘At least!’

Queek drew himself up from his crouch and regarded his underling suspiciously. Ska had stated it proudly, as though it were his army.

Ska is not strong-great like Queek. Soon the head of Kazador will prove it.

It did sound like a lot. Lots was good. The sudden inkling of doubt made him freeze. What if it was too big? It would be just like his jealous lackeys to assemble a host of such implausible magnitude that others would doubt the rightful glory of Queek when inevitable victory was his.

‘It will not be nearly so many,’ said Sharpwit.

Queek’s attention shifted to Old-thing, standing at his lieutenant’s shoulder. The white-fur sorcerer stood with him with his two albino guards. They would have leapt from their pale fur, leaving their halberds to stand by their own inertia, were they not sealed within their heavy silver plate. For a short heartbeat, he was confused. Two?

He glanced down at his paws. They were covered in dark spatters. A residue of memory. Suddenly he smiled. Measuring himself against one of the Council of Thirteen’s prized elite was an opportunity too rare to pass up. He had expected so much more.

‘We must stop-wait. Clan Rictus promises warriors from Crookback Mountain and they will be here soon-soon. Clanlord Doomclaw already take-take Gnawdwell’s warptokens.’

‘Queek bored-tired of being wait-still. Enough here to kill all dwarf-things, Queek thinks.’

Sharpwit prostrated himself lower. ‘Nearly, most fearless and enthusiastic of the Council’s servants, but not quite.’

‘Yes-yes quite,’ Queek insisted. ‘No more stop-wait.’

‘Queek has many challenging responsibilities,’ Grey Seer Razzel interceded smoothly. ‘If it would help-help the mighty warlord with his important tasks, perhaps the mundane duty of leading this army to Azul-Place might be delegated to me?’

With a snarl, Queek flung out an arm, grabbing the seer by the collar of his robe and dragging him closer. Before the sorcerer could move, Queek’s other paw was at his throat and squeezing. His tongue lolled absently from his jaw as he watched White-fur turn slowly blue.

Dat’s right. Choke da stinkin’ white fing wizard. Don’t fink he’s ever gonna give up on dis. I know da sort.

Queek’s grip tightened. Morglum Blacktooth was always right about these things. He was the oldest, the smartest. He had fallen to Queek’s sword in Black Crag, his first great victory. He had feasted on orc-meat and taken his head, rotten fangs and all. Morglum’s voice had guided him to Dwarf Gouger, and the orc had watched, satisfied, as Queek’s paws tore the throat from the long-unlamented skaven who had found it first. As he watched now.

‘Razzel want-lead army?’ he asked. ‘What makes Razzel think he such a good-smart leader?’

Queek’s ears twitched at the rattle of steel. The albino stormvermin stepped forward, eyes bulging with terror. Evidently Razzel had expressed his displeasure over their not coming to his aid the last time.

The seer squeaked, air rattling ineffectually from his gasping muzzle.

Queek marginally loosened his grip.

‘I am blessed with guidance from the Great Horned One,’ he gasped. ‘My paw-steps follow his great plan. With me as general we cannot lose-fail.’

Queek tossed the whimpering sorcerer to his bodyguards in a muted jangling of muffled chimes and drew his sword. Strings of flesh and a scrap of albino fur still stuck between its teeth. ‘Maybe if you so special, Horned Rat not let Queek kill-kill. Maybe sword bounces off your coward-hide. Shall Queek test-see?’

‘Cease-stop,’ Sharpwit squealed. Old-thing was livid with rage. His crutches shivered in his paws. ‘Behave like emissaries of Skavenblight, both of you.’

Queek lowered his blade.

Lying prostrate, Razzel traced the sigil of the Horned Rat through the air above his chest. ‘The Horned Rat, he scheme in many cunning ways, hmmm?’

Sharpwit glowered at them both.

‘The Council of Thirteen gift-give Grey Seer Razzel three stormvermin for his protection but now he has two. What do you know about that, great warlord?’

The Headtaker grinned, offering the most unconvincing shrug, daring the grey seer to make an issue of it.

Razzel rose, rubbing at his neck and muttering darkly. He cast Queek an evil look before flicking out his tail and storming away. He disappeared into the scurrying mass of bodies, a patch of white fur like foam on a muddy stream. The two albinos edged back, their halberds still levelled at him. Queek could see the blades wavering as the paws that held them shook. He tittered as they decided they had withdrawn far enough and turned tail in pursuit of their master.

The sight of Old-thing, his expression one of deep disapproval, made his mirth run cold. ‘Always under Queek’s tail, Old-thing. You spoil all Queek’s fun.’

‘You are not here to have fun. You are here to lead an army to stop Azul-Place’s weapons reaching Eight Peaks and other dwarf-thing places. Grey Seer Razzel can be dangerous if provoked. You should not goad him. He is an asset. He can be useful.’

‘White-fur? Seers are not to be trusted. Everywhere they scurry, hoarding their secrets, spreading their lies. Who knows what they whisper in distant ears. Is it same as were told to say-squeak? Is it what they squeak in other ears? Queek thinks no.’

Queek watched the old-thing think. Yes, he did like to think, that one. Every so often the cavern would groan under the pounding of so many paws and the old skaven would throw frightened looks to the ceiling as if expecting it to collapse and snuff him out right there. Queek had always assumed death would be less frightening for things so old. They should be expecting it. He had always assumed this was the reason that dwarfs, as old and grey as the rocks themselves, so seldom ran from a fight – even from one with Queek. But maybe death was more akin to a fearsome monster, like a gorgon or a cockatrice, and only more terrifying the closer one came.

‘The albinos at least you should not kill-slay. They are sacred warriors of the Council. It will annoy Clanlord Gnawdwell.’

Queek tittered. ‘Queek is not afraid of Gnawdwell, or of the Council. Old-thing thinks mad thoughts!’

Sharpwit looked about suspiciously, as though the bleak stone had ears. ‘You say such things only because you don’t know. You meet Gnawdwell when you were only a whelp. He takes you and raises you high.’ Sharpwit hobbled closer, until their snouts almost touched. ‘But you catch scent of the likes of Morskittar or Kritislik and I promise you, your glands will loosen like any rat.’

Queek snarled, uncertain whether he’d just been insulted. ‘Run-hide back to White-fur. Make nice if you want. Queek does not need White-fur to kill Kazador. Queek does not need any rat.’

Sharpwit bobbed ingratiatingly, but Queek saw the withered muscles of his paws tightening around his crutches as he fought to control his anger. ‘You are not here to kill Kazador. Your goal, your only goal, is to kill-slay every dwarf-thing we find, to pull down their foundries and demolish their mines and ensure weaponmasters of Azul never smelt another sword. Do you understand?’

Queek shrugged. He was enjoying watching Old-thing’s little struggles. He was curious what he might do next.

The old rat shook his head sadly as he turned away, his crutches stabbing the dirt as though administering mercy kills to a bleeding trail of goblins. Before the endless tide of warriors claimed him as it had Razzel, he craned his neck to address the warlord once more. ‘Kazador can die-die if he must, but remember what you are told. Gnawdwell is watching.’

Queek watched him depart. His claws itched to tear out the old-thing’s spleen and shove it in his milky eye. He doubted Gnawdwell favoured this rat so highly that he would miss him if he were gone. He’d do it too, just as soon as Kazador’s head was on his pole. He wanted him to share the joy.

Rubbing his paws in happy anticipation, Queek gazed affectionately into the faces of his trophies, his battle-brothers.

‘Kazador-King join you, yes-yes. He tell all Queek meet-see that Queek unrivalled in the world. That no one is mightier than Queek!’

By the fell paws of the Horned Rat, he was tired.

His paws and crutches blurred as he struggled to keep pace with the great surge of clanrat warriors that scurried six abreast and many thousands deep. He felt like he was drowning, sinking in a sea of fur. He came up for air, snatching a breath as the horde slowed to navigate a partial collapse. The ceiling, encrusted with rot, had crumbled away like cheese. Hunks of masonry littered the passageway, and the clanrats surged over it like swarming roaches, passing through the hanging smog of white fungal spores without pause. Sharpwit sneezed, expending valuable oxygen. His lungs sloshed with fluid.

He gripped his crutches a little tighter. He would not die here. Not like this.

How had Queek ever risen so high in Gnawdwell’s graces? He knew the story, of course. Queek had been the largest and most vicious of a particularly aggressive breed and had killed and eaten his litter-brothers before his eyes had opened and black fur begun to sprout from his pink body. From then on, the clanlord had practically hand-reared him, providing him only the very best, and he had risen swiftly. Queek could not be more than four years old, yet he already boasted an impressive string of victories.

Still, Sharpwit thought, as he vaulted a fallen support beam, bracing his crutches and swinging both legs over to land in a stumble on the other side, the warlord seemed content to rise no further. Perhaps that was why the clanlord suffered his inadequacies. It was obviously not due to any particular brilliance on Queek’s own part. What could be more rare and precious than an underling that did not covet your position?

Sharpwit grimaced. That was all well and good for the clanlord, but it was Sharpwit who had been tasked with keeping the mad-thing on track. Wearily, he dredged his thoughts for every rumour he had ever heard of Queek. The clanlord himself mentioned him rarely, except as a stick to exact more favourable terms from warlord clans unfortunate enough to lair within striking distance of the City of Pillars. And they always capitulated. There wasn’t a warlord in Skavendom that fancied going claw to claw with the Headtaker.

It was said that the warlord was mad, that he spoke to shades and listened to voices in his head. Once Sharpwit had discounted this as hearsay, but now he had witnessed the truth of those rumours for himself. He had since been forced to reassess many of the other, even more outlandish, claims previously dismissed as the malicious slanders of jealous rivals. It was said that Queek could not be bribed, that he didn’t care for threats and that he led armies fearlessly from the front.

Perhaps Queek truly was mad. He wondered whether the clanlord even knew.

He was so deep in thought that he barely noticed the tide slowing to a crawl. Hemmed in on all sides by taller clanrats, he couldn’t see what was going on. Muttering his annoyance at inconsiderate young minions, he hoisted himself up on his crutches. His feet dangled as his bent spine stretched painfully out for him to peer above the milling heads.

The passage ahead had collapsed, more seriously than any they had passed so far. One wall had completely fallen in, occluding the tunnel with chunks of rotten granite and limestone and checking the skaven tide like a dam.

Sharpwit bit his lip in worried thought. The skaven of Deadclaw were supposed to be maintaining this stretch of the Underway for them. It would be just like the small minds that infested that place to have alerted the dwarfs of Karak Azul to their presence with some pointless skirmish or other and got themselves wiped out. Was it so much to ask that the teeming millions of Skavendom might produce a pawful with sufficient ability to truly serve the interests of their betters? He lashed his tail in frustration. A foolish question and one to which he had long ago learned the answer.

Lashing out with the sharpened tips of his crutches and his glowing fangs, he squeezed through to the front of the pack. It wasn’t as bad as it had first looked. There was a small opening at the lower left corner where the angular strength of the keystone from one of the tunnel’s support arches had wedged in. He watched clanrats load their gear onto their backs, spears and shields and bundled food jabbing from all angles as the skaven squirmed on all fours and in single file through the narrow opening.

‘This will stop-slow,’ Razzel hissed, making Sharpwit yelp as the seer seemed to materialise at his side, taking advantage of his missing eye to blindside him. ‘Will anger Queek-Warlord.’

‘Yes-yes,’ he agreed after he had recovered sufficient nerve to speak. ‘It will.’

Razzel stood with arms crossed as he watched his two albinos lend their strength to the swarming clanrats that were trying to burrow a fresh path through the blockage.

It was typical skaven thinking. With an hour or two, Sharpwit could have this tunnel properly cleared and with a temporary ceiling properly supported that would hold long enough to allow Queek’s army through. But skaven cannot wait. Much easier to dig and dig and dig and hope you are not one of those to be crushed into bloody paste by secondary collapses.

‘So,’ Razzel began, as lesser skaven continued their toil, picking his words with care. ‘Do you still believe-think that Queek-Warlord should lead this army? He has never had such a host at his paws. You think that mad-thing can command such a horde to victory?’

Sharpwit cast his eye over his shoulder nervously. ‘Queek has won many great victories,’ he declared loudly. ‘He is a most-fierce warlord.’

Tugging him aside, Razzel ushered him from the busy clanrats. ‘You know what I squeak-say. You know-see he had Ska gather this army for him. That Bloodtail could not outthink a green-thing with a head-wound, and he is practically warlord.’ The seer slammed his staff into the ground. The brass base struck sparks from the rubble. ‘Such an important mission-quest cannot rest on such shoulders.’

Sharpwit fidgeted anxiously. It didn’t matter that the grey seer was correct, not if some sharp-eared opportunist overheard such plotting. He didn’t care how insane Queek was, nobody became warlord or, more importantly, stayed warlord, without their spies. ‘Queek is a mighty war-leader,’ he said again, even more volubly. ‘Our most holy mission–’

‘Is imperilled!’ interrupted Razzel. ‘Yes-yes, it cannot stand!’ The grey seer spun away, paws clenching and unclenching at his side, itching to exact pious vengeance. Razzel squealed in fury and thrust his staff at the cave-in. His red eyes turned dark, his brilliant fur conjuring tiny green-black sparks as power flooded into the unholy artefact.

Sharpwit’s ears flattened against his head and he ducked behind the grey seer as his age-loosened glands clenched in terror. The nearby skaven dropped weapons and tools and stared in alarm as powerful sorcery drew bursts of static from their quivering hackles, filling the crammed passage with the musk of their fear and the shrill panic of their voices.

Green-tinged arcs of power splayed from the seer’s staff and the tunnel ahead suddenly erupted into dazzling warplight. Sharpwit squealed at the flare of pain in his eye and ducked as shrapnel and bits of skaven rained down, covering his ears from the howl of the warpstorm that the sorcerer had unleashed within the tunnel. Viridian lightning clawed the walls with vivid burns, shattering loose rubble to glowing dust while reducing nearby skaven to slag. Convinced that this time he was going to die, Sharpwit dropped his crutches and curled himself tightly into a ball.

Razzel’s high-pitched laughter roused him. He carefully opened one eye, expecting to see them all buried beneath a ton of earth.

‘Come-come,’ said Razzel. ‘We must reach Deadclaw before Queek if we want to prepare a good surprise for him.’ The seer hurried off with a spring in his step, bullying his shell-shocked guardians into following him.

Wincing at the pain flaring in his joints, Sharpwit struggled upright. All around, skaven picked themselves up and sniffed warily at the newly reopened tunnel. The occasional burst of warplight arced from wall to wall, earthing itself with a crack and the lingering fizz of ozone. Gingerly, he rapped the wall with his knuckles. He flinched, but a drizzle of mortar over his ears was the worst he suffered. It seemed stable enough – at least for now.

Noisily, he cleared his throat of dust and mucus and hobbled after the grey seer. He was eager to be long gone before this tunnel collapsed again, as it inevitably would. Sick with worry, he felt his guts knot. Between Grey Seer Razzel and Warlord Queek, who needed concern themselves with the dwarfs of Karak Azul?

Ska shoved his way through the gaggle of chieftains and clawleaders. Feeling rough paws on their backs, the war leaders turned, fangs bared and ready to snap, only to freeze in horrified recognition at the sight of Queek’s imposing right paw.

Only the Headtaker himself could clear a space faster than Ska Bloodtail.

Queek had been cornered by a trio of his most prominent lieutenants and the four of them scratched crude diagrams into the hard soil of the tunnel floor. Out of respect, Ska held back. They were discussing arrangements for accommodating and feeding so many warriors on the stop-over to Deadclaw. Ska couldn’t help the tingle of delight at the thought of Queek Headtaker suffering through such tasks. It was a small betrayal, but all the more satisfying for it. Queek stabbed impatiently at the claw-scratch pictograms before finally succumbing to his temper. His gaze shot up. Ska’s blood froze, instantly terrified that some voice had whispered to the warlord the disloyal thread of his thoughts. He dropped to the ground and grovelled unreservedly.

‘What do you need-want?’ Queek asked. He dismissed the unwanted lackeys with more pleasure than his fierce countenance betrayed.

‘Is nothing, most fearsome slayer of traitor-meats. A little thing.’

‘Does Ska bother Queek with little things?’ He asked. His claws scratched a line of gore from his armour, which he proceeded to swallow with relish. ‘Ska knows what Queek makes of little things?’

‘Not so little, most important and busy master, not so little.’ Ska fidgeted nervously. He threw frightened glances around the grim section of tunnel but any faint hope of a friendly face was soon extinguished. Those traitorous vermin, he thought. They had always been jealous of him. ‘Is Grey Seer Razzel,’ he began.

Queek leant in close, his voice low and menacing. ‘What about White-fur?’

‘He’s… gone.’

Queek stalked through the milling warriors like the eye of a cyclone. Clanrats and heavily armoured stormvermin scurried from his path, sensing the destruction he would wreak if they did not.

He felt naked, like he was missing an arm or a leg. The passages had grown too low and tight to accommodate his trophy rack, and it had been with great heaviness of heart that he had ordered its disassembly. His tail quivered, ramrod straight with furious energy. It was like watching Ska being taken apart piece by piece and borne behind him like some grisly parade. He glared down the line of slaves. Each held one of his treasured friends in their worthless paws. Even though he strained his ears, he could not hear their voices. They were offended by this treatment. He would have the paws of those slaves cut off as soon as they reached Deadclaw.

Nobody touched Queek’s trophies but Queek.

‘Tell again Ska, tell-squeak what you listen-hear.’

‘I hear Razzel took all the warriors on the other side of the roof-fall and took them to Deadclaw. He says you die-dead under cave-in and now Razzel has charge.’

‘Where did you hear this?’

‘Loyal skaven,’ Ska said before hurriedly adding, ‘loyal to Queek.’

‘Good-good,’ muttered Queek, patting his lieutenant’s arm. ‘Is it cleared yet?’

‘Partly,’ answered Ska as Queek broke into a run, forcing him into a scramble to keep pace. ‘But still only narrow, not big enough for Queek’s mighty army.’

‘Queek does not need an army. Queek never gets full on traitor-meat.’

‘But if Razzel has half Queek’s army…?’

‘They would never dare turn on Queek!’

Queek slowed as they neared the site of the collapse. Chained gangs of naked skavenslaves slapped bleeding paws against the well-packed rubble. Others ferried lumps of masonry from the worksite or lifted lengths of rotten timber to shore the crumbling ceiling as it was exposed. All worked with bent and bleeding backs under the watchful gaze of a lanky, brown-furred overseer. The skaven cracked the barbed tip of his whip across a line of slaves carting away gravel in a cavalcade of one-wheeled barrows, inciting them to greater feats of celerity.

Among the slaves worked Clan Skryre engineers. They bore long-handled implements that resembled pikes but, in place of a blade, they were topped with a spinning, crackling disc that summoned a noise like the death-bellow of worlds as it tore into the wall of rock. Shrapnel shot back at the warlocks like hail, ricocheting off the hardened glass of the face shields they wore. The green flashes from the growling engines were enough to illuminate the mad faces beneath the visors. Drunk on the power in their paws, fat tongues lolled from lips in a rictus of pleasure. Scurrying unnoticed between their feet, more slaves collected the rubble as it piled around them. Queek saw one of the slaves collapse poleaxed as a shard of flying debris tore out his jugular. He lay twitching in his death throes before he too was loaded into a barrow and dragged away.

The warlord crouched down on four paws and sniffed at the opening that had already been made. He could see the silent flashes of warp lightning that bespoke more work at the far end. He squeezed the metal bulk of one pauldron in after his head, jigging his shoulders to make it fit. The tunnel was perhaps twenty or twenty-five tail-lengths long and stank of musk and warpstone. It was all tight jagged walls and an unforgiving floor. Already the palms of his paws were bleeding where tiny stones had burrowed into his skin. Overhead, the rubble shifted and groaned under the ministrations of the engineers and their warp-grinders.

Maybe this wasn’t such a smart idea after all. What could a fool like Razzel hope to accomplish with only a few thousand warriors anyway? Nothing that couldn’t wait. He tried to draw himself back but the edges of his pauldron seemed wedged in front of an overhanging spar. He shook himself, trying to free the offending article, but he seemed to be stuck. Panic wrenched his bowels as he threw himself against the dratted rock. Fear musk rose unexpectedly from his glands to add his own contribution to the already noisome stench. He forced himself to be calm.

Queek the Fearless was not to be slighted by a tunnel.

He stretched out his arms, grabbing a clawful of gravel, and hauled himself forward. The complaints of his armour screamed in his ears as it scraped across the tunnel walls. He pulled himself forward again, leaving a trail of warpdust, scarlet paint and year-old blood as proof of his passing.

He stopped to catch his breath before shouting back. ‘What do you wait for, Bloodtail lazy-meat?’

There was a pause before the answer filtered through, tinny and distant. ‘Hole is tiny-small. Ska not fit.’

‘Ska better find a way to fit or Queek cuts him into smaller bits that do fit!’

He didn’t stop to wait and see if Ska was doing as he was told. Ska always did as he was told.

Paw over paw, skin shredded and weeping bloody tears, Queek dragged himself slowly and painfully to the far side of the tunnel. Some of the flickering light from beyond the opening began to reach him, carrying with it the chittering voices and musky scent of his warriors. Already feeling his spirits lift, he hauled himself the last few inches.

He poked his snout into the open. Blinking in the light, he squinted up at something shiny rushing down to greet him.

He squealed in shock, snapping his head back into the hole as the spiked head of a poleaxe came crashing down where his head had been. The heavy weapon split the crusty sandstone flag in two and wedged there. Queek heard his attacker curse as he tried to pull his weapon free.

He tried to draw himself further back but he had gone as far as he could. He saw the poleaxe shift in the block that held it, beginning to loosen, and gave a furious snarl. It seemed the traitor-meat barred his one way out. Unlucky for him. He thrust out on his hind legs, bursting from the hole and clamping claws and fangs over the assassin’s ankle. His mouth suddenly filled with blood. The skaven squealed in pain and released his heavy weapon, instead bashing at Queek’s ears with his fists. Ears ringing under the onslaught, Queek released his bite and shoved his attacker back. The skaven stumbled and fell onto his tail as Queek wriggled the rest of his body free.

He pulled himself upright and drew his weapons. Facing him were eight muscle-bound stormvermin bearing an assortment of large and intimidating weaponry. Their leader, treading tenderly on a bleeding foot, bent to collect his poleaxe. He wore an earring made from twisted steel pins, bent into a crude rendition of the mark of Clan Rictus. He looked nervous, but took courage from his obvious advantage of numbers.

Queek risked a quick glance behind his back to where a handful of slaves and a single warlock engineer cowered from the fight. The engineer’s warp-grinder revved down noisily as Queek returned his attention where it belonged

‘Rictus thug-meat. I see-smell you coming from Skavenblight with White-fur. He sends you to kill me? Kill Queek?’ He bared his fangs and hissed a challenge. ‘No one can kill Queek!’

He dived forward, the first slash of his sword clattering harmlessly off the steel haft of the leader’s poleaxe. The vibration buzzed through his palm. A naval cutlass hissed for his throat, but Queek was already spinning away, knocking the blade aside with the flat of his own and following through with an irresistible downward stroke of Dwarf Gouger. The magically empowered maul clove through the stormvermin’s helm as though it wasn’t there. Its long spike pulverised the skaven’s skull and issued from his throat in a bubbling foam of gore. Queek shifted his weight, swiftly parrying a pair of probing blades as he yanked his maul free and kicked the ruined body to the floor.

Despite their advantage, his foes held back, weapons lowered as though attempting to herd some wild beast.

Snarling with contempt, Queek threw himself into their number, bearing two of them to the ground beneath his weight. Dropped weapons and armour clattered as they all fell together in a heap. The first was gutted on his sword. The second he doubled over in gasping agony with an armour-plated elbow to the throat before rolling clear in a flash of scarlet and steel.

Five remained. Queek’s lips twitched, thrilled by the bloody traitor taste. Of those, two moved unsteadily. Their leader moved in half-hops on a savaged footpaw while a second held his sword in one paw, employing the other to massage his bruised throat.

‘I tell you,’ he tittered. ‘I tell you none beat Queek.’

The limping leader snarled instructions to the others, hanging back and turning his poleaxe parallel to the ground to use its long haft to push his warriors forward.

‘Yes-yes. Come to Queek.’

He ducked beneath the crude swipe of the first to come near, flicking out with his sword, but the point merely grazed the skaven’s leather hauberk. A halberd flashed from the corner of his eye and he quickly scurried back. The recurved blade struck his shoulder guard in a shower of warpdust. Queek hissed and dived back in, but his foes fought cagily. They sought to use their numbers against him, pressing too close for him to get real power behind his attacks, but not committing to the killing blow themselves. They were waiting for him to tire.

One of the black-furs leered, dropping into a crouch and weaving his falchion menacingly like the head of a serpent. A string of rusted rings jangled loudly along the back of the blade. His confident expression did not falter, even as his head separated from his body and smacked against the near wall. Headless, blood sprayed at the ceiling by its witlessly pumping heart, the body folded over to reveal the panting, scratched and bleeding hulk that was Ska Bloodtail. The skaven had shed his armour to squeeze after his warlord and from snout to claw he was scored with tiny cuts. He blinked away blood as it dripped from a gash above his right eye. He came forward on unsteady feet, the bloody dwarfish rune-axe hanging heavy in both paws.

Seeing the hesitation in his attacker’s eyes at the sudden slashing of their odds, Queek spun and dashed aside the halberd of the nearest stormvermin before following through with an uppercut from Dwarf Gouger that smashed bone shards from its jaw to shred the creature’s brain. The blow carried the foe-rat from the ground and it flew, turning halfway along its own axis before crashing head first into a cart of rubble. Beside him, he felt the arrival of Ska as two more crushing blows sent two mutilated bodies tumbling to their open graves.

A flash of instinct made him spin. Too late he saw the leader. His earring blazed in the residual warplight from the digging machines, a rusted knife clenched in one fist as it drove for Queek’s unarmoured throat. A powerful force flung him aside, snatching the curse from his lips as it dashed him against the wall. Winded and coated in dust, he rolled onto his back just in time to see Ska take the blade. The giant was bigger than Queek. A strike intended for the warlord’s throat drank deeply of his heart.

Ska gasped as the knife entered him, pain shuddering through his entire body as it was clumsily withdrawn. He angled a punch but it missed by a mile. He fell, gasping and clutching clumsily at his ruptured chest.

The Clan Rictus assassin licked his blade clean and took one look at Queek. His tongue froze. His eyes widened in horror.

Shrugging loose the insignificant mountain that sought to slow him, Warlord Queek rose to his feet. Breath roared from his lungs like balefire. He saw nothing, felt nothing – nothing but rage, his innards devoured as fuel for its terrible fire. Blood trickled from his palms to paint the earth at his feet, his weapons gripped so tightly that his claws drew blood where they met. The pain didn’t even register. The red liquid ran as he stared down the fool that had cut the right paw from the Headtaker.

With a squeal of terror, the black-fur dropped his dagger and fled.

CHAPTER FOUR

So this was Deadclaw. He was not impressed.

Old-thing had told him that a dragon had once laired in the caverns beneath Azul, and he could still smell it. The place smelt hot – of ash and cinders and reptilian musk. And it felt too open. Glimmering red eyes marked his every step, their owners clustered over every mouldering plank of the vast timber towers that scaled the great cavern. The towers leant inward with the curvature of the walls, grappling one another in a frenzy of gangplanks and splitting hawsers. The scent of meat wafted from above to contend with the lizard stench, wet rags hanging from perilous-looking balconies to steam dry in the heat. The skaven of Deadclaw clung to the gangrails of their precarious dwellings and looked down. They were sparsely furred and skinny, adapted to the dry heat, and swarmed over the creaking edifices like beetles over a rotten log. They watched in silence as he passed beneath them, dragging a brutalised warrior behind him by a bleeding foot. The skaven was barely conscious, emitting a feeble stream of moans that were pointedly ignored. Its arms were broken and it was missing an eye. Its remaining eye was hidden in a swollen mass of pink tissue that had enveloped the left side of his face. Both ears had been ripped clean away and the ragged wounds leaked in twin tracks like scarlet rails in the dirt.

Not for the first time, Queek missed the presence of his heads – their reassuring presence watching his back, their wise counsel in his ear. They would know where White-fur was hiding. Queek glared furiously into every furtive pair of eyes, daring them to defy him. Ska had always been accomplished at sniffing out treachery. His voice had always squeaked in harmony with Queek’s others. And now he was gone. Spittle leaked from his gaping maw. His vision swirled, frightened clanrats condensing into one homogeneous mass and bursting into a thousand bleeding pieces as he sought a focus for his rage. Which of these had conspired with White-fur to betray him? Queek did not know, so he challenged them to step forward and face him if they dared. None did, and he headed on with a wordless snarl, dragging his weakly struggling victim along behind.

He started as he passed one of the yawing towers. He looked again, only for the figure he had thought he’d seen to duck behind the back of another and skulk under the rotting frame of a doorway. Queek snarled and headed that way. He was in no mood for games. One by one, the skinny, patch-furred skaven melted from his path until just one unfortunate remained. The crippled old skaven clutched the beetle-infested elm of the doorframe for dear life, holding up a crutch as if to ward him off.

Queek slapped down the stick with the back of his paw. ‘Old-thing,’ he hissed, looking down at the tremulous creature. ‘Where is White-fur? Tell Queek or he rip-tears arms from body!’

The old rat stared beyond him at the beaten body of the would-be assassin. He whimpered and cowered back behind the doorframe. ‘Don’t know. I swear I don’t. All my life I serve our clan. I would never betray, never-never.’

Queek shoved the old skaven roughly through the door and followed him into the hovel. At once, his nose wrinkled at the musk and dung stench of the generations of degenerate inbreds that had laired here. He cupped paws over his welling eyes and backed hurriedly out. He doubted whether even fear of the Headtaker could compel a grey seer to hide in such a place. Much as the decrepit one tried him, Old-thing was probably telling the truth. ‘Come-come, Old-thing,’ he snapped over his shoulder as he turned to leave, paw tightening around the ankle of his now-unconscious prisoner.

‘Most merciful and understanding of tyrants,’ Sharpwit grovelled, scurrying from the grimy hovel in a hopping, spider-ish gait as he recovered his fallen crutch.

‘White-fur will turn up. Queek does better things than hunt little lone White-fur.’ His gaze tracked the extent of the great cannibalised city below ground. It was nothing, driftwood deposited on a beach, rotten spars settling where they may. Queek had no wish to insert his nose under every crab hole and stinking mound of kelp. ‘He has no army. Is Queek’s army. Queek’s skaven always loyal to Queek. Stupid-dumb White-fur, he forgets that.’

‘Yes-yes,’ Sharpwit agreed, hobbling after the warlord as quickly as he could manage. ‘But where do we go?’

‘Queek surprised Old-thing forgets. Queek remembers Old-thing as most insistent.’ His eyes rolled upward and he extended a claw to the ceiling. ‘We are here, Old-thing. Azul-Place. Queek goes to destroy.’

Thordun felt weak at the knees. He was glad he was sitting down. And not just sitting down, but sitting on a dwarfish stool at a dwarfish table with a foaming tankard of golden dwarfish ale in his hand. He raised the vessel to his lips and gulped down half in one go. He set down the tankard and covered a belch with his hand. It was not that you couldn’t get dwarfish beer in Nuln, you could. It was just… not the same.

He looked around, unable in just one glance to take in the full measure of the hall’s splendour. Grungni’s shrine in Karak Azul was the largest, and quite easily the grandest, to be found anywhere in the Karaz Ankor. The lord of mining was said to have dwelt within these halls – said by the dwarfs of Karak Azul in any case – and thus the primacy of that most revered of ancestors was doubly pronounced in this, his home. Row after row of long, low-slung tables filled the hall, groaning under the weight of platters of roasted meat and tankards of ale. Between them ran flushed-looking shortbeards in greasy smocks. They looked younger even than Thordun, diligently replenishing flagons of ale from great pitchers and removing teetering trays of picked-clean bones.

The dwarfs chewed purposefully in silence, paying rapt heed only to their own platter. It was astonishing that so many dwarfs could generate so little noise. Aside from the rattle of animal bones tossed into pewter bowls, the cough of a dwarf taking too deep a draw of his pipe and the occasional crash of a dropped tankard, the atmosphere could easily have been mistaken for the Nuln public library.

Thordun followed suit and kept his mouth shut.

He gazed in wonderment at the high ceiling, its dazzling frescoes depicting seven thousand years of dwarfish history, and with equal awe at the great ribbed vaults that held the weight of the hold without need for columns. Set into the vertiginous granite walls, more ancestor statues sat in states of repose upon marble plinths bearing the names and great deeds of the worthies depicted in immortal stone upon them. The statues themselves had been festooned with ornate mining lanterns, the ancestors of Azul casting a homely glow upon their feasting kin and gifting it with the evocative aroma of burning oil. Between such statues, and they were numerous, rich hangings were draped bearing the runes and accumulated history of the clans of Karak Azul from carpenters to kings. Across the many bowed heads, about as distant from Thordun’s table as could be, the king and his thanes feasted beneath a vast statue of Grungni. The stone colossus was taller than five dwarfs, its beard speckled with silver, its body clad in iron and gromril plate finer than that worn by any living prince of Karak Azul.

The contemplative air was infectious, and Thordun’s mind began to wander. It had been many months since he had departed the Empire, far too long to plan such things, but he had secretly hoped to arrive at the home of his ancestors in good time for the Feast of Grungni. To arrive on the very day itself could surely only speak of providence. In his excitement, he had shared the thought with Bernard, but the Bretonnian had been less enthusiastic. ‘Fishing a corpse from the Aver and finding a pfennig still sewn into its jerkin, that’s providence. This is just lucky.’

Thordun hoped that Bernard and the others were keeping clear of trouble. Unlike more cosmopolitan strongholds such as Zhufbar or Barak Varr, Karak Azul was far to the south and with too grim a reputation to lay claim to any great human populace. But humans, it seemed, got everywhere, and there were always a few pirates and ruffians prepared to risk the Old Dwarf Road for Arabayan gold or a mercenary’s wage in the Border Princes. They had even encountered a couple of bands who, like Thordun, fancied a tilt at Kazador’s fabled reward. He had overheard that, on Grungni’s night, those men would gather in one of the taverns of the First Deep where they could see the open sky and drink in the new day; there to carouse to their own gods and any other deity that could be named – provided they not be dwarf – with free ale to he who could cite the most. Thordun rubbed his chin nervously. Throwing Bernard into that drunken mix seemed a recipe for blood on the stones and a very brief stay for Thordun in the home of his ancestors.

Even so, he was glad that men were not welcome in the Feasting Hall this night. The feast was a night for dwarfs, and he did not want Bernard to spoil it for him. This night had always been the highlight of his calendar, even as he had spurned most dwarfish things in his youth. It had been an excuse to get drunk, to sing loud songs, to dance with girls, to stay up all night and not annoy his father in doing it.

The thought of his father had him reaching again for his ale. He had been so lost in thought he hadn’t even noticed some kindly soul refill it. He sat back, regarding the silent throng with a shrug. Maybe this was how true dwarfs celebrated Grungni’s Day, with quiet reflection and personal enjoyment of the mountain’s bounty. He raised his tankard in silent salute. He would drink to that.

‘Put your drink down, lad. A fly’ll land in it.’

Startled, Thordun looked across the table to where an apple-cheeked old dwarf, evidently somewhat the worse for wear, downed the last dregs of his ale. He smacked the empty tankard on the table, seemingly blind to the poisonous looks shot him by his neighbours, and used his sleeve to wipe his grey beard of suds.

‘There are flies down here?’ Thordun asked, still a little stunned that anybody had spoken to him at all.

The old dwarf grunted in laughter. ‘There’s always flies, lad.’ He reached across the table, offering a hand, which Thordun took in a firm shake. ‘Handrik Hallgakrin, beardling. What brings you to the Iron Peak on this cheeriest of nights?’

‘I’m not a beardling,’ said Thordun, offended. ‘I’ve passed my fiftieth year.’

‘Have you now?’ Handrik chuckled.

‘My name is Thordun Locksplitter.’

Handrik sat back, smoothing the braids of his beard as if in deep thought. He flagged down a passing server who poured fresh ale into his tankard, and only when his cup was overflowing once more did he speak again. ‘You wouldn’t be kin of Thordred Locksplitter?’

Thordun sighed. He hadn’t expected his name to be recognised after so many years. ‘Thordred was my father.’

Handrik raised a bushy silver brow. ‘Was…?’

‘He died in the skaven attack on Nuln,’ he said, setting his mug on the table. He gripped it with both hands, his eyes growing distant. ‘You’ve never seen such evil. Plague, famine, rats under everything. It was darkness as you can’t imagine. And that was before the skaven came. Half the city was destroyed in a single night, everyone who survived lost someone. Most more than one.’

‘Thaggoraki,’ Handrik muttered darkly after a fortifying sip of ale. ‘He was a stout lad, your father. The best of lads, the sort you don’t find nowadays. I’m sure he died well and has his feet in front of a roaring fire in the Ancestors’ Hall.’ Handrik’s broad smile did little to banish the spectre that had settled over both their shoulders.

Thordun cleared his throat nervously. ‘Actually, that’s why I’m here–’

‘Hush lad,’ hissed Handrik, cutting him off. ‘Time for the speech.’

As if on cue, a horn sounded a deep bass note, and the hall filled with the scraping of stools as the gathered dwarfs rose as one. Thordun stood on tiptoe to gaze over the intervening heads to the far end of the hall. A proud white-bearded figure in royal vestments clambered onto his table.

‘That’s King Kazador,’ observed Handrik.

Thordun grunted an affirmative.

As he watched, the king raised the rune-carved ivory horn to his lips once more and sounded a long clear note that brought the hall to total silence. The king was garbed in heavy robes of blue wool and animal furs, layered over his armour as though girded for war, his simple crown affixed to a spectacular winged helm. His beard was carefully braided, plaited between five heavy golden clasps. With the reverence due a timeless heirloom, the king hung the horn from his belt, clasped his hands behind his back and prepared to address his people.

‘On this day,’ Kazador intoned in a rich baritone that carried with ease to the far reaches of the shrine, ‘we give thanks.’

The king paused and Thordun looked around. He’d expected a cheer or a round of applause, but the dwarfs looked as if they were here to suffer rather than celebrate. Behind him Handrik stood head down, eyes closed like a Sigmarite sister in prayer.

The king turned to face the image of Grungni. ‘And for what do we offer our thanks? We thank him for iron and for gromril and for gold. We thank him for copper and lead and tin.’ He shook his head with a grim laugh, shunning the face of his ancestor. ‘We could. If such things alone had value. Perhaps we thank him for teaching us to dig, that we may bury our heads beneath the stone of the karak while above a world is consumed by darkness? Or perhaps we should give thanks for the protection of walls of marble and granite? Ha!’ he barked, startling those who stood closest to him. ‘So we instead offer praise for kith and kin, safe within our mountain’s warmth.’ Kazador’s voice broke, and Thordun feared the king might weep, but the king’s eyes were dry and his face wrathful. The king stamped his heel on the table top, gesturing angrily to one of his blue-liveried servants. ‘Ale! Pass me ale, you beardless bozdok!’

Ale was hurriedly pressed into the king’s hand, and he thrust out the tankard to the grimly observant throng. ‘Thank you, Grungni, ancestor of Karak Azul, lord of mining. We offer our thanks for all that you deign to give.’ There was a rippled muttering from the dwarfs in reply. Kazador brought the ale to his lips. ‘And,’ he growled, ‘for that which you take away.’

Thordun joined his fellow dwarfs in reciprocating the king’s ‘toast’, wetting his throat with ale and retaking his seat amidst much shuffling and scraping as others did likewise.

Handrik puffed out his cheeks, noisily expelling the air between his lips. With a sigh, he downed the remnants of his ale and signalled for more. ‘And they say oratory is a fading art.’

Thordun nodded. This was definitely not the way the Feast of Grungni was observed in Nuln. The distant strains of a heated argument made him twist in his stool. The king was remonstrating with a fearsome-looking dwarf. Even from a distance, Thordun recoiled from the hard steel in the longbeard’s stare.

‘That’s Runelord Thorek Ironbrow,’ observed Handrik, following the younger dwarf’s look.

‘That’s impossible! My father told me stories of Thorek’s deeds. He must be long dead for half of them to be true.’

‘I’d wager they’re all true and then some, lad. Thorek was old when I was young and I’m no beardling myself.’ His good humour faded as he followed the distant argument. ‘I don’t envy the king. Thorek has a hammer for a tongue.’

‘Handrik, why does a venerable longbeard like you seat himself with rootless wanderers like me? Surely you should be up there at the king’s own table.’

The longbeard belched and eyed Thordun blearily. ‘You’re a young and impertinent beardling. I would have expected Thordred to impart better manners.’ He sighed, pushing his freshly refilled ale away. ‘This is my first feast in fifteen years. I would always volunteer for duty in the Underdeep on this night. It has not been the same since… since the dishonour. It happened just before Grungni’s Day you know, lad. Urk and grobi, plundering and killing. You thought Nuln was bad?’ He shook his head, laughing without humour. ‘You haven’t experienced true evil, lad. I missed the lot too. I was patrolling the Underdeep when the greenskin savages broke into the Fifth Deep. It was all done and dusted by the time word got down. To come back and see what I saw. Pray you never see the like, lad, pray you never do.’

At the royal table, Thorek was gesticulating angrily, hissing through his beard and jabbing a beringed finger into the king’s chest. Kazador, for his part, bore the runelord’s tirade in grim-faced silence until, without a word and abandoning the old dwarf mid-sentence, he turned his back and walked away. Thorek’s jaw clenched, but the venerable runelord managed to sit without doing himself the dishonour of giving vent to his fury. Kazador stalked through the seated ranks of his people with an expression set in obsidian. Not a single face looked up to note his passing, and Kazador offered less in turn as he swept from the Hall. The disapproving grumbles of a nearby table of longbeards were swiftly tempered by the brooding proximity of Runelord Thorek.

Handrik leant across the table and pulled his ale back towards him. ‘Kazador is a good king, lad.’ He took a sip and set it back. ‘A great king. You should’ve seen him before. There was none stronger. He could lift a laden ore pony, one in each hand, and outdrink any dawi in the kingdom. His tally in the grobkull is the greatest since the Golden Age and unbettered since. Aye, he was a fine king.’ His expression soured as he stared at Thordun. ‘What’s been done to him would change anybody, don’t you forget that. You can’t imagine true loss, not at your age. And then… then there is the prince.’

‘What happened to the prince?’

Handrik stiffened. ‘Enough of your questions! Let me ask one of you. What brings a son of Azul back home?’

‘I come with a company of men to recover Kazador’s lost kin.’

‘And help yourself to the reward no doubt,’ Handrik barked gruffly, but Thordun saw from the sparkle in his eyes that the old dwarf was joking. ‘Good for you, lad,’ he laughed and the two dwarfs struck tankards together and drank.

‘Tell me, Thordun Locksplitter,’ Handrik began earnestly. ‘Tell me what you will do with half the wealth of Kazador once you have earned it.’

Thordun sighed as he joined his elder in envisaging such a mountain of gold.

‘And are you ready to do battle with the squatter king, himself? He is the largest orc in these mountains and old as far as such foul beasts measure such things. Some of these beardlings say he’s as strong as Kazador in his prime, but younglings today seem quick to such judgements and half wouldn’t remember their king’s feats in any case. Present the king with the head of Gorfang Rotgut, lad, and you’re entitled to your pick of the king’s treasury.’ The old dwarf slouched, his eyes glazed, almost glittering with the heaped gold he pictured behind them. He started to laugh, a girlish giggle unbecoming so grizzled a veteran. ‘Did your father ever tell you of the time I caught him breaking into the king’s vault? Not to steal of course, just to prove that he could.’

Smiling, Thordun shook his head.

‘Well, listen up then, it’s a good story…’

Sharpwit stood in the entryway to the warlord’s newly appropriated burrow, uncertain whether to go or to stay, or if Queek even realised he was there. The chamber was large and, judging by the even grooves scoured into the rock, dug by machine rather than by skaven paws. Ratskin parchments scratched with wireframe diagrams of unrecognisable machines littered the floor space. Long bronze-plated shelves ran the length of the burrow at waist height, packed with strange, many-pronged instruments and alchemical apparatuses that bubbled and spat, filling the small burrow with a vinegar sharpness.

The warlord kicked through the sheets of ratskin towards the vat of acidic fluid that rattled against the rivets sealing it to the shelf. Sharpwit cringed in anticipation.

‘Great warlord, might I urge–’

Sharpwit squeaked in alarm, ducking as the warlord hurled something his way. It was made of brass and gold, some manner of clockwork contraption with spindly arms around a central sphere. It flew over his head and clattered into the pile of similar junk that was taking shape in the tunnel outside the burrow. Sharpwit sucked in a sharp breath. That had looked valuable.

The warlord had soon become distracted from his plans for the immediate annihilation of Karak Azul. Sharpwit felt he deserved no small measure of thanks for that fact: a statue in warpstone before the gateway to the Shattered Tower, perhaps? As obvious as it had appeared to Sharpwit to await the arrival of one’s army before attacking, Queek would not see it. The warlord’s madness seemed limitless. Even now, Queek muttered to himself as he sorted through the objects and treasures of the skaven that had previously called this burrow theirs, studying them before invariably tossing them out, keeping only the most innocuous of things. A clockwork timepiece clad in brass. A rat skull with glowing ingots of warpstone set into its tiny eyes. A ghostly white moth pinned to a vellum sheet. Queek plucked the insect from its page and, with a lunatic grin, pinned it into the fur behind his ears, whispering as though it listened. And perhaps, in Queek’s broken mind, it did.

‘Queek-Warlord. Maybe it is time we prepared. Your army will be here soon.’

Sharpwit squealed, ducking again as the warlord changed his mind over the rat skull. He watched it soar, striking the roof of the tunnel. The precious warpstone slipped from its sockets and rolled away down the tunnel’s incline towards Deadclaw. Sharpwit sniffed in dismay. Such waste.

‘Queek not run after little rats,’ Queek whispered after a time. ‘Is that what Old-thing thinks? He thinks little rats call on Queek and he go?’ He tittered, muffling his laughter behind a paw. His eyes flared and without warning the warlord suddenly pounced.

Sharpwit jerked into motion but too late. Queek grabbed him by the throat and hauled him from the ground. The old skaven swung like a stalled pendulum in his grip.

‘Is that what Old-thing thinks?’ Queek asked again.

‘No-no,’ Sharpwit croaked. ‘Queek’s clawleaders come here. Of course they come here.’

Queek dropped him and Sharpwit gasped, his tail twitching in time to his ragged breathing.

‘Clever-smart. Now be away-gone. Queek very busy.’

Again the warlord broke into a fit of laughter, and Sharpwit glanced nervously at the room’s third occupant. The brutalised warrior of Clan Rictus moaned in agony, lying at the rear of the burrow in a space that the warlord had cleared for him. The skaven looked at him, beseeching. As if Sharpwit could help. As if he would.

Sharpwit’s tail lashed. ‘Queek-Warlord is too important for such tasks. Allow humble Sharpwit to interrogate this traitor-meat. Glorious Queek then… then…’ he trailed off before adding desperately. ‘Then he find-catch dwarf-things to kill.’

‘Deadclaw has rats and it has dry wood-stuff, but it has no dwarf-things.’ Queek turned his back, his attention riveted on his mewling captive. ‘Now leave. Before Queek does something unpleasant.’

The heat of the Clan Skryre foundry beneath Deadclaw was an almost tangible thing, a physical presence that made walking like a wade through boiling mud. Long before Sharpwit had set paws over the threshold, the acrid stench of its industry had assaulted him from the tunnels. It flowed from the airless chamber like semi-molten rock. His nose recoiled from it, a hot acid burn of a smell that forced tears from his single eye. He pressed on, the grinding of rusted metal evolving from a bass rumble that sent vibrations tingling through his feet to a perpetual percussive thunder that rattled his teeth in their diseased gums. Mammoth wheels, the source of the ungodly din, ground slowly through the smog.

He coughed, bringing up a clot of bloody phlegm. The air was dense with dust, vaporised warpstone and simple lung-darkening ash. Suppressing another cough that threatened to become a fit, he smothered his snout with his sleeve and looked about. Between the ever-turning wheels, wiry figures hurried about on inscrutable errands. Bubbling vats of molten iron for casting glowed white hot, swaying precariously from bowing rods embedded in vast, pyramidal, iron stanchions. Steam rose from the vats to turn the wheels, the motion transduced down a chain of cogs and ratchets into the smog-clouded distance of the foundry’s core.

Sharpwit tried to pick out individuals through the haze as he fingered the strange mechanical device in his paws. He examined it again. It was the spinning-armed device that Queek had thrown out of his newly claimed burrow. Of all the burrows Queek could have claimed, must it have been that of Warlock Fizqwik? The warlord had no notion of diplomacy. Only the most devious of skaven could have laid claim to the burrow Queek had simply taken for his own. It was an oasis of cool amidst the teeming firepit of Deadclaw, and a skaven strong enough to hold such a prize was unlikely to take his eviction gracefully. He turned again to the object in his paws. The maltreatment had caused it to stall. The two little spheres that orbited the larger central body jerked like a freshly animated cadaver. The property of a warlock, whatever its function, he thought as he tucked the contraption inside his jerkin.

Creeping deeper into the forge, an object that didn’t seem to belong attracted his notice and he limped towards it. It was a box, taller than Sharpwit and twice as deep. From between its crudely nailed slats came the occasional flash of warp lightning, painting Sharpwit in alternating patterns of eerie green light and shadow. Stepping closer, he could hear sounds above the endless metallic grinding. It sounded like the chittering of many hundreds of rats, furry bodies rustling against their cramped confinement. He pressed his good eye to the space between two boards and was convinced he saw hundreds of beady red dots glaring hungrily back.

‘You-there, away-back!’

Jolted by surprise, Sharpwit stepped hurriedly back, raising open paws in the air and dropping his muzzle in a general gesture of deference.

The hunched shape of a warlock engineer broke through the grasping black tendrils of smog. His piebald fur was swaddled in thick leather overalls with little regard for the unbearable heat. The ratkin’s head was enclosed in a copper helm from which sprouted an array of delicate and unfathomable protuberances. He leant in close, taking a deep sniff of Sharpwit’s scent before satisfying himself that the intruder’s fear was genuine. The warlock straightened, adjusting one of his helm’s devices: a multi-segmented arm that held a green-lensed ocular attachment over his right eye. The warlock struggled with the appendage, its stiff joints uncooperatively tugging it from his face. In the end, he held it in place with his paw, focusing on Sharpwit as though analysing a specimen for dissection.

‘What you want-seek?’ he asked suspiciously.

Sharpwit bobbed again, for safety’s sake. From the corner of his eye, he watched a pair of skavenslaves feed dripping hunks of red meat between the boards of the mysterious crate. The box jolted and erupted with wild screams. The slaves scurried clear, thankful for their fingers, before an unconcerned warlock with an electric goad encouraged them back to their task, a red-sodden wicker basket on the ground between them still heaped with fresh meat.

‘I come-search for the great and knowledgeable warlock of Clan Skryre who has so skilfully readied Deadclaw for the glorious conquest of Azul-Place.’

‘I am Fizqwik,’ the warlock muttered cautiously. ‘What old-thing wants to know?’ The warlock leant in closer, all evasion forsaken. He adjusted a clicking dial around the circumference of his ocular lens. ‘Just how old are you, Old-thing? Twenty? How are you still living?’

Sharpwit squirmed under the warlock’s scrutiny. ‘The dwarf-thing’s fall is soon-quick and you, most skilful and loyal servant of the Council, have been relieved of your most hard-heavy duties.’

‘What?’ Fizqwik spluttered, suddenly paying attention. ‘Fizqwik is in charge here! What two-warptoken warlord do they send to replace me?’ Sharpwit opened his mouth but the warlock wasn’t listening. He sniffed, genuinely hurt. ‘After all this time that I battle dwarf-thing hordes. Almost single-pawed! No warlord steals from Clan Skryre! Come-come!’ This last was snapped in Sharpwit’s direction as the warlock swept past him towards the Deadclaw tunnels. ‘Are lots-many nasty surprises hidden in my burrow. I teach the little warlord not to trifle with Fizqwik!’

‘Your burrow?’ Sharpwit asked, feeling his stomach drop. Of course, the warlock wanted to go to his burrow. ‘Hold-wait! Queek-Warlord should come here. Yes-yes! Show you are an important skaven of much distinction.’

The warlock paused. ‘You say Queek? The Headtaker is here?’

Sharpwit nodded eagerly. He knew from his dealings in Skavenblight that the threat of the Headtaker was worth a thousand warriors. The choking smog and metallic fumes did little to hide the clenching of the warlock’s musk glands at the name of the most notorious warlord in the Worlds Edge Mountains. Fizqwik shuffled in an agony of indecision. Appearing to arrive at a solution, he barked a summons into the smog and a junior warlock came running, a stunted creature with golden-brown fur and bright orange eyes.

‘Peekrit,’ Fizqwik ordered. ‘My weapon!’

The apprentice engineer bobbed acquiescence and scurried away into the din of the foundry.

‘Most smart and considered–’

‘Come-come, Old-thing!’

Surrendering to the sinking feeling, Sharpwit limped after the departing warlock. He shook his head in despair. Could these spoiled whelps not cooperate for just a little while?

The keen-eyed young warlock came running out of the smog at the head of a rabble of slaves, and pressed a long-barrelled musket into his master’s paws. The smooth walnut stock bulged with whirring accoutrements of brass and chrome. The engineer grinned cruelly as he took it, sliding open the flash pan and filing it with blackpowder, then stuffing a smooth warpstone bullet down the barrel. A puff of warpstone fume vented from a miniature chimney stack in the weapon’s side as it accepted the new load. Fizqwik bounced excitedly, the power in his paws and its heady warpstone emissions filling him with a bloodthirsty eagerness. He stroked the barrel.

‘I show fool-Queek why Clan Skryre is greatest of the clans!’ He squeaked a command to the slaves and they fell in around him.

The warlock marched into the teeming tunnels of Deadclaw, the skaven they passed swift to press their muzzles to the dirt. Fizqwik lapped up the adulation like spilt cream, acknowledging the fawning vermin with a triumphal gesture, pumping his bulbous warplock in both paws over his head as he walked.

‘Fizqwik!’ Sharpwit snapped, neglecting in his impatience to properly gild his words with flattery. ‘There are things you do not know.’

‘What does Fizqwik not know? I am the most skilful of warlocks. No mysteries to Fizqwik.’

Sharpwit nodded obligingly, cursing through clenched teeth the general ineptitude of the skaven race. Without pausing in their progress through the narrow tunnels and wide, scale-scraped caverns of Deadclaw, Sharpwit tried to explain that Queek Headtaker was the chosen leader of the Thirteen and then finally, his exasperation transparent, that Queek had claimed Fizqwik’s precious burrow as his own.

Fizqwik glowered. ‘They say Queek is a mad-thing. Must be true-talk. None other would take-steal from Fizqwik of Clan Skryre.’ The warlock glared angrily at Peekrit who quickly nodded.

‘Yes-yes,’ the young engineer nodded in eager agreement. ‘Fizqwik is the most famed and terrible of all warlocks.’

Sharpwit rolled his eye and muttered a silent curse.

The party turned from the main tunnel into an upward-sloping passageway. It was littered with metallic debris: springs, cogs and a splayed mess of copper wiring. It resembled a trail of corpses, bleeding and disembowelled, all of them victims of Queek’s disfavour. Fizqwik’s eyes widened as he took stock of the extent of Queek’s vandalism. The warlock’s lips pulled back over black gums, a low snarl rattling from his throat. He clutched his warplock musket to his aproned chest in a grip so tight that his claws screamed across the chrome panelling along the barrel.

‘Clan Mors will compensate me for this,’ Fizqwik hissed. ‘Queek’s head will not be enough.’

They proceeded through the wreckage of the warlock’s former belongings to the burrow’s entrance. The pile of junk was deeper here, a dragon’s treasure in platinum and palladium and copper and silver. Warpstone power cells glowed dimly, fading towards a slow death beneath the weight of rare and precious elements. Rising above the mound of dubious treasures like volcanic isles, a quintet of dusty elmwood barrels seemed quite innocuous. Beneath the layering of grime, Sharpwit could discern the markings of the klinkarhun carved into the wood.

He picked his way through the sharp and probably toxic mess to the nearest barrel. His claws traced the chiselled lettering, lips moving as he translated the dwarfish writing. ‘Grumbold’s…’ He paused, taking an involuntary step back. He took up his crutch and wedged its sharpened point under the lid. It was dwarfish design and the seal was good, but after a breath-stealing moment of effort he was able to lever the lid from the barrel and drink deep of the scent of hops. ‘Speckled Green-thing,’ he whispered with a touch of awe. He turned on Fizqwik. ‘Brewed in Azgal-Place. Unique. A gift to the kings of Azul-Place. Why did you steal this? Your job was to ready Deadclaw, not to steal from dwarf-things. They are not to know we are coming!’

The warlock clutched his musket defensively. ‘Fizqwik is too smart-clever. Dwarf-things too slow to follow here.’

‘Fizqwik is an imbecile! Dwarf-things are not stupid. And they always remember.’

‘Fizqwik is not an imbecile. Fizqwik is cunningest and most wise of warlocks. Everyone knows dwarf-things are slow of paw and thought. Now,’ he said, addressing Peekrit, ‘we show Queek-Warlord the cleverness of Clan Skryre.’ The warlock waited impatiently until it dawned on the young skaven that his master expected him to go first.

‘But surely,’ Peekrit whined, ‘you should make it certain-clear that you are not afraid.’

Fizqwik bared his fangs, jabbing his apprentice in the behind with the barrel of his loaded musket. Peekrit yelped and finally hurried ahead. Under Fizqwik’s baleful glare, the slaves streamed after him. The warlock turned on Sharpwit, gesturing down the burrow with his musket. Shooting the warlock an evil look, he did as he was directed.

Sharpwit found little comfort in the scent of so many fellow skaven. And it had little to do with one of them pointing a loaded warplock at his back. There was something disturbing about this tunnel. As if it were haunted. As if the Headtaker had somehow infected it with his madness.

‘Hurry-scurry,’ Fizqwik agitated from behind him. ‘The others get ahead.’

Sharpwit took a deep breath and threw his shoulder into his crutches to pick up his pace. He hobbled from the tunnel mouth into the cool dark of the warlord’s burrow. Almost immediately he gagged on the sour musk of fear. Peekrit and the slaves stared in horror at the brutal mess that the warlord, in his insane inspiration, had created. A reel of copper wire had been unwound along the ceiling from corner to corner. Severed paws, threaded through their palms, hung from the wire as morbid decoration. Sharpwit could smell their freshness. Blood still drizzled from their wrists. They had belonged to the slaves that had borne the Headtaker’s trophies from the City of Pillars. Those trophies stared down from the four corners of the room. There was an orc and a dwarf – the two races that Queek despised most of all – but also the skull, spine and ribcage of a skaven which lay draped across a stretch of shelving, and the pickled hands and feet of a human hanging by a cord from one end of the grisly wire. In any other place, Sharpwit might have mocked the way their attention made his skin crawl, but here, in this place, he felt them watching.

‘What is this?’ breathed Fizqwik.

Sharpwit limped forward. Something had caught his nose. Unnoticed beneath the bleeding madness that hung from the ceiling a shattered corpse lay forgotten. He caught a glimpse of black fur. He prodded it with the tip of his crutch. Unexpectedly, it gave a piteous moan and Sharpwit squealed in fright, tottering back towards Fizqwik. The warlock had still not noticed the body on the floor. His horrified gaze shot across the room from skull to skull.

‘Queek sees rats, yes-yes. Why are so many rats here?’

Sharpwit, Fizqwik, Peekrit and a dozen skavenslaves yelped in unison, each seeking to cower behind the other as Queek Headtaker emerged from one of the burrow’s secondary tunnels. Behind him, irrelevant in the warlord’s shadow, a large black-furred skaven scuttled, bent low under a stack of ratskin papers.

Ignoring the slaves, Queek fixed the three skaven in his sights one by one. He grinned manically as he held their stares. Sharpwit was last. He yearned to look away, but it felt like turning his back on an ambitious rival with a knife.

‘Queek hears so-so many voices.’ The warlord’s muzzle drifted to the room’s corners where his trophies waited and watched. Sharpwit felt their eyes like needles in his soul. ‘Why does Queek not hear your voices? Why in Queek’s burrow?’

‘Queek’s?’ Fizqwik squealed, resentment briefly overriding good sense. As soon as the words escaped he cowered back behind his slaves, emitting a shrill whine as Queek’s wild eyes tracked lazily towards his.

‘Tinker-rat squeak-talk?’

Fizqwik’s jaw worked soundlessly for a moment, finally managing a strangled squeak. ‘Queek’s… burrow… very… nice?’ Fizqwik paused to catch breath, hugging his musket to his chest. Nervously he cleared his throat, struggling to recover some dignity even as he wilted under Queek’s mad stare. ‘I came to… er… welcome-greet and… um…’

‘Is Tinker-rat done with squeak-talk?’

‘Um… yes.’

‘Then go away now.’

The warlock gaped, frozen. A gentle shove in the back from Peekrit made him start, and he suddenly remembered himself, grovelling low. His snout scraped a shallow furrow into the dirt as he backed away until, pride gone, he turned tail and pelted for all his fur was worth. Peekrit and the skavenslaves hurried after him, the sounds of an anxious scuffle breaking out as soon as the fleeing skaven were out of sight as each battled not to be the last to flee the lair of the Headtaker.

Sharpwit’s lip twitched nervously. It was below his station to scurry and hide with the rest of the rabble, but that didn’t keep his tail from twitching with terror as the warlord’s undiluted attention now fixed on him. His knees weakened in an unconscious desire to show humility but he restrained them, instead leaning forward onto his crutches.

‘Good-useful you stay, Old-thing. Queek itches to feast on dwarf-meat and is lots-much to do.’

Sharpwit lowered his muzzle, willing servility to radiate from every gland. ‘Anything, warlord.’

Queek gestured at the black-furred skaven that had followed him in. The muscular warrior wore a haunted expression, the look of one who has traced the path fate has laid before him and numbed himself to the horrors that await.

‘New-Ska,’ Queek ordered. ‘Go through paper-stuff with Old-thing. It is boring, like Old-thing.’

‘New-Ska?’ Sharpwit asked.

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek muttered, returning to Sharpwit after apparently listening to something the dwarf skull in the near corner had to whisper. ‘New-Ska is faithful-strong friend of Queek.’

The skaven looked hopelessly towards Sharpwit. His broad shoulders sagged despairingly and he offered a glum nod.

Sharpwit studied Queek’s hapless attendant carefully. Queek was obviously so attached to his muscle-bound brute of a subordinate that his mind couldn’t fully accommodate the loss. Well, that just made the next little titbit he had to wave in front of the lion’s jaw all the more tantalising.

‘Does almighty Queek not know that Ska Bloodtail still lives?’

‘He what?’ Queek stood stock still. The madness in his eyes momentarily coalesced into a single point of focused clarity. Sharpwit quailed before its intensity. Queek bounded forward, dragging the bent old skaven from his feet to meet the warlord muzzle to muzzle. ‘You say-squeak Ska alive?’ The warlord took his shoulders in his paws and shook them roughly, as though truth were a thing that could be shaken free. ‘Where is he? Where is Ska?’

Sharpwit squeaked, tasting blood where he had bitten his tongue. ‘I hear-say Grey Seer Razzel found him. He rests in the stormvermin barracks in Deadclaw.’

Queek let Sharpwit drop. He threw his gaze from side to side as though seeking counsel on this unexpected development. ‘White-fur?’

Sharpwit nodded stiffly. ‘He is safe-well and awake. You should go-see.’ Sharpwit cringed, worried he had pushed too hard.

Queek barely noticed, nodding absently. He turned to New-Ska as if seeing him for the very first time. ‘Who are you? Give-give papers to Old-thing!’

The black-furred warrior bowed gratefully, dropping the stack of papers at Sharpwit’s feet and dashing for the tunnel before the warlord could change his mind. Sharpwit bent to pick up one of the documents, a ratskin parchment that was thick with the claw-scratch writings of the skaven language. Sharpwit sneered. It would surprise him to learn that Queek could read, much less write.

He looked up to find that Queek was gone. Either the warlord didn’t think Sharpwit worthy of a dismissal or, more likely, he had simply forgotten he was there. He let the parchment fall. Sharpwit would attend to them later.

The trembling mound of muscle and hanging flesh that had once been a fierce warrior of Clan Rictus whimpered softly through broken teeth. Sharpwit started towards it. The rhythmic clatter of his sticks on dusty ground resounded between the gruesome assembly of totems and trophies. The thing raised a shredded stump, the evidence that it had once been a skaven’s head becoming apparent only when it opened to reveal a row of cratered, bleeding gums. A whisper of hot air passed its lips. Sharpwit’s stomach turned, unable to avoid a spasm of sympathetic pain in his own jaw. Still grimacing, he leant closer, realising that the poor creature was trying to speak. He strained his hearing but the wet babble could not quite congeal into words. It might have been…

‘Help me.’

‘Toskitt very brave. Sharpwit is here, Toskitt. Tell me what you tell to Queek.’

Toskitt moaned, trying to shake his head even as the action caused him pain. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered.

Sharpwit grinned cruelly and, such was the way the skaven recoiled, he fancied the evil glow of his warpstone fangs was perceived even by Toskitt’s sightless eye sockets. ‘Why do I not believe you? It hardly matters. Queek knows you would say anything. You probably point a claw at everyone before Queek finished. He won’t know what to think.’

Toskitt struggled to reach out for him. Flesh hung from his arm as though it had been savaged by wolves.

‘But if Queek leaves you alone with me and he comes back and finds you dead? Well, maybe then it be easy-clear who sent you.’

‘Please–’

‘Hsssh, Toskitt,’ Sharpwit soothed. ‘Queek must trust Razzel, then maybe Razzel can have faith in Queek. Azul-Place will fall. You die for the greater good of Skavendom, brave Toskitt.’

Sharpwit stepped back, lifting one crutch so it rested on Toskitt’s heart. The skaven sobbed, begging and pleading, as Sharpwit pressed forward. Even at this point, the skaven clung desperately to life. Death would be deliverance. And how many skaven could claim to have made such a contribution in their short, frantic lives as Toskitt would in death?

The stake-like point burrowed into the skaven’s trembling hide. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t painless. Toskitt’s feeble screams didn’t die until well after the spear reached the end of its slow journey and perforated the walls of his desperately beating heart. Sharpwit wheezed as Toskitt’s body relaxed into death’s embrace. He tugged his stick free and rested on it wearily. He wasn’t a young rat any more.

An itch beneath his spine made him turn. Three pairs of sightless eyes followed his progress – watching, judging, remembering. He shivered. With cold reason, he sought to exorcise the queasiness settling in his gut.

He was being a fool. The Headtaker was mad.

He could not truly share the secrets of the dead.

CHAPTER FIVE

Handrik sat on the lip of a two-wheeled cart hitched to a pair of sturdy pit mules. Everywhere, hurrying dwarfs struggled into their armour, many still bleary eyed from the festivities of the previous night as they ran for their musters. The halls rang to the pounding of hobnailed boots and the remnant echoes of the last great blast from the Thunderhorn. The thrill of excitement was palpable. But, thought Handrik, no excuse for shoddiness.

‘Call that axe sharp, lad?’

The young clansdwarf who had been targeted for Handrik’s ire pulled up sharply at the rebuke. The royal blue of Karak Azul was worn with pride over tough, dwarf-forged chainmail. ‘What’s your name, lad?’

‘My name is Bagrin, sir. Bagrin Threkkson.’

‘Pass up that excuse for a weapon, Bagrin.’

The clansdwarf did so, and Handrik lifted it to the light. The illumination cast by the ceiling glimstones trembled with the thundering of so many feet and Handrik studied the reflected light as it played across the axe’s edge before experimentally shearing a grey hair from his beard. He frowned.

‘I’ve suffered the butts of thaggoraki spears with a keener edge than this. I’ll be keeping an eye out for you later. I expect to find this axe sharp enough to take the head off a troll by the time we reach Black Crag.’

‘Yes, venerable elder.’

Handrik shooed him away, and the dwarf stowed his axe at his belt as he hurried off to join his clan’s muster.

Handrik kicked his legs, wincing at the pain induced by that simple movement. He shifted about, the cart’s undercarriage creaking almost as loudly his spine. The cart was loaded with that most essential of campaign supplies, forty-eight kegs of Ekrund Brown, lashed with thick rope and covered in a tarpaulin. It was a stout brew to put fire in a dwarf’s belly and iron in his heart. One keg had already been tapped, and Handrik poured himself a pint to replenish the one he had just finished. His skull still ached from the previous night’s drinking, and he watched with a disapproving eye as the mighty throng of Karak Azul assembled. He took a long swallow of ale.

The day after the Feast of Grungni: a damned poor day to go to war.

But he couldn’t help but share a measure of excitement. For fifteen years now, the peerless industry of the Iron Peak had been bent towards this one goal. The Black Crag would be purged and vengeance exacted on the squatter king. Cannon had been cast, axes forged by the thousand, beardlings tempered by battle into hardened warriors. Today was the day of grudgement. Karak Azul stood ready, and Handrik Hallgakrin was not about to let a sore head and some trifling wound keep him from a battle that would be remembered until long after the mountains themselves crumbled to the wind.

‘Handrik!’ cried a voice in oddly accented Khazalid.

Handrik glanced over his pint’s foaming head to see Thordun easing his way between the purposefully flowing clansdwarfs. The young dwarf waved his wide leather hat over his head in a bid to attract his attention.

‘What is it, young Thordun?’ he asked. The dwarf’s grim look was enough to know that his news would not be good.

‘The king refused me permission to go to Black Crag. The loremaster tells me no more hired swords will be sent after the king’s family.’

‘I suspected he might,’ Handrik sighed, waving down Thordun’s angry retort as it formed. He drew another sup of ale before deigning to proceed. ‘My hopes were with you, truly they were. You’re a dwarf of these halls, and you seemed keen. I’d hoped Kazador might be moved by your passion.’ He grunted and took a sip of his tankard. ‘A fool’s hope I suppose, but you can’t fault an old greybeard for trying. You’re just too late. Kazador’s patience with sell-swords and glory hunters has run thin. And now the throng of the Iron Peak will be settling its own scores.’ He nodded approvingly. ‘As it should.’

From his high vantage, Handrik’s gaze swept the gathered throng. In his youth, he had lived through the Great War. He had been an Ironbreaker, oathsworn to the defence of the hold, and it had been his lot to be left behind, but he still remembered. It had been a time of trial, but also one of triumph. A time when whole pages were torn from books of grudges, and when new volumes needed binding simply to keep pace with the accumulated wrongs. It had been the greatest coming together of the dwarf kingdoms since the War of Vengeance and, even though the throng of Karak Azul claimed allies from throughout the Karaz Ankor, the comparison was unfavourable.

He sighed. Such was the way of things.

Thordun appeared disconsolate. ‘I’ve come so far. To fail now, without even making it to Black Crag…’

‘Chin up, lad. I seem to recall a fresh-faced beardling trying to impress on me how he’d come for honour rather than gold. Was that true, or just the ale talking?’

‘It’s true,’ Thordun said firmly. ‘It’s just… I doubt the men I travel with will be so charitable.’

‘Umgi,’ Handrik scoffed, spitting out the word like a curse. ‘Never trust them, lad. I’ve yet to meet the man who could hold an oath any better than they hold their ale. Scant better than elves in my book. But if you’re that worried about them, know that Kazador is staying true to his promised reward. He intends to split the prize between all who bring warriors to his cause. Nine men will not put the fear of their foul gods into grobi hearts, but they’ll earn you your share. It’ll be yours to split as you wish.’

Thordun looked about, pinching his lips in thought. The icons of fourscore clans and more waved above the helmeted heads of the dwarfs, stern faces forged in gold and iron and bronze. ‘It’ll not be the king’s ransom I promised, but I’m sure they’ll agree. It’s better than nothing to show for such a journey.’

‘Good on you, lad. Now hurry. We wait only on the king.’ He gestured to a rune-banner held aloft above a silver sea, the warlike countenance of the ancestor, King Lunn, fashioned in bloody copper. He raised his voice to shout over the growing din. ‘Gather your men and seek out Thane Hrathgar of Karak Eight Peaks. He could use a strong body or two.’ He made the twinned axe of Grimnir across his chest. ‘Grimnir lend your arm strength.’

‘And yours, Handrik,’ Thordun returned, bowing hurriedly before dashing away.

Handrik leant back to refill his cup a second time. The Ekrund brewery wasn’t what it used to be. Must be all those grobi pissing in the aquifers. There was a time when three pints of Ekrund Brown would have had his head spinning, but it hadn’t so much as blunted the edges of the pain in his spine. Downing the ale in one go, he gritted his teeth and leapt from the back of the cart. Nothing more than willpower kept him from collapsing to his knees. He gripped the haft of his battleaxe with white-knuckled steel and wiped his beard of spilled ale. He tossed the empty flagon into the back of the cart. He heard it rattle like a stone dropped down a shaft. Handrik Hallgakrin would not be wheeled into battle like spare cannon shot or a trenching shovel.

For Hallar, for Kazrik, for all the others.

And no pain would compare to that.

Grey Seer Razzel almost leapt clean out of his fur as Sharpwit’s scratched and wrinkled nose emerged from the tunnel and into his burrow. Seeing who it was, the grey seer settled back onto his stool. His tail coiled nervously about the leg of the dark wooden table he sat behind. Drumming his claws on the hard surface, he strained to peer over Sharpwit’s head, breathing a deep sigh of relief at the reassuring sight of his albino guard. The giant warrior could have been more inspiring, but the recent disappearance of the second and last of his comrades from Skavenblight had bequeathed him an expression of perpetually paranoid anxiety. Razzel barked at the albino warrior as it glanced over its shoulder for the fiftieth time. It straightened as though stung, shuffling from the entryway and glaring balefully around the room with the safety of a dirt wall at its back.

Sharpwit smirked, taking in the grey seer’s less than salubrious abode. The table at which he sat was cracked down the middle and spotted black with insect dung. The burrow itself, already cramped without the addition of three skaven bodies, was possessed of a perplexing and not at all pleasant odour that almost certainly arose from the black beans that spilled from the mould-ridden sacks piled up against the bare earth walls. Perched between the sacking, rats followed him with warily glittering eyes.

‘So, this is where the great Razzel tremble-hides?’

Razzel snarled, but didn’t move. His stillness was uncanny, his myriad charms and chimes muffled to a whisper by the lack of motion. ‘The prophet-seer of the Horned Rat does not hide.’

‘Do not pout-sulk, chosen one,’ Sharpwit sneered. ‘You tried to rid the world of Queek and you failed. This time you are one lucky traitor-rat. By now you should be walking dead-meat but, like my patron, I do not discard useful things. I fix-mend for you. Can Razzel forget his little games and be useful?’

‘The Council chose me to lead, not you! How dare you–’

‘Be silent!’ Sharpwit squeaked and the easy authority in his tone had the grey seer doing precisely that.

The silence stretched before Razzel asked sulkily: ‘How do you fix-mend?’

‘No matter.’ Sharpwit limped forward, taking the second stool at Razzel’s table. The grey seer had arranged his meagre furnishings to ensure his guests exposed their backs to the entrance. Sharpwit tried to appear comfortable, but his skin crawled in protest. ‘But if ever you are asked then squeak-say that, in kindness and contrition for your grave misunderstanding with Queek, it was you that help-healed Ska Bloodtail.’

‘Why would I help that worm-brain offal-meat? I kill-kill if I can.’

‘You will not!’ Sharpwit snapped. ‘And your other storm-vermin stands watch-guard to be certain-sure no other has same idea.’

Back to the wall, the albino noticeably relaxed. He sagged into his halberd as the crippling tension released his muscles.

‘You order my guards?’

‘Yes-yes,’ Sharpwit hissed. ‘They are not Razzel’s playthings. They are gifts of the Council and protecting Ska will help. Queek-Warlord has an… unhealthy attachment. He will be easier to control with Ska alive.’

Unable to help himself, Sharpwit twisted on his stool to peer back into the tunnel. No dark shape swam through his mist-shrouded sight and he could hear nothing but the comforting babble of thousands of skaven living out their short, pointless lives. Reassured, he turned back to Razzel. The grey seer was nervously flicking his claws at the brass chimes that fell in bunches like rotten fruit from his horns, listening to their dull notes.

‘I ask again, Razzel. Can you be useful?’

‘Grey Seer Razzel!’

‘I find-sniff your hiding hole, Razzel. You want Queek to come-find, also?’

Razzel paled even further than natural as he considered. He smiled slyly and Sharpwit was abruptly reminded of how unstable and perilous an ally the grey seer could be. ‘I know things. Things you and Queek do not. Things you find most useful to hear, hmmm?’

‘Yes-yes? What do you learn-smell?’

Razzel tittered, setting his chimes to jangling. ‘Why would I tell mangy Old-fur? Razzel finds a tasty-treat, why should I share, hmmm? Maybe I just tell Queek and have no need for you.’

‘You could try. But maybe Queek would kill-slay on sight. Maybe a clever grey seer would get on the warlord’s good side first.’

The grey seer looked sullen, but only for the briefest of spans before the obvious excitement at his information beset him again and he burst into a fit of manic laughter, leaning across the table to confront Sharpwit with his mad eyes. ‘The dwarf-things, they leave. Even now their armies move.’ He laughed again, his mind basking in the darkness of his god’s favour. ‘We will kill-smash with ease. Even the warriors mad-Queek left behind will not be needed. Easily they will die-die. Their souls will strengthen the Great Horned Rat for his return.’

Intently, Sharpwit leant forward too, meeting the grey seer halfway. ‘How do you know this?’

Razzel sat back, preening his claws through his lustrous white fur. ‘Like the Great Horned One himself, his chosen sees all.’

‘Squeak-tell,’ Sharpwit growled.

Razzel eyed the older skaven for a moment before extracting a small statuette from within the folds of his robes. It was carved of wutroth wood into the likeness of a slinking rat, its fangs rendered with glass, its eyes picked out with tiny ingots of glowing warpstone. A long tail looped around its feet to form a base. Razzel placed it on the table, his paws making about it a possessive wall.

‘Even dwarf-thing places have rats.’ The grey seer stroked his carving, and the manner of its posture, body and snout rising into his paw, made it appear as if the creature gnashed its teeth in pleasure at the sorcerer’s touch. ‘This catalyst helps them hear the Horned Rat’s call. Lets a skilful user of his gifts use their body to hear and smell. Spy-rats show me the dwarf-thing army gathering, show me their secret councils. Good-lucky for us as the army is vast. Good-lucky for Sharp-wit,’ he added, pointedly. ‘Much mightier than Sharpwit squeak-tells before Council.’

‘I always was a lucky rat,’ he murmured, not rising to the bait. ‘Where does this army go?’

‘Does it matter?’ Razzel shrugged. ‘Away-gone.’

‘Show me. Show me what you saw.’ Sharpwit reached for the carving but the grey seer snatched it away, clutching it jealously to his breast.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ Sharpwit snarled.

‘Because Prophet-Seer Razzel, chosen of the Horned One, is not yours to command. And because I do not want to.’

Sharpwit growled but held his tongue. It was likely that the act of splitting his consciousness across the aether rendered the seer helpless, and no amount of cajoling would convince him to place himself at Sharpwit’s mercy. He filed the knowledge away for later use.

He shuffled around on his stool at the sound of a disturbance from outside the seer’s burrow. It was a minor thing, no more than a scuffle, but enough to make his hackles rise.

Across the table, Razzel sat up and snarled at the albino. ‘Fool-fool! The Council sends you to hide in corners? Go look-smell what is happening.’

The stormvermin gave a slight nod and, flipping his resting halberd between his paws, strode into the tunnel to beat the fear of the Horned One into whoever was unfortunate enough to start a fight within hearing of Grey Seer Razzel.

Razzel leant across the table, snapping his claws under Sharpwit’s nose. ‘Do not think to try-test. You remember who is in charge here.’

Sharpwit gave an irritated nod, opening his mouth to speak just at the instant that an albino body smacked into the table between them. Razzel squealed and fell backwards from his stool into the rancid sacks, sending startled rats streaming across the floor. Sharpwit swivelled on his stool as the albino’s halberd followed its wielder’s earlier trajectory, the flat of the shaft smacking into the stormvermin’s side to elicit a fresh cry of pain.

Sharpwit coughed, drawing in an intoxicating measure of warpstone dust. But not enough to completely obscure the scent of freshly spilled blood that clung like a vengeful spirit to the Headtaker. The warlord was in full armour but for his absent trophy rack. He dragged the groaning albino from the table, but otherwise paid the creature no heed. One paw remained firmly hidden behind his back as he stalked around the edge of the table, studying Sharpwit and Razzel as a cat might be intrigued by a pair of oddly behaving mice.

‘White-fur and Old-thing,’ Queek whispered. ‘Watch them plot. Watch them scheme.’

‘No-no, most understanding and wicked of warlords,’ Sharpwit began. ‘Razzel finds most crucial information. He knows his burrow too drab for great warlords and find-seeks humble Sharpwit to bring to the attention of the illustrious Queek.’

Razzel nodded eagerly, climbing back up to the table. His chimes filled the burrow with broken music.

Queek remained impassive, stalking slowly towards where Sharpwit sat and Razzel, his stool forgotten, now stood, nervous claws drumming on the table’s top. Sharpwit flinched as Queek came up behind him. He felt his hot, vile breath on the side of his face before the warlord moved on, circling around behind Razzel.

All this time, the warlord hadn’t once removed his paw from behind his back.

Sharpwit tried to sneak a peek around his shoulders but Queek angled himself to thwart him. Queek leant forward so his muzzle rested on the grey seer’s shoulder. The shivering sorcerer jangled with disharmonious terror.

‘Lies, these voices squeak. Lies. Queek sees poison on little rat-thing lips.’

‘No,’ Razzel stammered. ‘It is all true.’

Queek frowned as he straightened, granting Razzel the briefest of moments of relief before he struck. His arm was a crimson blur, so fast that neither skaven had moved until it was too late.

The warlord’s gauntleted fist smacked wetly against the table top, the impact spraying blood over the horror-stricken faces of the watching skaven. Sharpwit’s jaw hung open as the severed head being gently crushed beneath the warlord’s paw oozed the last of its life onto Razzel’s table. Its eyes had rolled up into their sockets, but Sharpwit still felt their gaze on his and he shuffled, ill at ease. The creature’s fur was white, its waxen hide rendered even more so as Queek squeezed the blood from its veins like juice from a soft fruit. Razzel stared at the remains of his former bodyguard in mute horror. The last surviving albino, having collected himself from the floor, covered his nose and looked away.

‘Lies,’ Queek hissed again. He gathered the head in both paws and faced it towards him. Blood flowed down his arms from its gaping neck, tendrils of muscle and ligament clinging to the metal of his armour as they swayed. ‘You tell truth to Queek, don’t you,’ he crooned, addressing the flaccid muzzle and blank eyes in his paw. ‘Tell White-fur what you tell Queek.’ He pressed the head’s cold lips to his ear, his expression enraptured. ‘Yes-yes,’ he nodded, the dead thing still whispering into his ear. ‘White-fur plots. White-fur covets.’

‘No-no,’ squealed Razzel, frantic. ‘He squeak-tells wicked-lies.’

The warlord lowered the head, his eyes burning into Razzel with blistering malice. ‘His name is Stikslash. Queek finds him spying on Ska. He tells Queek where White-fur hide-cowers, where he cooks his plots.’

‘But they are mute. They don’t squeak-talk to anyone!’

‘All squeak-talk to Queek!’ The warlord calmed himself, resetting the head on the table, positioning it deliberately to keep Sharpwit and Razzel both in its vacant sights. Queek sat cross-legged on the floor, holding the head firmly between both paws and lowering his muzzle to its level as if to see through its eyes, to sense odours from beyond the veil.

‘Queek comes to tell White-fur and Old-thing that he does not care about their plots. They will fail.’ His voice was a whisper, seemingly intended for the unreceptive ears of Stikslash rather than any living audience. ‘White-fur and Old-thing plot all they like and they will never be mightier than Queek. Tomorrow we fight and dwarf-things die-die. Maybe White-fur also die-die,’ he suggested, to a squirm of discomfort from the grey seer. ‘But not Queek. No dwarf-thing ever bests Queek. Not even Kazador.’

‘You speak-squeak truth, most ferocious of warlords,’ Razzel stammered. ‘When we fight the dwarf-things, Queek will win an easy triumph.’

‘Easy? Easy how?’

‘Tell him, Razzel,’ Sharpwit said. ‘Tell Queek what you squeak-tell me.’

Razzel nodded eagerly, his chimes sounding his excitement. ‘The dwarf-things leave. They leave! Kazador-King leads them away. The dwarf-place will be empty when we attack, and it will fall like stacks of hay in a gale. The Horned Rat favours this quest and greatly potent Queek, his champion, hmmm?’

‘Is this true?’

Sharpwit hesitated. He saw the madness flicker behind Queek’s eyes, but Razzel was blind to it.

‘True-true,’ Razzel said. ‘I see it.’

The warlord erupted with a snarl. His gauntlet hammered the table top, making the staring head dance. ‘Kazador must not leave! How soon can Queek’s army be ready?’

Razzel’s mouth worked as he thought, but Sharpwit beat him to it. ‘By the end of tomorrow, perhaps. Not before the thirteenth bell at the earliest.’

‘Not good enough. We attack at first bell tomorrow and Kazador will fall by my paw.’ The warlord was on his feet now, pacing the burrow in a rage, kicking and slashing with his claws at the rotten bean sacks, spilling their odious contents in a stream at his feet. He spun about. ‘Why are you waiting? White-fur and Old-thing will watch each other die if Queek’s army is not ready by then.’

Nervously, Sharpwit cleared his throat. ‘With the greatest of subservience to the mightiest and most despotic of warlords, we are not here to kill-slay one dwarf-thing. We are here to smash-burn the entire dwarf-place.’

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek muttered. ‘Smash-burn.’ Suddenly remembering something, he snatched up the head of Stikslash and planted its muzzle back against his ear. ‘Yes-yes, little friend-thing. We burn-dead in pyres so high that all the world sees the might of Queek and trembles and Kazador, he watches, he watches from my paws.’ He stalked for the tunnel before, in a moment of lucidity, he glared back at Sharpwit and Razzel.

‘First bell, hurry-scurry!’

Queek’s mind worked fast.

He raised Stikslash to his eyes, studying him grimly. ‘First bell too late, dead-thing. Kazador might already be away-gone. Who then will tell-squeak of Queek’s strength? Who?’ The albino had no reassurance to offer and Queek let his arm drop, his claws buried in the bloodless flesh of the dead creature’s scalp. Somehow he had to stop the dwarf-things from leaving, to keep them within Azul-Place until he could strike at their king.

He swept through the tunnels of Deadclaw. The heat was unbearable, but thoughts came easier when accompanied by actions.

He was the strongest warrior, the mightiest of skaven. But the world was large and, strange as it might seem, there were peoples within it that had yet to quaver at the name of Queek Headtaker. It was not to be borne! He would claw-scratch his glory into the heavens with the blood of Kazador-King such that all under the stars would see it and lower their muzzles in dread and awe.

It was deathly quiet and no other skaven sought to share his thoughts. It was amusing how space could always be found when skaven desperately desired some other place to be. Amusing, but hardly useful. Instinctively he made to summon Ska, only realising after he had bellowed the name into the cavernous belly of Deadclaw that his worthless lackey still rested like the indolent breeder-thing he was in the stormvermin barracks, a foul-smelling smear of skalm daubed over the filthy bruise that concealed two cracked ribs and a punctured lung.

Queek would have to figure this one out alone.

He glanced at the head in his paw and grinned.

Not alone.

Thordun stood proudly within a stern phalanx of dwarfish shields. To left and right, bearded clansdwarfs in crimson-tinted mail were arrayed in grim-faced order. Thordun carried no shield with which to form a shield wall and had been positioned at the back of the block of infantry. At least he hoped that was the reason. He had heard the mutterings of Thane Hrathgar when the dwarf thought he was out of earshot about being forced to ‘babysit’.

Hrathgar Hammerhand was a dour and joyless individual, grumbling commands as if the need to issue them at all was a source of grievous disappointment to him. The thane stood in the front rank. His tall helm was clearly visible above the intervening heads. Baleful runes glowed red on its gromril surface, horns like those of a minotaur striking from its temples. His ancestral weapon, a massive warhammer engraved with the clenched fist and the hammer of the Hammerhands, rested in quiescent readiness across one broad, armour-plated shoulder.

The anticipation was palpable. The time that every dwarf of Karak Azul had awaited for fifteen years had come. Thordun hoped he was ready. He checked his handgun for the tenth time.

‘I feel ridiculous,’ said Bernard, towering with the other men over the dwarfs they were ranked beside. ‘Every greenskin’s going to be shooting at me.’

Thordun chose to ignore the man’s griping. He was sick of it. The man’s annoyance hadn’t stopped him, or any of the others, from signing their names into Loremaster Logan’s great war ledger and accepting the king’s coin. Gold was gold and while less gold was less, it was still gold.

‘What’s happening, Bernard, what can you see?’

The big Bretonnian swung his bearded face from right to left, nodding in hard-faced satisfaction, the way Thordun had seen him appraise a wealthy home with a weak door. ‘A decent number. And they look tough. We might actually get paid at last.’

‘Give it up already. Is the king here yet? Are we ready to march?’

‘I don’t see him. But then maybe I just don’t recognise him. Some of us didn’t get the chance to meet him yester–’ His voice broke. Raising a hand to shield his eyes from the glare reflected off the casual wealth of starmetal axe blades and gold-embossed helms he stared at some point across to the left. If Thordun recalled correctly, to the left was the stairwell down to the Fourth Deep. ‘Attendez,’ he said. ‘I think I see something.’

‘What is?’ Thordun asked, pointedly. ‘Is it the king?’

‘No it’s…’ Bernard tailed off, sketching the sign of the Grail. ‘Par la dame.’

Without further explanation, Bernard broke ranks and sprinted in the direction of the stairwell.

Thane Hrathgar turned irritably. ‘Control your sell-swords, beardling. I’m sure you can get away with this sort of thing in the Empire, but when dawi are told to stand, they stand. Until released or the sun freezes and falls from the sky.’

‘I’ll fetch him, Thane Hrathgar,’ Thordun said, with a swift nod.

The grey-bearded thane turned away, grumbling loudly to his icon bearer over the unreliability of the young.

Thordun excused himself, easing his way clear of his regiment. He ignored the disapproving looks and subtle shakes of the head from the dwarfs he hurried past, finding Bernard half a turn down the stairwell. The big man cast a deep shadow on the gleaming marble stones.

‘What is it?’ Thordun asked irritably. ‘I think Hrathgar already dislikes me.’

‘Ratman,’ Bernard rumbled, his fist tightening around the leather grip of his morning star. ‘Like in Nuln. A big one – black fur, red plate. Saw him on the stairs. Caught my eye and the thing just waved and then scarpered.’ He turned around, his face white. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘He left this.’

Thordun peered around Bernard’s broad shoulders and choked. Hurriedly, he traced the rune of Valaya across his chest. Pinioned to the wall by a rusted blade wedged into the joint between two marble blocks was a pale skaven head. It appeared to be choking, gagging on the sword that had been rammed deep into the back of its throat. Swaying in the gentle breeze rising up from the Fourth Deep, a sickly brown scrap of parchment fluttered from the weapon’s box hilt. Retching at the sight of the thing, Thordun reached for the note. His fingers recoiled from the touch. It was not paper, nor parchment, nor any other writing material he was familiar with. It felt like dead flesh, and his fingertips crawled at the memory of its touch as though infected.

‘What’s going on here?’ Hrathgar bellowed. ‘What are you up to in there, you umgi-sired kruti?’

The thane’s insults ran dry as he saw what Thordun and Bernard had found. He reached past unsqueamishly and, not wishing to damage the parchment in his heavy gauntlets, carefully teased it free. It resembled a mad child’s scrawl, random lines and scores scratched into dead meat. Hrathgar’s eyes roved across the page. The language was Queekish, the claw-scratch form of the skaven tongue and well familiar to the thane of Karak Eight Peaks. No dwarf would ever admit it but, deep in his stubborn heart, even Hrathgar understood that the rats were now the true rulers of the Eight Peaks.

The thane muttered aloud as he read, teasing out the dense and childishly rendered words. ‘Old grey fur… Kazador-King… forever squeak-tell of the glory… assault on the Ninth Deep… face if you dare… find doom at the paws of…’

Numbly, the thane’s arm dropped, his face turning as white as the dead albino.

‘What is it, Thane Hrathgar?’ Thordun asked. ‘Do the skaven intend to attack? It is a trick, surely. Who would be mad enough to first warn their enemy?’

Hrathgar studied the ratskin parchment again, staring at the name scratched into the bottom. He hoped that if he stared hard enough it might blur into some other shape. But it did not. It remained as blindly defiant as the warlord to whom it belonged. A name inscribed into the dammaz kron of Karak Eight Peaks a hundred times in the blood of kings, his manifold crimes recorded until the end of days.

Dwarf-bane. Defiler of the Eight Peaks.

Headtaker.

Kazador would have his war, though not the one he intended.

Queek was in Karak Azul.

CHAPTER SIX

The Ninth Deep was the lowest level of Karak Azul. There were deeper delvings, test shafts, drainage channels that flowed deep into the porous underbelly of the mountain, but this was as far into the earth as the dwarfs had come before the earth pushed back. The cataclysmic chain of quakes that had brought the Karaz Ankor to its knees and presaged the ending of the Golden Age of the dwarfs had not been kind to the Ninth Deep. Deep fissures split the grime-covered flagstones, occasionally venting steam as the heat and pressure from beneath grew untenable.

Yet it was not in the nature of dwarfs to forget, and certain key structures had been diligently maintained by the guilds to whom that thankless duty had been entrusted. Or thankless it had seemed. Now craftsmasters of the Masons’ Guild puffed out their chests with pride as cannon and ballistae were installed in the towering basilica, accepting with beaming modesty the compliments of the engineers and work crews sent to bed in their engines.

A dwarf hold was impregnable. Everyone who knew anything knew that. Holds had fallen in the past, but only by the most exceptional of circumstance and the vilest of treachery. The foes of the dwarfs were legion as the dwarfs themselves were not, but prepared, fortified, the dwarfs were resolute as stone and hard as iron, and not one inch of Grungni’s earth would be surrendered this day. Miners, carvers and sappers worked in teams to construct defences, tearing up paving stones to dig trenches and piling the resultant rubble into earthworks from which long-barrelled cannon snarled like beasts of brass awoken prematurely from slumber.

The throng of Karak Azul was arrayed into a semicircular formation, concentric curtain walls of bearded steel in defence of the single stairwell to the Upper Deeps. The stair itself was a fortress, its ramparts bristling with Thunderers and weapon emplacements. A heavy iron portcullis hovered above the open gateway, ready to drop like a guillotine at a moment’s notice. More dwarfs trooped beneath the murder-holes and crossbow slits of the massive gatehouse, their heavy boots thundering on the wooden bridge that spanned the deep crevasse between the keep and the gathering throng. Some dwarfs bore with them great oathstones, carved blocks of ancient rock. The ranks parted before these relics, nodding solemnly as they passed. Eyes bulging and cheeks reddening, the honoured bearers set down their burdens with the utmost reverence. Clan leaders and thanes climbed atop the stones to the cheers of their warriors. No dwarf would abandon their oathstone. It was a symbol on which the blood of generations of enemies had been spilt, and it was a warning: the line that no foe might cross.

Surrounded by an elite company of Hammerers, Handrik stood with Kazador and Runelord Thorek in the centre of the front line, the point any invader intending to reach the keep must pass. Loremaster Logan stood with them, legs braced against the great weight of the tome in his hands. He read aloud, hard words of hate shouted from the pages for the ears of the entire Deep.

‘…on this day, the three thousand two hundred and fifty-first since the reclamation of Hirn Mingol, did the rat-king of the Eight Peaks…’

Handrik felt bitter hatred swell in his breast as the manifold crimes of the one that called himself the Headtaker were recounted from the great book. Who would have thought the achievements of so many could be undone in so short a span of years?

‘…and Argrin, may his beard forever lengthen, did fall in steadfast defiance…’

He clutched his axe to his breastplate. The gleaming gromril, hardened with runes of protection and stone, was a physical reminder of his lessened station. That the king had acceded to Handrik’s request to fight by his side might in other circumstances have been deemed an honour, but today it smacked of pity. And Handrik didn’t care to be pitied.

‘…did fall bravely while seeking vengeance on the Headtaker for his capture of Karag Durak…’

The king stood glorious in the Armour of Kings, the resplendent glory of aeons past rendered with timeless honour in gromril and a hundred varieties of gold. Heavy bracers girdled his thickset arms, straining against his taut muscles as he relived the ancestral hate bound in the pages of the dammaz kron. His arms were crossed over his neatly braided beard, ham-like fists joining around the long haft of the Hammer of Azul, a heavy anvil-shaped club of unleavened gromril capable of shattering rock and bone with equal ease.

‘… twenty-seven stout warriors of the Dourback clan did fall, the rat-king Queek, foremost in the numberless ranks of their slayers…’

The Hammerers clutched their mighty weapons in silence, their eyes hooded in fierce remembrance. All around, dwarfs stood with bowed heads, some similarly in silence, others muttering personal oaths and pledges of grudgement. The sense of hatred was palpable. The Headtaker would find no quarter here.

There was a shuffling of feet and much vehement muttering as the kron was slammed shut. ‘They will be remembered,’ Logan intoned, passing the book to an aide who bound it reverently in blue cloth. The loremaster reset his spectacles as another junior lorekeeper handed him his warhammer and attended to tightening the straps of his armour.

‘My thanks, loremaster,’ said Kazador, his wrath barely constrained. ‘All those wrongs will be righted this day.’

‘Agreed,’ Thorek added. The two dwarfs had set aside their feud of the previous night. Thorek was iron-willed, as unyielding as an anvil, and their confrontation at the Feast of Grungni was far from the first of their clashes. It was not forgiven, and certainly not forgotten, but it was studiously ignored for now.

‘Will the earthworks slow them?’

At the king’s question, Thorek and Handrik looked at the steeply sloping bulwark of granite blocks bristling with spear points that lay at the confluence of the hurriedly excavated trenches directly in front of their own position.

‘I imagine they will,’ said Thorek

‘I don’t like them,’ Handrik grumbled.

‘I’m sure neither will the thaggoraki,’ Thorek said stiffly.

‘We never needed such contraptions in the past.’

‘They’ve been proven many times,’ said Thorek. ‘Before the time of Grungni, our most distant ancestors tilled the earth like men without knowledge of delving or smelting. What’s new is not always to be shunned, if its worth is proven.’

Handrik grumbled, but offered no contradiction.

‘I oversaw every step of their assembly and smote the runes myself. Have no doubt, Handrik, they will function as they should. Today, the thaggoraki will suffer a taste of their own trickery, and our ancestors who had not such weapons will weep at the justness of it.’

‘Do I see men in my line?’ Kazador asked.

Handrik glanced up, his heart still roiling with the bound wrath of the kron. ‘They are with Thordun Locksplitter. His father is an ancestor of Karak Azul.’ Handrik pointed out the cloaked dwarf in his wide-brimmed hat, standing behind the ranks of the Hammerhand clansdwarfs.

Kazador followed the longbeard’s gesture. ‘What’s that thing in his hand?’

‘I believe it one of the new repeater handguns the humans have devised,’ said Thorek

‘Will wonders never cease,’ Handrik grunted with a sour laugh.

Thorek levelled a withering glare at the old longbeard. He turned to Kazador, with the slightest of bows. ‘It’s time I was about my own duties. Fight well, Kazador.’

‘And die hard, Runelord,’ Kazador returned as the pair clasped wrists.

Thorek departed for his own place in the battle-line. Flanked by quarrellers, Karak Azul’s Anvil of Doom had been wheeled into position between the infantry and wooden blocks were being hammered under its wheels. His apprentice, Kraggi, stood overseeing the work, and Thorek immediately set about the ritual preparations to awaken its potent runes of destruction for battle.

‘They’re late,’ Kazador growled.

‘Maybe,’ said Handrik. ‘The note said “at first bell”. According to Hrathgar, skaven split their days by thirteen bells, but he doesn’t know exactly when they start. We measured from dawn and hoped for the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the thaggoraki make it up as they go along.’

The king spat, venom still poisoning his veins at the mere mention of the verminous ratmen. ‘If they come at all.’

Handrik nodded. The host assembled on the Ninth Deep was not the full throng of Karak Azul. The possibility of a trap could not be ignored, and clansdwarfs, grumbling bitterly, had been garrisoned to key points throughout the hold. The strength of the Ironbreakers had been split between the tunnel-ways of the Upper Deeps and the cramped battlegrounds of the stairwells where the veteran tunnel fighters would excel. Only a handpicked detachment of Ironbreakers had been deployed to the Ninth Deep. A dozen of their oldest and most experienced warriors stood guard before the gatehouse, an extension of the fort’s unyielding rock. Their new captain, Lothgrim, stood with them in his first duty since assuming Handrik’s command. He looked nervous.

‘You’d better not mess this up,’ Handrik muttered.

‘What was that?’ Kazador asked.

‘Just thinking aloud,’ said Handrik, embarrassed. He nodded, relieved, to a pair of blue-cloaked dwarfs as they appeared by the king’s side. The Hammerers parted before them with nods and murmured greetings. They bore between them a massive shield, wrought of iron and swirling with runes and angular heraldic motifs that blended together into a single elaborate design. ‘Your shieldbearers, your majesty.’

Kazador did not turn. ‘I have no need. No dawi is so lowly that they should suffer the weight of the accursed king of Karak Azul.’ The king scoffed. ‘Perhaps it is I who bring such misfortune upon my hold, I who cannot avenge even my own kin.’

‘You are the best of kings,’ said Handrik stiffly. But this was neither the time nor the place to convince his king of that statement’s truth. ‘You will have your vengeance, if vengeance is what your kin need.’

Kazador might have wept, had his pride allowed, his sorrow suddenly rekindling into anger. ‘This Headtaker will pay, Handrik. On the line of all my ancestors, I swear to you that he will pay. I will exact full vengeance and demand tenfold again for every hour he keeps my boots from the halls of Karak Drazh.’

Handrik bowed his head. It had been too long since he had heard the Black Crag referred to by its true, dawi-given, name.

‘Shieldbearers!’ Kazador bellowed. ‘Shieldbearers to me!’

The two dwarfs moved forward, dropping to their knees as one. Kazador swept his long blue cloak over one shoulder and accepted Handrik’s offered hand as he clambered atop his shield.

Handrik winced, suppressing the agony that erupted in his back as the king let go, enduring in silence as only a dwarf could.

Kazador reached to his belt and unhooked the clasp of the Thunderhorn. The instrument was as old as time. It had been carved by masters of long-forgotten holds from the ivory tusks of the beasts of the southern plains and its golden ancestor runes were unblemished by the passing millennia. He pursed his lips to the mouthpiece and blasted a note of such clarity and purpose that it cast back the shadows, rendering insubstantial the din of the Ninth Deep. It was a sound to uplift the spirit, like the sight of dawn rays on the icy crown of the karak, a vision to true-hearted dawi of all that was everlasting. Always, the enemies of the dwarfs harried and probed. Always they dreamt of the day when the last dwarf faltered and permitted them to feast on the carcass of the Karaz Ankor. But it would not be this day. And not for ten thousand years hereafter.

Kazador lowered the Thunderhorn from his lips. The throng regarded him attentively.

‘Hear me, children of Grungni,’ he roared, his deep voice pitched to stir the distant corners of the Deep. ‘How many times have the ratkin come here? Or urk, grobi and drakk? How many times has our strength thrown them back?’ He turned slowly on his shield to meet every pair of eyes. ‘Every time!

‘And yet back they always come, like a tide of evil that cannot know when it is beaten. And always they will come back. Because this is Karak Azul, and there is no mightier prize. Grungni dwelt here. By the skill of his craft and the sweat of his toil were these halls carved. I see his work in every stone. I feel his blood in my veins. It boils at the presence of trespassers, and by that same blood I swear that not one inch of Grungni’s soil will be forsaken unto thaggoraki paws this day.

‘Here we stand, rock and earth. Here we fight and spill vermin blood. This is the line we hold to our final breath, until the Iron Peak falls to rust and ruin!’

The Deep erupted with angry yells, but Kazador shouted them down. ‘What say you then, descendants of Grungni? When will Karak Azul fall?’

‘Never!’

‘Tell me when!’

‘Never!’

‘Let your defiance echo through the ages!’

‘Never!’

The king tightened his grip on his hammer. ‘Let the ratkin gnaw on this!’ He thrust the Hammer of Azul upwards amidst a rapturous chorus of oaths and pledges of undying resolve that made the very roots of the Deep tremble with shared purpose.

Handrik, no tender beardling, felt the goose bumps rising on his skin.

This was his king, the Kazador he had thought forever lost. He roared his approval with the others.

Karak Azul would never fall.

The thunder of dwarf-thing voices thrilled through his heart. He felt it pump harder, louder. The hatred in their cries was palpable, a wave of near-solid fury. It crashed against his own in a bitter spray of bile and rage. His pulse quickened. He was stronger, he was mightier, his hatred more intense, his claws tingled at its heat.

Queek quivered with barely restrained desire, dancing an effervescent jig under the shelter of a half-collapsed mineshaft, twitching with impatient hunger. Compulsively, he examined the smooth brass contraption in his paw, sniffing it suspiciously as it continued its persistent ticking. Some mechanism beneath its tarnished surface clicked, and the warlord flinched involuntarily before the brass horn that curled along the outside of the disc-shaped device sprang inward, chiming the first bell.

Time to kill-slay, whispered the bone-dry voice of Ikit Slash, his fleshless torso draped across his trophy rack where he belonged. His fellows nodded, the movement almost imperceptible except to eyes as attuned as Queek’s. Dwarf-things die-die!

‘Yes-yes, they all die-die. Kazador-King die-die. Yes. Yes!’

Queek bounced and hissed, working himself into a frenzy.

Somehow, within the tunnel’s confines, the two score of Queek’s hand-trained stormvermin found room to edge away.

‘Please think,’ Sharpwit begged, entreating to reason, against all reason, one last time. ‘Dwarf-things cannot be beaten by frontal assault alone. Look-see. They are ready and wait for us. I blame stupid-fool Fizqwik and his thieving. I warned him–’

‘Enough,’ Queek hissed. ‘Enough chatter from this voice. It bores me.’

‘Let us flank them. I know tunnels that dwarf-things never use. I take out their guns and attack from inside the fort-thing. Then Queek charge.’

Queek grinned. Let the voice twitter away. There were other voices. The stone and metal banners of the dwarfs bobbed and swayed over their short, bearded heads. They taunted like fleas.

Queek yearned to scratch. And claw. And make bleed.

His breath caught. Raised above the throng on an iron shield stood a single dwarf-thing, white of fur, a thin crown welded to a winged helm, a lumpen cudgel wielded high above his head in foul disregard for the might of Queek.

Queek charge. Queek kill-kill. Show dwarf-king Queek is strongest!

‘Queek is strongest!’ he shrieked. ‘None laugh-mock Queek!’ Screaming a battle-cry, Queek sprinted from the cover of the shaft and into the open killing ground of the Ninth Deep. A moment later, the stormvermin followed, issuing shrill cries of their own as they gripped halberds and pounded after the warlord they feared more than the guns and axes of the dwarfs.

Sharpwit punched the wall in frustration. The Horned Rat take this blasted warlord!

Clanrats poured forth from other shafts, a sputtering flow where there should have been a deluge. Sharpwit picked out pockets of order as snarling chieftains marshalled their warriors into ranks and sent them through the tunnels with promises of death and pain to whoever was the last one through. He memorised their scents. They would make useful warlords if Queek should suffer an ‘accident’ in the wake of this debacle.

A horde of clanrats lingered, confused, at Sharpwit’s back.

‘Go,’ he snarled. ‘Go, go, go!’ He waved them past, speeding them on their way with a sweeping flash of claws.

Drawing confidence from his authority and finding assurance in the thousands of blood-hungry ratkin pressed into the tunnels at their sides, skaven without number surged ahead as a mass.

Sharpwit shrugged with resignation.

In for one, in for thirteen.

Thordun placed his hand over his heart. It beat hard enough for two, and even under layers of steel, leather and flesh it seemed improbable that Hrathgar and the others would not hear and judge. In numbers beyond imagination, the vermin boiled up through the rents in the floor and spilled from previously unnoticed splits in the distant walls, the disparate masses seething into one that came surging forward like a maddened swarm. He snapped up his handgun in readiness. The range was still too great, but they were closing fast. So, so fast. How could anything so numerous move so fast?

He forced himself to take a breath, then swept the coming storm with the barrel of his weapon. His throat clamped down over that prized breath, his gaze landing on the ratkin that charged well ahead of its pursuing hoard. It was tall, armoured red, the bones swaying from its trophy rack rattling with every step so swiftly stolen into the Karak Azul.

Hrathgar had seen it too. The dwarf muttered some dark oath, as did his icon bearer, Rorrick, beside him. Soon all the Eight Peaks dwarfs had taken up the lament. A single word: ‘Headtaker.’

Musket-fire crackled into life across the dwarf line, the sharp reports soon joined by the crump of cannon, flaring briefly red within their emplacements like the maws of devils, belching black smoke that hung in ashen clouds as well-drilled crews scrambled to reload. Skaven jerked back by the hundred, falling under the paws of ten thousand more of their onrushing brethren. Chain-shot from one of the fort’s smaller cannon scythed into the front rank of the skaven horde. The two half-balls spun in a vicious arc of death on a length of chain, severing arms and heads and even armoured torsos in an eruption of pulped flesh and liberated fluids.

But still the Headtaker came, his eyes only for the thin line of dwarfs.

‘Hold fast,’ bawled Kazador. ‘Let the ratmen break upon our shields!’

A crack split the air and the king staggered back, his shieldbearers quickly tilting the shield forward to check his fall. His fingers probed the charring on his armour, looking up to see a dozen or so ratmen with long-barrelled warplock jezzails taking up position on a toppled statue that overlooked the battlefield. They unleashed a volley, two score muzzles flashing sickly green. Their aim was dire, but a warrior of the Orgrin clan fell, a wound the size of a fist in his shield and likewise its shadow in the chainmail beneath. Blood polluted with glowing shrapnel pumped from the dying dwarf’s chest. Thunderers and quarrellers shifted their aim but the distance was too great. Those few that struck true impacted harmlessly against the broad pavise shields of the jezzail teams.

A hunched figure stalked behind the protection of his fellow rats as the jezzails settled into a continuous, but irregular, pattern of fire. The skaven was swaddled in thick leather armour, tufts of piebald fur escaping from the confines of a copper helm, a green lens hovering over one eye as he closed the other and took aim at Kazador with a grossly oversized musket.

Handrik roared a warning but the expected impact never fell. He looked to see the warlock waving his paw through a plume of green smoke. The creature’s eyepiece had swung clear on truculent joints and the shot had fired wild. Handrik saw him turn to berate an underling, hidden behind the back of a pin-cushioned pavise.

Handrik hissed in recognition. He’d remember those eyes until he closed his own for the last time. ‘That’s the sticky-pawed beggar who made off with the Grumbold.’ He gave Kazador a worried glance. ‘You’re a mighty tempting target up there.’

‘Let them aim their infernal guns on me, my friend. My skull is thick.’

Behind them, a chorus of cannon fired. The smog shrouding the fort smudged red as the cavern shook to their furious report.

Kazador clutched his hammer two-handed and shouted into the din. ‘Come to me, vermin. Come to the sons of Grungni!’

The tunnel rumbled as if in the grip of an earthquake. Sharpwit threw himself aside as a monstrous rat ogre blundered past, its tiny brain uncaring of the mewling clanrats pulped into jelly beneath its paws. Its huge hunched shoulders scraped dirt from the ceiling as it forced its way through the passage towards the bloodshed for which it was bred.

His lungs spasmed in fright, throwing him into a coughing fit as dust lodged at the back of his throat. He hobbled across the flattened, bleeding mess left in the rat ogre’s wake and into the chaos of the Ninth Deep. Smoke hung over everything. The fort defending the stairwell to the Upper Deeps was invisible behind the black shroud, evidenced only by the simultaneous smear of fiery red light as cannon crew loaded and fired almost as one. The thunder came a moment later, rumbling over the battlefield like the wrath of gods to whom mutilated skaven screamed for mercy.

Sharpwit escaped the tunnel just in time as another seven rat ogres bounded from the passage after the first. The last to emerge, a particularly hulking brute, tore out the roof from the tunnel with his passing. It snapped, confused, with viciously oversized fangs at the spray of grit it produced. A team of Clan Moulder packmasters followed their creations, cracking barbed whips over their massive backs, drawing syrupy blood from the truculent beasts. The rat ogres roared. The big bonebreaker hammered its fists against its chest and barked a challenge, loping towards the scent of dwarf-meat that its twisted mind could not resist. Its smaller kin followed in its wake, charging into the fusillade as though it were a light rain.

Assured by the monstrous creatures between him and his enemy, Sharpwit limped forwards.

Blood.

Queek raised his nose and breathed it in, a stream of life and death that made his heart palpate with ecstasy. He no longer knew where he was. All he saw was Kazador held high above his shield. He beckoned. They belonged together.

He urged his warriors deeper into the enfilading fire. Lead shot from cannon and musket tore across the disordered skaven ranks, laying into them from somewhere in the smoke-shrouded distance, or wailing above their heads like a banshee to bring death upon those further back. He pushed himself to pull even further ahead of the front rank, braving the hail of shot with the arrogance of the insane and yelling his challenge in the vain hope that Kazador might hear.

The king made no move, but no matter. Queek was close, so close he could smell the fear that surely matted his white fur at the nearness of the Headtaker. Just a little closer. Just one more charge.

‘Kill-kill,’ Queek shrieked and the stormvermin and clanrats that had kept pace and survived took up the cry.

‘Kill-kill!’

‘We charge,’ Queek yelled. ‘We kill.’

Ahead lay a patch of rough ground. Piles of rock had been mounded around a low wall of sandbags and jutting spears, all surrounded by a shallow ditch. They hoped to slow the Headtaker, but even weighed down by armour, he and his warriors were swift and nimble and it would take more than that simple bulwark to slow his charge. Queek pointed his sword at Kazador and charged after it with a yell. His warriors, demented by terror into blood frenzy, flowed as a crimson wave in his wake.

As the charge closed with the earthworks, the air behind it shimmered. Light bent, broke and re-annealed, disappearing like blood into the vortex of a whirlpool as a pair of squat four-barrelled shapes materialised from behind runes of cloaking. In unison, the crew of the two guns lit fuses and the eight barrels bloomed in deadly, concussive sequence.

A stormvermin squealed, knocking the warlord aside as he threw himself to the ground. A bouncing cannon shot took him in the chest, smashing breastplate and ribcage into one pulped mess. Queek had no time to move before the force of his underling’s death threw the ruined body into his own. He felt bone shatter and the pair of them were flung back, ploughing into the following ranks of vermin, sowing death and destruction as thoroughly as any cannonball.

As the last barrel released its load there was a sudden calm. The squeals of the maimed and the dying filled it before a hard voice overshadowed them all.

‘Reload!’

Darkness had descended on the Ninth Deep, a smothering blanket of bloody ash and gunpowder that choked the eyes and burned the hairs of delicate skaven noses. Sheet lightning flared within the storm as the blasted runemaker continued to wreak havoc, granting visions like daemon-sent portents of the world’s end. The giant shapes of rat ogres jerked between the strobing pulses of electric light, their twisted skeletons, suddenly as luminous as moon-rock in a papyrus wrap, writhing in unimaginable torment. All the while muted cannon-fire rumbled sporadically like distant thunder.

Sharpwit held a scrap of scarlet fabric torn from a fallen battle standard to his snout. His ribs still hurt and he drew slow, cautious breaths through the cloth.

A brown-furred sword-rat in tatty rags, the red dye slowly giving way to the green beneath, fidgeted anxiously as he waited for Sharpwit to recover.

Sharpwit withdrew the cloth from his muzzle long enough to speak. ‘You saw Queek fall?’

‘Tragic end, wiliest and most cunning of skaven. He shot-hit and fall-dead fast-quick.’ A staccato sequence of booms rippled through the storm and the sword-rat ducked, covering his paws over his ears.

Sharpwit replaced the cloth over his snout and considered. So Queek was dead? Good. It couldn’t have happened to a madder warlord. Of those that remained, Fizqwik was a fool promoted far beyond his skills, while Razzel had disappeared faster than a slave tossed into a Clan Moulder breeding pit the moment the fighting had started. The sorcerer’s cowardice was truly of epic proportions. Even for a skaven. That left him. He straightened, back clicking as he savoured a taste he had long ago forsaken.

Power.

He closed his eye and pictured the battlefield, summoning a mental image from the scraps of scent and sound that filtered through the murk. The charge in the centre had stalled before the organ guns, while the flanks suffered under a withering barrage from the emplacements within the fortress stair. Sharpwit got no sense of a rout, despite Queek’s death, but the guns continued to pound and there was little to be gained from throwing yet more bodies onto the problem.

And bodies he had to spare. Clanrats milled about him, wide-eyed with confusion and terror. Some, Sharpwit suspected, were deliberately hanging back, while others appeared genuinely to have no idea what they were supposed to be doing.

‘Clawleaders!’ he squeaked, clamping the cloth over his nose for a deep breath before shouting again. ‘Clawleaders come-scurry to me.’

The clawleaders clustered round him to take their orders as though he handed out favours. Not one of the ruthless back-stabbers questioned his right to command. Sharpwit’s paws tingled, a latent memory of the power of youth. He had forgotten how it felt to be feared. It felt good. The clawleaders scurried to their assigned tasks, each eager to appear the bravest and most zealous in their persecution of the new warlord’s enemies. Shrill commands cut through the din as the rabble amalgamated into an approximation of order as only a skaven army could.

‘Go,’ he squeaked. ‘Go now, for glory and dwarf-meat!’

The horde surged forward. Spears rattled and rusted mail shook, the senses maddeningly overwhelmed by the excited chittering of a thousand clanrats intent on murder and the pounding of their fleet-footed paws. In the midst of such numbers, defeat suddenly did not seem such a foregone conclusion after all.

As the vast host of ratkin swept by, he caught a glimpse of black-cloaked gutter runners loitering between the charging clanrats. Their leader, garbed like the rest of his number in black, had his claws and teeth discoloured and the pale flesh of his paws and snout bound in dark silk. Only the red of his eyes gave the assassin’s presence away. The night-clad killers of Clan Eshin had their musk glands removed in some quasi-ceremonial rite of passage, and the assassin’s scent predictably betrayed nothing, but his posture radiated a confusion that was obvious even to Sharpwit’s dim eye. Where once feckless clanrats would have trampled him without a care, now they avoided him like a leprous plague monk. His crutches bore him unhurriedly through his hordes. He recognised the Clan Eshin hireling and struggled to recall his name as he limped through the crush.

‘Fang Dao,’ he said, remembering just as he arrived at the skaven’s side.

The assassin responded with a faintly submissive display of unguarded throat. He glared at the stampeding clanrats with thinly veiled loathing. ‘Bloodtail hires me to stalk-slay dwarf-thing leaders. But Queek forgets, I think.’

‘Fool-Queek not warlord any more.’

‘So I hear, but Bloodtail’s warptokens aren’t enough to throw Eshin onto dwarf-thing shields. Sharpwit-Warlord has lots-many clanrats for that, I think.’

Sharpwit grinned. He did like the ring of Sharpwit-Warlord. ‘You squeak correct-true.’ He brushed past the assassin, gesturing that he and his gutter runners should follow.

The Clan Eshin adept hissed to his underlings in their clandestine dialect. Dark-garbed shapes bled from the seething body of the clanrat horde in answer, streaming in the wake of their master and the old skaven that led them from the carnage and back towards the burrows.

‘Where do we go-sneak?’

‘Azul-Place is sick with hidden passages and secret stairs. Sharpwit knows them better than any, better even than dwarf-things. Follow me, Fang Dao. Queek was too stupid. But I will win this war.’

Warlord Queek disentangled his limbs from the pile of shattered bodies. The air was clouded with smoke and the reek of death. He groaned, the world spinning, as he tried to sit. He felt broken bones. He opened his paws, bone fragments spilling between the fingers of his gauntlets like withered petals.

Frantically, his gaze shot to where his trophies swayed on their poles. Krug was there. Ikit was unhurt. But there was an empty pole, an epitaph to the lost. Its quiet poignancy broke his black heart. He screamed. Pain and loss unimagined howled from the depths of his soul as he clutched the bone fragments in his paws. He struggled upright, rattling the few pieces he still held. A vicious black incisor bounced between palm and fingers amidst the bleached yellow shards.

‘Blacktooth,’ he whimpered, snuffling at the bony mess, pressing his ear to his paws and praying to gods he held in scant regard for an answer. ‘Speak-squeak to Queek, orc-thing.’

His only answer was the pounding of guns hidden behind black smoke and the wails of the injured. They cried like the dispossessed spirits of the battlefield slain. Queek let the pieces fall, scattering them like ashes. They had silenced him as death alone could not. Blacktooth was gone.

Shaking off the clinging paws that lay draped across his lap, Queek staggered to his feet. Bodies in varying states of brutal dismemberment lay strewn. He ignored their silent pleas, the despairing looks in their blank eyes.

He glared into the smoke. It coiled into beckoning shapes. Dwarf-things are here, it seemed to insinuate, the killers of Blacktooth.

Queek ground his fangs, a fierce snarl ripping from his throat. He flung his arms above his head, crashing Dwarf Gouger against the blade of his sword as he bayed a challenge into the smog.

The Headtaker had a spike to fill.

The dwarfish left bore the brunt of the skaven charge.

Suddenly organised, the massed hordes of clanrat warriors came at them like a wave. The front rank stepped forward to meet the charge, each warrior overlapping his shield with that of the dwarf to his left to form an unbroken wall of oak and steel on which the ratmen broke. The foremost skaven rank thrashed and screamed as the surge crushed them against dwarfish shields. Axes slashed over the shield wall, hewing into already dead flesh held upright by the sheer volume of ratkin behind.

The skaven pressed forward and the dwarfs braced and pushed back. The clanrats were numberless, but these were dwarfs of the Iron Peak. If so tasked they would hold back the march of glaciers, and they did not yield.

Bulky shapes moved among the skaven horde. Ratmen in tatty leather overalls with faces hidden beneath long-snouted copper rebreathers stuffed with charcoal filters. They reached begloved paws into bulging knapsacks, withdrawing small glass spheres filled with writhing green gas.

‘Gas!’ The alarm raced down the line to the blaring of warning horns. Along the front ranks dwarfs hawked spit down their chins, cupping beards with shield-hands and pressing them to their faces. The tinkling of shattered glass rose above the riot of melee. The green-black fumes of the dreaded poisoned wind coiled about struggling legs and crawled ever upwards with corrosive intent towards waists, beards, and breathing lips.

Handrik swore and tore his gaze from the scene. It was a death he had seen too often. An excruciating torment of poison-flayed lungs and raving blindness as acrid gas burned the fluid from one’s eyes.

‘It’s time we got stuck in, majesty.’

‘Not yet.’

‘They are dying!’

‘They will be remembered.’

The air cracked, a warpstone shell zipping overhead. He ducked on impulse. That was close. And he didn’t care to think just how close, nor how the damned sniper could still draw a bead through such choking blackness.

Kazador’s deep baritone rose steadily above the encroaching slaughter. Astonished, Handrik realised the king was singing. It was a paean to the lost and the dishonoured; a tragedy of a dwarf without wealth or kin, with nothing to lose but his ancestors’ pride. It had no place on the battlefield, but it felt right, and Loremaster Logan, on Kazador’s opposite flank took up the tune while the Hammerers themselves soon joined in, stamping their feet in time to the dirge.

Handrik maintained his stoic silence. In his many years he had seen plenty of villains like this Headtaker, and they seldom fell with easiness of grace or timeliness of virtue.

The regiment to his immediate left was the Hammerhand clansdwarfs of Karak Eight Peaks. He offered Thane Hrathgar a thumbs-up, but the dwarf did not heed the gesture. The thane stared darkly towards the battle that raged mere feet to his left, his bespittled beard pressed tight to his mouth. The young lad, Thordun, consigned to the rear ranks where he could do least harm, hid his frustrations less well. The beardling fiddled with the stock of his handgun, scratching in anguish at his golden beard.

He winced at a keening wail, audible over the chaos like feral claws to the ears.

Kazador broke from his lament, the dreadful howl growing ever louder as the Hammerers’ mournful voices trailed away.

‘What in the Gates of Gazul!’ Handrik bellowed as the scream grew louder.

‘The earthworks!’ Logan cried. ‘It’s coming from the earthworks.’

The engineer attached to the organ gun crews looked up from his work, the inhuman sound pervading the ash like a shrieking cloud of bats. To the dwarf’s enduring credit, it did not distract him or the crews under his charge, as the gunners brought torch to fuses. The stubby muzzles of the organ guns flared. Thunder and fire rent the night, birthing its own terror, Queek Headtaker, scarlet armour ablaze as he fell through the conflagration of its conception.

The creature was abominably fast.

A blow from a spiked maul came down on a loader’s head even as the thing’s feet found solid ground. The spike erupted through the back of the dwarf’s spine, the skaven ducking beneath his own buried weapon to impale the engineer on a sword held in the other paw. The engineer was still working a pistol from his belt as the blade ripped though his mail, entering through the collar and tunnelling deep into his belly.

The engineer still lived, still fumbling at the buckle of his holster as the skaven pulled and jerked on his blade to free it. The dwarf screamed, puking blood as serrated teeth chewed at his guts before the skaven lost patience, leaving the blade in place and putting the dwarf down with a fierce backhand.

Handrik gawped as the skaven continued his lone rampage. For the first time, he noted the swaying trophy rack like half of a morbidly spoked wheel above the skaven’s shoulders. He saw the trophies that nestled atop it like vultures – a dawi skull among them. His heart turned to stone at such a violation of an honoured ancestor.

So this was the infamous Headtaker. His reputation served him well.

The surviving gun crew abandoned their machine, turning to flee for the safety of the dwarfish line. The Headtaker pounced on the back of the slowest. The claws of one paw burrowed into the screaming dwarf’s scalp as the other sank into the unguarded flesh of his armpit. The skaven warlord heaved the struggling dwarf from his feet before clamping its fangs around his neck.

‘Valaya shield her children,’ Logan breathed as the dwarf’s spine snapped, blood running in rivulets down the warlord’s muzzle. Still, the Headtaker thrashed his head from side to side with the dead dwarf in his bloodied jaws like the prize of a hunt. Handrik was compelled to look away as the Headtaker’s efforts finally ripped the dwarf’s head from his shoulders. Blood fountained, dappling the abandoned organ guns with its dark blessing as the warlord opened his jaws to lap at the sticky rain.

‘Attack,’ Handrik shouted. ‘Attack now, before he profanes the body of a dawi any further!’

‘We hold,’ Kazador growled. ‘Look.’

Beyond the Headtaker’s back, scarlet-armoured stormvermin picked their way over the piled rocks. They clutched fearfully at their halberds, forming up into ranks at the warlord’s back as he let the brutalised remnants of his victim fall.

‘Hold the line!’ Kazador yelled. ‘Iron hearts, sons of Grungni!’

‘Majesty, wait.’

Kazador started at Handrik’s voice, his face darkening as he followed the longbeard’s gaze. Hrathgar and the host of Karak Eight Peaks had broken formation and already skaven streamed into the gap they had left in the lines. A clansdwarf went down with a spear in his throat before he had time to raise his shield. The frayed ends of the shield wall turned to meet this new threat but in so doing, loosened their pressure on the hordes to their front. Scenting victory, the skaven surged forward anew.

‘Get back, Hammerhand. Hold the line!’

Handrik knew that the Eight Peaks thane heard. He saw the tightening of the dwarf’s jaw at the king’s words, but he pressed on regardless, his eyes only for the rat-king of the Eight Peaks.

‘Curse you, Hrathgar,’ Kazador screamed, red-faced with fury. ‘May your ancestors turn their faces from you in shame! Loremaster!’ This last was a roar directed to Logan. ‘Fetch me the kron. There is a grudge I would see inscribed.’

Logan clutched his hammer, eyeing the tide of vermin spilling between the dwarfish lines. ‘Is this really the time, majesty?’

Handrik followed the loremaster’s horrified expression. Only Thordun and his band of hirelings stood before the skaven charge. They looked like pale islets in a sea of dusky brown fur. He saw a large black-bearded man swing a flail twice about his shoulders before messily beheading a spear-rat in a spray of teeth and brain. A war-cry thundered over the din of struck metal and screams and Hrathgar charged, his great hammer held high, bounding ahead of his throng to smash into the disordered ranks of the Headtaker. One of the stormvermin went down with a sound like a thunderclap as the thane’s runehammer blasted its breastplate into smithereens. A moment later, his clansdwarfs were at his side and the whole area around the earthworks descended into a turbulent melee of pained cries and flashing blades.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘This is the perfect time.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Thordun squeezed the trigger of his handgun. He roared as the spinning barrel of the repeater sprayed indiscriminate death into the verminous hordes. The mechanism clicked empty, the overheated metal of the barrel glowing hot in the smoky pall. It was so thick he could no longer see anything else. The illumination from the stalled weapon conjured horrors of memory and shadow, transient flashes of filthy rags, the reflected gleam of sinister red eyes. Screaming, he rammed the burning barrel like a spear into the next shape to streak past. It screamed as though gelded. Thordun nearly choked on the waft of burned fur.

He had been a thief, not a killer. There had been times, of course, times when fate had forced his hand, when dark gods laughed at the mockery of dwarfish kind they had made of him.

Throwing down his handgun, he drew his brace of pistols. He spun at a noise and aimed into the smog but the shape was gone. He checked his breathing. This was not Nuln, it was the Ninth Deep of Karak Azul, but the swirling shadows of ratkin shapes haunted him like shades of his past. He spun again at a fresh noise and fired, propelling a lead bullet through the cheek of a charging clanrat. It fell with a whimper and Thordun finished it off, smashing the ivory butt of his emptied pistol into the back of its skull.

Its struggles ceased. In the skaven’s place, he saw the weeping crown of a night watchman, blood smearing his pistol and staining the sleeves of his jerkin. The man lay face down, blood streaming into the gutter in the rain. It was dark, moonless beneath banks of cloud. Rain drenched Thordun’s beard, hiding his tears. He crouched by the body. It was a boy. He rose with a curse, wiping blood from his pistol and reholstering it. There was no time to reload. He drew his father’s hammer in its place, kissing the rune inscribed into its head as he regarded the skaven corpse.

‘One more to the scales, father. I will see you pass Gazul’s Gate yet.’

‘Speaking with the dead, Splitter? You were always an odd one.’

Thordun spun, lowering his weapon fractionally when he saw it was not a giant black-furred ratman but the hairy bulk of Bernard Servat. The man was breathing heavily, betraying his years. The right side of his face was slick with blood and lumps of gristle stuck to the head of his flail. The Bretonnian’s eyebrow arched warily at the continuing suspicion in the dwarf’s regard.

‘What’s your problem?’ he asked.

‘Just considering my mistakes.’

Bernard leered. Suddenly he struck, his off hand flashing for Thordun’s head. Thordun ducked aside, and Bernard’s short sword skewered a charging clanrat through the chest. The creature’s scream pierced the din as its own momentum thrust itself right down to the hilt of his blade. ‘Speaking of mistakes.’

‘This is not the time!’ Thordun shouted, firing his last pistol round into the murk and cursing when it failed to repay him with a scream. ‘I am a dwarf. I accepted Kazador’s coin and gave my oath. This is where Thordun Locksplitter makes his stand.’

‘I don’t see your beloved king risking his royal derriere down here and I’ll not give my neck for the sake of one measly coin.’

‘Then away with you, Bernard. Flee. Keep your life, and I will keep my honour.’

‘You’ve changed, Splitter,’ the man spat. ‘It’s your grave, and I’ll not lie in it with you.’

Thordun turned away, his swinging hammer smashing the teeth from a scarlet-garbed skaven warrior. He had no oathstone, but he felt its weight on his heart. The same compulsion that drove him to his ancestral home was what bade him stand, to fight, and never yield.

He hadn’t lived as a dwarf, but by Grungni he would die as one.

This was where the last of the Locksplitters would reclaim his honour.

With a low swing of his axe, Handrik took the legs from a clanrat warrior, pivoting on the ball of his foot to slam the heavy iron head onto the struggling creature’s ribcage. He had the barest of moments to register his triumph before three more stinking, dirt-caked warriors jumped him. He roared, smashing one aside mid-leap before the other two were on him. A spear point shattered on the rune-hard gromril of his breastplate and, acting on pure instinct, he twisted his waist to swat aside the other’s sword on his elbow. The off-balance warrior stumbled, and Handrik encouraged him on his way to the ground with a thrust between the shoulder blades with the haft of his axe.

A lance of pain seared up his spine as he turned. He cried out and dropped to one knee. His lower back burned like a furnace, and he realised he could no longer move it. Stubbornly, he attempted to stand, but the intensity of pain blacked his vision and he fell.

‘Handrik has fallen!’ he heard one of the Hammerers cry, and he redoubled his efforts to stand. He would not permit the king to see him so.

He felt hands grip under his arms and drag him back. Trunk-legged figures stepped into the breach, laying into the skaven horde with immense hammers flying.

‘I’m fine. Just winded is all.’

A face appeared beside him. It was Loremaster Logan. He was missing a lens from his glasses and his face was messed with skaven blood.

‘If you aren’t the stubbornest wattock I ever met. No wonder Kazador had to force you from your duties.’

‘Damn you. No Valayan priestess will tell me whether I can fight. I’ll not be left at home with pipe and slippers when there’s killing to be done.’

‘Rest, Handrik. None will think less of you for it.’

‘Bah,’ Handrik grumbled. Forcing through the pain until his face turned red, he managed to get up onto his elbows. He glared at the old loremaster, chest heaving. ‘A quick sup of ale and I’ll be on my feet again. Pass my skin, old friend.’ He gestured with his eyes to a bulging ale-skin tied at his waist.

‘I thought you’d been a little deeper into your tankard than usual these past weeks. Is this how you’ve kept on your feet, Handrik? Neck deep in ale?’

‘Grimnir take your beard! Can’t an old longbeard savour a fortifying brew without being spied on by so-called friends?’

‘I’ll pretend you’re insensible with agony and didn’t say that. We should get you away and get that armour off you. The weight must be killing you.’

‘This old thing?’ said Handrik, shrugging his inch-thick gromril pauldrons. ‘I scarcely feel it. And when did you become a priestess anyway?’

‘Handrik!’

‘Enough! Fine!’ Handrik sagged. Suddenly he felt very tired. ‘But I’ll make my own way back. You should be at the king’s side, who else will record his deeds in battle?’

The loremaster looked as though he might weep, such was the depth of sadness in his eyes as he regarded his old friend, as if he had in some way applied the crippling blow himself. ‘You should see him. He fights with the strength of Grimnir. Iron in his heart and in his veins. No thaggoraki can stand before the Hammer of Azul when wielded with such fury.’

Handrik grimaced. ‘You read like a tale of the Ancestor Ages. Too many inkspots and too few bloodstains. Get yourself to Kazador before I carve your own bloody name into the history books.’

Logan stood and bowed.

Handrik saw the old dwarf smile just as heavy feet crunched into the hard earth, transmitting its tremors through Handrik’s prone back. A nightmarish creature of pale flesh and brawn shouldered its way through the dwarfish line. Shrieking a twisted amalgam of brute power and self-loathing, a sweep of its ape-like arms tossed aside a pair of Hammerers as if they weighed nothing. The rat ogre stood fully twelve feet tall at its hunched, monstrously powerful shoulders. Pus wept freely from open sores, its thick hide puckered with quarrels and blackened by electric burns. Its verminous head was almost swallowed by musculature, its tiny red eyes glowing with a simple hatred that left no room for pain. It loped forward on mismatched legs, charging blindly at the elderly dwarf in his path.

The loremaster turned, eyes widening as the giant rat ogre bore down on him. Too slowly he hefted his hammer as the rat ogre reared up on its hind legs, bunching one boulder-like fist and bringing it crashing down like a mace.

‘No!’ Handrik screamed.

Logan’s hammer fell hard, like a stone.

Grief-stricken, Handrik tried to rise, almost choking on pain. Instead, he took up his axe in both hands and hacked blindly at the mutant obscenity’s scabrous foot. A misshapen toe flew off at the knuckle, pustulent blood oozing from the stump. The beast howled, instinctively clobbering Handrik with its tail as it leapt back. He turned his face away as it came in, the cable-like lash cutting across his cheek and slicking his beard with blood.

The rat ogre towered above the stricken dwarf like a mountain. It lowered its head to Handrik and roared, beating its great fists against its chest. Handrik gripped his axe in both hands and roared back.

‘Come on then! What are you waiting for?’

Bunching its muscles to spring, the rat ogre was suddenly distracted as one of the king’s Hammerers burst through the cloying smoke over the bodies of his kin. Blood stained the azure of Karak Azul as he came, swinging his massive hammer in both hands. The weapon crunched under the beast’s ribs, the sounds of splintering bone audible even over the thunder of cannon-fire. The rat ogre skittered back, rat-like, the injury giving it pause but little more.

Again, Handrik tried to draw himself up, managing, through sheer stubborn force of will, to drag himself to his knees. His head swayed. ‘Leave the beardling be, rat-beast. You’re not done with me yet!’

The rat ogre ignored him as it prepared to charge the tiny creature that had caused it pain.

‘Ahead!’ commanded a royal voice. ‘May your blood feed the roots of Karak Azul, monster.’

Kazador emerged from the smog. His anvil-headed hammer held aloft like the prow of a warship, his bearers cut through the squall of battle towards their prey. The brilliance of the Armour of Kings was undimmed by the spatters of skaven blood. Even to Kazador, borne aloft and with his great winged helm sweeping proud like a battle standard, the rat ogre loomed gigantic. It roared, sweeping its blade-like claws at his face. Drilled beyond excellence over the centuries, Kazador’s shieldbearers stepped back, carrying their king from the blow before charging back in at the unbalanced beast. The Hammer of Azul descended like punishment from the heavens, first crushing the rat ogre’s shoulder before drawing back and smashing the teeth from its jaw with a well-placed blow to the snout.

The giant beast screamed and cowered away. Unmoved, Kazador beat relentlessly at the mewling creature’s hunched back, bone crumbling under every blow, while his bearers set to work with hand-axes on the rat ogre’s thick hide.

At last, the beast’s cries ceased and it lay still.

Kazador lowered his hammer and turned to face Handrik. His gaze swept over Logan’s body without hint of emotion. His eyes were cold, his heart so swollen by sorrow he could physically feel no more. ‘Can you still fight?’

Handrik took in the fallen Hammerers, the shattered armour of his oldest friend. They had died because of him, because of his weakness. ‘Until I can no longer hold an axe, majesty.’

‘Good. There’s plenty more to kill.’ The king looked across the melee. The Hammerers were a knot of order amidst a swirling sea of chaos. He squinted into the murk where, just visible within the ashen shroud, a rack of severed heads danced above the battle like vengeful spirits. ‘Headtaker,’ he cursed. ‘Thaggoraki hordes are all the same. We cut off its head and stamp down hard on its plague-ridden body until the tail stops twitching.’

‘Go on without me, majesty. I will not allow the ratkin to feast on Logan’s body. Let me die at his–’

He paused, unnerved by something he could not place.

‘What is it, Handrik?’

Something was wrong. Finally it struck him. Something that had so overwhelmed his senses that its absence was like suddenly noticing the sky was green or the mountains inverted.

‘The guns have stopped.’

Sharpwit crouched at an intersection, where his smaller tunnel joined another, much larger one. The walls were smoothly carved granite. Angular faces stared gravely from the stone. They seemed to grumble and curse with the echoes of distant cannon-fire. He poked his muzzle out of his hiding place, drawing a careful sniff of the tepid air and finding it barren of dwarf scent.

‘This way,’ he whispered.

Fang Dao hissed acknowledgement, turning to his gutter runners and forming his paw through a sequence of shapes. They bobbed silently in understanding. Sharpwit hobbling in the lead, the skaven swept down the tunnel. The booming maledictions of the stone-carved figures grew louder as they drew closer to their goal. The floor of the passage vibrated under foot with every rumble.

The dwarfs had been clever, as dwarfs were wont to be. There was no easy access to the Ninth Deep fortifications. Not from the Ninth Deep, anyway. They could only be reached by a network of passages connecting to stairwells from the Upper Deeps, thus forcing any attacker either to submit to a barrage of death they could not answer, or to assault the hold from many points at once. Even then, total victory would be far from certain, as the dwarfs had left many blind tunnels and traps for the uninvited and the entrances to their most important passageways were barred by the most adroit of dwarfish runecraft. They were an ingenious race, cunning when they chose to be, and skilled in the arts of obfuscation. It had taken ten generations and peerless skaven guile to finally wrest Karak Eight Peaks from their grasp. Its ruins were testament to what the skaven could accomplish when selfishness was set aside for the greater interests of Skavendom. Karak Azul was no less formidable than the Eight Peaks of old, but the Council of Thirteen was too divided to bend their full will to its capture. That was why Gnawdwell had put his trust in Sharpwit – wisest and cleverest of all the skaven.

They must be almost directly above the dwarfish fortifications now, somewhere between the Eighth and Ninth Deeps.

‘Ahh,’ he breathed. ‘Here it is.’

The passage opened out into a huge black maw, too wide for even skaven night vision to perceive the far wall. The sounds of battle rang from its depths like echoes from a well. Clutching the stone wall, Sharpwit leant over the yawning gulf and peered up into what his lurching gut insisted was infinity. His head calmly told him that the shaft ran to the foundries and workshops of the Fifth Deep, running an elevator platform for weapons and munitions down to the endless battlegrounds of the Lower Deeps.

He got down stiffly onto all fours and sniffed over the edge. A brisk breeze played at the soft hairs of his throat, carrying on it the sharp scent of fire and gunpowder. Their destination was not far. Dao and his nimble-footed adepts would likely not balk at such a climb, but Sharpwit’s joints ached at the mere prospect. Fortunately, there was always another way.

‘Dao, send half your sneaks ahead-down. We go right into the dwarf-thing’s heart and will find no more unguarded tunnels.’

The assassin peered over the edge, pointing out individuals from the group and directing them down. Wordlessly, they obeyed, spooling out rope from coils beneath their black cloaks. The first to go wrapped the rope under his left thigh and over his right shoulder and backed towards the ledge as Dao himself checked the line was secure. The gutter runner snarled, possibly in prayer, and threw himself tail first from the precipice and rappelled down the sheer chasm.

Sharpwit watched approvingly as the remainder of the advance team followed suit. It was said that the training Clan Eshin agents received was intended to instill loyalty and fellowship as well as martial skill. They were a model that all Skavendom should follow.

‘How far do they fall-drop?’ Dao asked.

‘Far. Likely they need climb the last by paw.’

Dao nodded as though he had expected as much but revealed nothing of his thoughts. Mental discipline was said to be another trait of the Eshin.

‘Come-come,’ said Sharpwit. ‘Now we find our way down.’

‘You will not be joining us down the hole?’ Dao asked, innocently.

Sharpwit sneered. ‘You are no fool-fool, Dao. Do not try-seek and test me. I play these games far longer than you.’ He laid his paws against the walls, seemingly at random, and began sliding his touch along their cold length. These passages had not been trodden in an age.

‘You could wait-rest here. Let Dao do what he does well-best and keep clever Warlord Sharpwit from danger.’

Smiling to himself, his back to the assassin, Sharpwit’s paws didn’t cease their questing. ‘You try to frighten me? I have the ear of Nightlord Sneak, I treat with Deathmasters. What could Fang Dao say to frighten me?’ He turned, treating the assassin to a grin filled with fell black fangs.

The assassin met his gaze, sizing him up as perhaps only an adept of Clan Eshin could. ‘You are not as feeble as you seem, are you?’

Sharpwit smiled but said nothing. He pressed his muzzle back to the wall. Trembles from distant cannon-fire passed through the stone like ripples.

‘What do you find-seek?’ asked the humbled assassin.

‘A way down. I squeak-say already.’

‘Through solid rock?’

‘I thought you were expert on dwarf-things.’ Sharpwit broke into a laugh. ‘But then Razzel says that too. I weep for the skaven race.’ His paw passed over a patch of wall that felt different to the rest. It looked identical, but it had been years since Sharpwit had trusted to his sight. ‘Watch, Dao. Maybe learn something.’

With that, Sharpwit pushed forward, the rock giving way beneath his paw until his arm was buried within the wall up to the shoulder. He cackled. ‘Dwarf-things think themselves so clever. Clever enough perhaps, but not to fool Sharpwit.’ He grasped about until his paw settled on what he sought: a metal lever, cool to the touch and as long as his wiry forearm. He tugged but it was locked. Spitting a curse, he gave it another yank but the lever didn’t shift. He withdrew his paw. The lever had been designed for stronger arms than his.

‘Dao. Pull the lever.’

The assassin stared at the depression as though he expected it to sear the flesh from his bones on contact. He cast about for an underling to perform the task.

‘Now!’

Dao squirmed in discomfort, looking first at the wall and then at Sharpwit before finally reaching a decision. He sidled closer to the wall, throwing one last imploring look at Sharpwit and receiving short shrift before daintily sinking one claw into the aperture.

Sharpwit thwacked the assassin across the rump with his crutch. ‘Quick-quick! Or I tell Sneak that Dao is a coward-rat scared of holes in walls.’

Holding his breath, Dao drove his arm deeper, finally relaxing as his paw found the lever head.

‘Yes-yes, good. Be convinced-sure you have the proper lever. One to left is to summon. It is longer. One to right is to send up or down.’

‘I have it.’

‘Good-good. Now, pull-pull.’

Thick muscles pulled taut beneath black fur. The assassin grimaced as he fought against the stubborn lever.

‘Pull-pull, pull hard.’

Dao grunted, feeling the arm shift the merest inch. He pulled back his dye-blackened lips into a snarl and gave everything to haul the damnable thing until it could go no further. There was a throaty clank, as of metal being withdrawn into metal, and a whir of machinery as Dao collapsed, panting.

Sharpwit stepped away from the wall as the sound rattled on. Somewhere, deep within the clever masonry of the dwarfs, wheels were spinning and heavy-duty chains older than the Under-Empire rumbled towards the Fifth Deep bearing a lead counterweight – forged undoubtedly into the stern countenance of an ancestor, for all that none would ever see it – in their wake. He moved closer to the shaft and peered cautiously upwards. He took a sniff. The cry of sheared stone and overworked metal ricocheted down the walls of the shaft.

‘Away-back from the ledge,’ he squeaked, obeying his own command. ‘Away-back.’

An enormous stone platform, at least three feet thick and too vast in diameter to discern, hove into view, its descent grinding to a shuddering halt. It locked smoothly into place and Sharpwit couldn’t help but marvel. If he hadn’t just witnessed the floor appear, he would never have believed that it hadn’t been present all long. The joint with the rest of the passage was seamless, the tall statues that ringed the platform aligning perfectly with the faces in the accompanying hall.

Sharpwit shook his head. So very clever.

With this contraption in his paws, he could have positioned warriors on every level of Karak Azul as high as the Fifth Deep. The dwarfs would not have folded, he knew that. They were a stubborn race who almost revelled in adversity, but the skaven would not have been forced to assault an entrenched line and Kazador would have seen his forces split. Would he have defended the ancestor shrines on the Sixth Deep? Or would he have dispatched his finest to the burial chambers of the Eighth or the treasuries of the Seventh? It was all moot now. He cursed Queek and his childish thinking, rejoicing in the same breath that the Headtaker was no longer his problem. He hoped the Horned Rat choked on that one.

‘Onto the platform,’ he commanded, waving the slinking skaven forward. ‘Dao, one must stay to work the lever.’

Dao dropped his muzzle, pointing out a scrawny ratkin stood nearest to him. ‘You. Go work the lever for Sharpwit-Warlord.’

The skaven scurried from the platform with a posture that bespoke profound relief. Sharpwit stabbed his claw at another of the gutter runners, a silent and brooding presence with a heavy hemp net over his broad shoulders. ‘And you. Make sure he does not run-scurry.’

Sharpwit, Dao and the remainder of the gutter runners assembled around the lip of the platform. The adepts fidgeted nervously, but Dao himself had regained his composure. The assassin crouched low, legs braced like willow saplings so he would not be unbalanced by any sudden movement of the floor. His ears and eyes roved ceaselessly in search of danger.

Sharpwit snarled at the gutter runners they had left behind. ‘Twist the right-paw lever, quarter turn to right and then pull-pull.’

The gutter runner did so, twisting the lever clockwise before pulling it back down. Sharpwit looked sideways at Dao.

Dao bared his fangs. ‘I loosened for him.’

The platform lurched, spilling all but Dao from their feet. Sharpwit swore as the level began to descend noisily. He stabbed his crutches into the trembling floor and pushed himself onto his feet. None of the gutter runners offered a paw in aid.

Grey walls ground upward, twinkling with baubles of quartz, pyrite and feldspar as the mineral seam smeared lazily across his vision. The gutter runners gripped the floor on all fours. Dao stood hunched, his body seemingly motionless as he swayed in perfect harmony with the vibrations of the platform. Sharpwit turned his back on them all, resting on the support of his crutches. Not far now.

The platform crashed into its Ninth Deep terminus. This time Sharpwit kept his feet, but the shockwave shook his insides like jelly. A team of hunched, black-clad shapes greeted them as Sharpwit hobbled gladly from the shaft. The tunnel was almost identical to the previous. Perhaps the dwarfs themselves could tell the different ancestor statues apart, but he could not.

One of the gutter runners from the advance party came to prostrate himself before Sharpwit and Dao. His slender blade was bloody. Sharpwit ignored the skaven and pressed deeper into the tunnel. It seemed the statues here were possessed of two shadows. Gutter runners slunk behind them in watchful positions of wariness.

He sensed Dao and the remainder of the Clan Eshin team on his tail. The tunnel ran only a short way before ending in a stout, iron-banded portal. The last gutter runner sat cross-legged before it, tail coiled about his waist and twitching in time to the actions of his paws which fished a multi-pronged instrument into the door’s locking mechanism. Either side of the working ratkin lay two dead dwarfs. One lay face down, a stab wound in the back, while the other sat upright against the wall. His head lolled to one side, tubes showing glistening and white where the dwarf’s throat had been slit.

The sounds of battle came through most clearly now. He could hear screams and war-cries, the chittering of skaven multitudes whipped into death frenzy. Above it all, cannon roared like dragons in an ancient sky.

And Sharpwit had his paws in their nest.

‘Fast-quick Eshin-thing. Is time we take the Ninth Deep for the glory of Skavendom.’

Fizqwik ventured his snout from the crater that had been the site of his warplock jezzails. The cannonball hadn’t left a scrap of fur. Even the spume of eviscerated skaven remains had never fallen back to earth. Every drop had been mopped up by the cloud of ash that hung over the battlefield. He stared upwards, lost in a momentary fascination of this alchemical phenomenon and how he might turn it to the removal of bloodstains from his workshop floor.

It had been quick thinking of a paramount degree that had concluded in his hasty relocation to the rear once the cannonade had diverted its aim from Queek’s mad charge through the centre towards his own position. It was hardly his own fault if lesser minds could not keep up. He crawled a little way further over the lip of the earthen parapet and set his precious warplock musket under his body. His ears still screamed to the whistle of phantom shells, but there were no more explosions, no plumes of pulverised rock or short-lived screams. He stuck a claw in one ear and wiggled it.

He began to laugh. The guns had stopped.

He scurried the rest of the way from the hole and snatched his weapon from the ground. All around him, shell-shocked clanrats emerged blinking from their own pits and furrows. Through supreme cleverness and guile he had survived where the idiot Queek had not. And now it would be Fizqwik who delivered the Council of Thirteen a famous victory.

‘Forward, brave minions! Kill-kill!’

Queek squealed, exultant, mashing the face of the prone dwarf into paste, striking over and over with the spike of Dwarf Gouger until the flattened mess above its neck had combined inseparably with the pulverised rock upon which it had breathed its last.

‘Queek greatest!’ he screamed. ‘Squeak-tell who is greatest, dwarf-thing!’

The dwarf said nothing and Queek screamed once more as Dwarf Gouger struck again, its ensorcelled spike splitting deep into the rock. Dwarf-things with hand-axes and shields fought back to back, all cohesion abandoned to the chaos of battle as their numbers thinned and scarlet-armoured stormvermin swept to envelope them. He had been so close. Even now he could see Kazador’s garlanded white fur. He saw him look his way.

Face me if you dare.

‘Ska! Cut a path. See-hear how Kazador challenges Queek.’ He scowled as stormvermin continued to streak by him, thrusting the serrated blades of their halberds at the dwarfs, and not one of them paying heed to their warlord. ‘Ska!’ he yelled again. Damn that worthless underling and his ineptitude. Queek would do it himself.

‘Rat-king! Headtaker! Stand and meet your doom.’

A dwarf strode towards him. A grey beard spilled from the face of a tall horned helm from which ruby-red runes glowered with quiet power. A huge warhammer crackled blue-white in his heavy iron gauntlets. The horns reminded him of White-fur.

‘Queek hate-hate stupid White-fur!’

‘Your madness will trouble Karak Eight Peaks no longer. Face me if you dare.’

Queek hissed. Hearing those words spoken aloud jarred his senses, as though two disparate realities had suddenly collided into one, imbuing both with hyper-realism. Colours became vivid as though shackled before hidden stars, scents sharpened, and the clatter and roar of battle pitched to crystal clarity. He could see every whisker on the dwarf-thing’s face, smell the oil on his armour and the rank hatred that crusted in its pores like salt from old sweat.

He tittered. ‘What you think, dwarf-thing, should Queek kill-kill?’

The dwarf scowled. ‘If you believe you can. Come meet the Hammerhand.’

‘Queek does not speak-squeak to you, dwarf-thing.’

Moving with ferocious alacrity, he leapt in for the quick kill. He revelled in the sudden panic in the dwarf-thing’s eyes as he witnessed his speed, the painful realisation of the mighty warlord that he faced. The foreplay was almost as joyful as the final ecstatic eruption of life, that little death that preceded the greater, the bloody finality of defeat.

His sword clanged against the dwarf’s hammer. Electric sparks flared as Queek measured his strength against that of his foe. Shoving the dwarf’s weapon aside, he spun in its wake, Dwarf Gouger arcing for the greybeard’s head. The dwarf jerked back just in time, Queek’s maul shearing a horn from his helm like a hot wire through cheese.

Growling, the dwarf reset his helm. Queek tittered mercilessly at his earnestness. ‘What is the matter, dwarf-thing? Queek thinks you want-wish to join dwarf-kin Krug on Queek’s spike, yes-yes?’

‘Damn you and your abominations, Headtaker.’

The dwarf came swinging, his hammer leaving a train of sparking blue afterimages as it fizzed through the air. Queek skipped away, parrying and dancing as the dwarf came stubbornly on, always missing by a whisker. Queek felt his hairs tingle and stand erect as they absorbed the charge imparted by the dwarf’s wildly swinging hammer. Queek tittered as though tickled. The sensation was arresting, as if he were being pulled into the sky by tiny blue faeries. He snapped his jaws at one of the dancing lights, the sparking mote popping delightfully on his tongue.

The dwarf saw little to amuse him, storm clouds settling over his eyes as he lunged with an upward swing. Queek curved his spine back as the mallet whisked beneath his snout, his tail catching his falling weight before uncoiling like a spring to fling him back at his enemy. The dwarf swore as he shifted his hammer to block Queek’s strike, but he was slow as a corpse from the grave and Dwarf Gouger bored deep into dwarfish rune-plate and drank deeply of the blood that issued forth, spilling in runnels to the ground. His weapons blurred as they reaped a bloody harvest of dwarf flesh.

‘Make fae-things dance for Queek, dwarf-thing!’

The dwarf panted raggedly, his hammer held resolute even as the life ebbed from him. He shook his head grimly. ‘All that has been lost. To you. A mad rat. Do you even realise what you do?’

Queek spread his arms as if offering an embrace. ‘Come-come. Be with Queek.’

The dwarf studied the mad skaven, beginning to laugh even as Queek sprang with a velocity that blurred action and reaction into a single scarlet blur and strangled his gallows mirth in a cry of horror. His hammer swung too late, catching the warlord on the edge of his pauldron with the wooden shaft as he was borne to the ground. The pair rolled through the earth as clawed skaven footpaws and iron dwarf boots stomped around them, locked in their own private struggles. Queek didn’t see. They were distant things, small and lacking in consequence.

He felt the dwarf-thing fading and clutched him tightly to his breast, forcing his bearded and bloodied face into his breastplate.

‘There, there, dwarf-thing. You are with Queek now.’

The dwarf struggled, coughing harshly as he inhaled a lungful of warpdust shaken loose from Queek’s armour. Suddenly, his struggles grew more acute. He thrashed and jerked in Queek’s hold, green-black foam spilling from his nose and mouth, choking his cries to an agonised gargle before that too drowned in the mucilage of his melted lungs. The dwarf’s body shuddered one last time and went still, his eyes rolling white into his sockets.

Queek lifted back the dwarf’s head. He was peaceful, content, sublime.

He lowered his muzzle to the dwarf’s lips. ‘Now Queek will kill-slay Kazador. You watch-like very much, Queek thinks, yes-yes.’

He looked up.

The dwarfs were advancing, shields interleaved into a milling engine of death. At the centre came Kazador atop his iron shield, armour and wide helm gleaming like a full moon in a fire-choked sky. His hammer smote down skaven by the dozen as his ranks advanced with iron discipline by his side. The king bestrode the conflict like a colossus, more machine than mortal; cold, hard and utterly beyond death.

Queek shrieked his challenge. He would prove that that was not so!

His cry was lost in the scrum as the vengeful dwarfs closed to the blast of horns and trumpets, the ground between them and Queek turning into a slaughterhouse. Ratkin were still charging unawares, even as others attempted to flee. The survivors of Hrathgar’s clansdwarfs stood like solitary islands in that churning sea, arms that didn’t know the meaning of weariness hacking out at newcomers and lategoers both.

Queek threw his gaze about in a rage, settling on a burly pair of brown-furred rats that bore between them a great sloshing barrel connected by a hose and bellows apparatus to a bulky cannon in the paws of the foremost skaven. Their fur was lank with the effort of jogging all the way from the strike tunnels with their cumbersome equipment and heavy, flame-retardant overalls.

‘Flame-burn,’ Queek hissed, gesturing at the skaven and dwarf-things alike that stood between him and Kazador. ‘Fire. Quick-now.’

The gunner grinned excitedly, chittering instructions to the fuel-bearer as he pressed down on the trigger.

The intensity of the explosion knocked Queek off his feet as the fuel-bearer rocketed skyward on a pillar of warpflame, exploding far above the battlefield in firework fury. Queek gasped for breath as gobbets of warpfire rained down, sinking through dwarfish armour and igniting skaven fur. Panicked skaven bolted in every direction, setting fresh ratkin ablaze as they blundered through the crazed press or simply, mercifully, ended their short lives on the axes of the still advancing dwarfs.

A quartet of ratling guns arrived behind him, breathless and exhausted as had been the late warpfire team. ‘Fire, fire, fire!’ he squealed as panic threatened to become a rout.

Victory would be his. Kazador would be his. He was Queek. Fearsome. Undefeatable.

The gunners cranked the handles of their weapons and the muzzles of their fearsome guns chittered and spun, but spat nothing more deadly than warpstone-smeared oil. One of the skaven shook his weapon angrily. Another, surveying the destruction of the warpfire team, released a stale waft of relieved musk.

‘No!’ Queek wailed, stamping his footpaws in fury. Blurred ratkin shapes ran by in full flight. ‘No, no, no, no!’

He glared at Kazador with undisguised hate.

Next time, Kazador.

Next time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was little cheer to be found among the throng of Karak Azul as the ratkin fled the Deep in rout. The skaven were scattered to the depths but, like the verminous weeds of the Underworld they were, every last one needed to be purged by blade and flame down to the very root before there could be any rest. Units of Ironbreakers, escorted by rangers and experienced miners, already pursued the foul creatures to their lair.

Sensing the blackness of their king’s mood, the throng joined him in giving expression to the sombreness in their hearts. There was little chance now of a war on the Black Crag. The clansdwarfs would return to their trades, the warriors from foreign holds would trickle back to their homes and the moment when restitution came agonisingly within their collective grasp would have passed. Grudgement would be forced to wait – another fifteen years or more.

The sound of fighting continued to filter from distant quarters. The sharp report of a Thunderer’s handgun sounded strange after the sense-deadening cacophony of the battle just fought, a shrill note suddenly silenced, like the shriek of a fowl snared in the depth of darkness before the dawn chorus. From somewhere lost in smoke came the rumour of steel clashing against steel, likely skaven hold-outs unaware their battle was lost. But there was little glory in such slaughter. Even the sound of it faded to insignificance beneath the rumbling industry of the Eighth Deep, audible once again at the battle’s death, immutable as the grinding drift of continents.

The area around the fort had become the last focus of activity. In an unexpected reversal of roles, besieged had become besieger, and ranks of Thunderers knelt behind hurriedly fashioned palisades of skaven corpses and scree as they took potshots at the grey-walled basilica. A group of skaven, fleetingly visible through the slitted openings in the rock face, had somehow gained access to silence the artillery station there. The wooden footbridge spanning the chasm before the fort shook to the tread of boots as clansdwarfs quick-marched back the way they had come. A continuous stream of missiles rained down upon them, from poison darts to cannonballs, hauled to the window slits between pairs of slender paws and dropped onto the heads of the dwarfs like rocks.

Some distance from the continuing actions, not far from the spot where Kazador had crushed the skaven centre, the wounded and the slain lay in grisly array, a battalion of the broken laid out in parade order. Lorekeepers with iron-bound ledgers walked the files, grimly recording the names of the slain. Priestesses and their assistants bustled by them. For many, there was naught to be done but cleanse bloody flesh and comb knotted beards that they might be presentable for their arrival in the Ancestors’ Hall. Those that lived awaited stolidly the ministry of the daughters of Valaya. The hermit priest, Gunngeir, followed more slowly in their wake, offering Grimnir’s quite different balm to the wounds of the dishonoured. There was no weeping, no gnashing of teeth. They bore their suffering like dwarfs.

Handrik resented his own place in that unlucky number. These dawi were heroes undeserving of his company. They had laid their bodies down in defence of the karak, whereas he hadn’t suffered so much as a splinter from a thaggoraki shield. He lay face down in the ground, the millennia-old stone fractured and bloodstained from the murder mill that had passed over it mere hours before. He had been helped out of his armour and his goat wool undershirt, his densely muscled shoulders straddled by the sturdy thighs of a Valayan priestess. Handrik bore her ministrations, red-faced. That any should see him in such a condition was intolerable.

Handrik grumbled, wincing as the priestess cut into the flesh of his back. He felt blood spill from a lanced swelling and stream down his sides. He ground his teeth as the woman cut deeper. A shadow fell across his face and he squirmed under the priestess’s hold to look up, a curse pre-formed on his lips.

‘That’s right, come take a good gawp at…’ Handrik coughed, embarrassed as the approaching figure turned out to be that of Kazador. ‘I… erm… Forgive me, majesty.’

The king came on foot, whether out of humility born of misplaced respect, or simple consideration for his bearer’s aching limbs. He held himself back, eyes fixed upon the hanging fog, glassy and unseeing as a sleepwalker’s in their modest aversion.

‘How do you fare, old friend?’

‘Don’t ask such stupid questions,’ Handrik snapped, before he could rein in his wayward tongue. He forced a laugh, but it was half-hearted, devoid of his usual cheer. ‘There’s a keg of Bugman’s in it for you if you’d have this harpy from my back.’

‘Almost done, you big baby. Stop fidgeting.’

Handrik spluttered in outrage. ‘Baby?’

‘Peace, Handrik,’ Kazador intoned. ‘Leave Grimhildur be.’ The king regarded him sorrowfully. ‘Know that no blame is apportioned to you over Logan’s death. It is my own fault. I should never have permitted you to take up arms at my side, but I couldn’t deny you one last battle.’ His expression hardened. ‘The fault is mine. I was warned against it.’

‘You were,’ the priestess added.

‘No! Logan fell on my account.’

‘Silence, Handrik,’ Kazador threatened. ‘The grudge is set. I can only hope one day to find the good fortune to atone. Logan’s memory deserves no less.’

Handrik softened in surrender. It was already written.

‘The loremaster will be interred with full glory tomorrow morning. You were friends. I’d ask you to join me in bearing his body to the Burial Hall.’

‘I’ll allow that,’ Grimhildur interrupted, ‘but only that,’ she finished firmly.

‘Aye, majesty,’ Handrik whispered.

‘It is done,’ said Grimhildur, patting him on the rump. The priestess clambered off Handrik’s back, wiping her bloodied hands on a rag. ‘The swelling is lessened, but you must rest. And I mean really rest this time.’ She regarded him sternly. ‘So if I hear so much as a whisper of you donning that armour again, it’ll be an inch from your beard.’

Handrik grunted, downcast, not troubling himself to rise at the scuff of fresh boots. He was not some performing beast to make a spectacle of himself for the amusement of every ill-mannered gruntitroggi that passed his way.

Kazador, for his part, noted the new arrival with the slightest of nods. He might have smiled had his frown not been immortalised in stone. ‘A pleasure to meet you again,’ he said, ‘Quite the hero of the hour if what I hear is to be believed.’ But the king’s countenance and tone of voice remained grim.

Grimhildur nodded to the newcomer and offered a bow to the king, turning to leave them be before fixing on Handrik one last time. ‘If I don’t find you right here when I get back–’

‘I know, I know. Away with you, woman.’

The stranger laughed, and the sound of his voice removed any mystery as to his identity, for Handrik knew no other whose Khazalid was so polluted with Imperial accenting. ‘I’d do as she says, longbeard. She strikes me most fearsome.’

‘What do you want, beardling?’ he asked, tersely.

‘Speak well to friends or hold your tongue,’ Kazador barked. ‘I summoned the boy. May dawi in my kingdom travel only where Handrik Hallgakrin deems fit?’

‘Of course not, majesty. Forgive me.’ He struggled to rise. He could feel his legs better now, frigid needles prickling his extremities, but he was still horrifically sore. His body felt beaten, wrung out. And he had a dire thirst. A gentle hand, gloved and unarmoured on his shoulders, bade him stay still and, to no benefit to his temper, he was too weak to do anything but comply. He glared into the youthful, golden-haired face of Thordun Locksplitter. ‘You look bloody pleased with yourself.’

‘As well he might,’ said Kazador. ‘It is scarcely commonplace for the actions of one so young to save a kingdom, old friend. Single-handedly, he plugged the hole left in the line by that traitorous umgaki, Hrathgar, may his beard be shorn and his chin lie forever fallow. He held the thaggoraki long enough for Lothgrim to drive them back with reinforcements from the citadel.’

Forgetting his ire against Thordun, he snapped back at the king, red-faced and indignant, ‘I told you. I said that Lothgrim was too sparse on the chin. He was tasked with guarding the stair. It wasn’t for him to decide what’s best. What if the skaven had got in behind him, they could have made it anywhere in the hold?’

‘But they didn’t.’

‘I hear there are skaven even now inside the fort, how do you explain that? Without the barrage to keep them down, the thaggoraki nearly overran our entire left flank. How many dawi fell because the guns went quiet?’

‘Lothgrim’s actions were decisive and bold. Without his Ironbreakers we would almost certainly not be having this conversation now. He is to be commended, and that is all I need to explain to you.’

Handrik grumbled, but said no more, taking a sudden interest in the grain on the stone beneath his cheek.

‘Thordun,’ Kazador continued. ‘It is only right that I offer you some reward for your deeds.’

‘That is unnecessary, your majesty,’ Thordun said, beaming. ‘It was my honour.’

‘It is necessary. In Karak Azul, we honour our debts in full. But if you prefer, consider it further service to me. I need to send an emissary to Karak Eight Peaks. Belegar must be informed of the treachery perpetrated in his name, and of the debt already owed for his failure to honour his alliances. And Hrathgar’s heir must be notified as well. His father’s grudge debt is now his to repay.’

‘This seems an unhappy duty.’

‘Does it?’ Kazador asked, surprise briefly threatening his grim mask of apathy and pain. ‘Ours is an unhappy world, beardling. You will learn this as the centuries add grey to your beard.’

‘I will serve proudly, majesty.’

‘Good. Then when that is done, you will bear record of these grudges to the high loremaster of the Karaz Ankor in Karaz-a-Karak. I am told it would be on your way home.’

Thordun bowed low, nervously clearing his throat. ‘With respect, majesty, you are mistaken. This is my home, if you will have me.’

Kazador barked with hollow laughter. The gesture was a half-remembered habit, an impulse from another life, and his lifeless visage was unmoved. ‘Then let us clear your home of thaggoraki. You should have a hearth worth returning to after your trek to the Everpeak.’

‘I can help,’ said Handrik. He rolled to his feet in brazen defiance of his own body, swaying but refusing to fall. His legs bent and quivered as he came forward. ‘My axe hand still works.’

‘Handrik,’ said Kazador, sorrowfully. ‘Do as Grimhildur says.’

‘Mother of mercy be damned!’ he roared, fists clenched in frustration. Kazador did not flinch, his stony façade unyielding before the heat of Handrik’s glare.

Thordun placed a calming arm around his shoulder. He shook it off and shot him a warning scowl. He had anger sufficient for Thordun and Kazador both.

The young dwarf held up his hands. ‘Please rest. Just for a time. The battle is won and now we just mop up the dregs. I’m sure you’ll be fighting fit in no time.’

Handrik lowered his head. Un-helmed, his mane of grey hair spilled down over his shoulders. He knew his body better than any priestess, and certainly better than any beardling from the Empire. ‘Aye, lad. Miracles do happen, I suppose.’

Thordun lowered his hands, choosing to offer one in friendship. ‘Perhaps when I return we can share an ale again? I would love to hear more tales of the glories of Azul.’

Handrik merely stared at the proffered digits until Thordun withdrew them. Turning his back, he sank to the bloodstained stone, hoping none saw how the stone of his legs had turned molten. He just wanted to be alone.

‘Leave me in peace, beardling.’

‘Handrik–’

‘And take your wretched umgi with you when you leave.’

Sharpwit paced the choked confines of the dwarfish battery. The cannon themselves lay calm at his side, panting and hot like hounds summoned to heel. His plan had worked as perfectly as he had known it would, but for what?

The door leading back to the elevator shaft shook to the punishment of a ram, a momentary spear of illumination shafting by its bowing hinges. The floor around the doorway had been piled with cannonballs, corpses, powder kegs, anything not chained down and readily hoisted by skaven paws. A terrified-looking adept braced the failing door with his body; arms, legs and tail spread-eagled against the stone frame as though his life depended on it.

Gutter runners hovered at the angular muzzle slits overlooking the Ninth Deep and the rear of the dwarfish line, hurling throwing stars down after the distant targets. The waspish steel buzzed through the smoke with Clan Eshin poison dripping from their stings. Iron bolts fired back in fitful exchange struck the imposing granite frontage of the fort.

Sharpwit looked over the five cannon at the wide corridor that cut deeper into the fortress stair and its batteries, each now as dead as this one. He lost himself to a fit of coughing. The smoke wormed its way into his lungs. It stung his good eye and flushed his nostrils with the scent of gunpowder and terror. He ceased his pacing and ground his crutch angrily into the flagstones. He would not die here.

He looked up as Fang Dao materialised from the smoke that masked the service tunnel, his lithe physique conditioned unconsciously to stealth. The rictus of panic shadowing his features only marginally ruined the effect. Two gutter runners crept after him, their movements obvious only by comparison

‘All dwarf-things are dead-dead,’ reported Dao, half an eye looking behind Sharpwit to the door as it suffered another crunching blow.

Sharpwit snarled. The assassin’s efficiency made Queek’s wretched efforts all the more infuriating. Victory had been within his paw and, while failure was bad enough, what truly caught in his gullet was the discovery that the mad warlord still lived. The ferocity with which he gripped his crutches left splinters in his paws. He had seen the warlord charge down Kazador’s throat. He had seen him repulsed just as swiftly. Perhaps it would teach the whelp some humility, but he doubted it. Queek lacked the requisite mental acuity for anything as refined as ‘learning’.

Sharpwit gestured at the cannon that had formed this battery. He would have dearly loved to claim such fine engines for the glory of Skavendom but there was no way to get them out, and some half-wit tinkerer like Fizqwik would only insist on ‘improving’ them to the point of ruination in any case.

‘See these are destroyed. These weapons at least will be lost-taken from Azul-Place.’ He tittered sarcastically. ‘Such glorious victories. Azul-place will never recover from such completeness of sabotage. What are the workshops of weaponmasters and the forges of runemakers compared to five big scary cannon like these?’ Overcome with fury, he kicked out at the closest war machine. The hollow barrel tolled like the Thirteenth Bell and Sharpwit’s ankle exploded in pain. He hopped on one footpaw, his crutches making vengeful stabs at the floor as he waited for the throbbing to cease. He coughed, loudly clearing a bloody gob from his throat, which he spat from the cannon slits and onto the dwarfs below.

‘What are you waiting for? Is Clan Eshin in the habit of receiving invitations from those they kill-slay? Do it now!’

Dao bobbed to obey, calling a pawful of his charges from their positions to assist in sabotaging the ancient machines.

Another crunch of splintering oak. Wood shards sprayed from the door’s centre. The riveted iron bands running across its top and bottom began to buckle. A gutter runner dashed to aid his comrade in holding together the tortured wood. Another pair tried to drag one of the cannon to add to the ramshackle barricade, so possessed by panic that they hadn’t realised the thing was chained to wooden tracks to check its massive recoil. Frantically, they kept on tugging regardless.

A gutter runner jerked back from one of the cannon slits with a bloody crater in his chest, his tail jerking like the decapitated body of a worm. The booming report of a musket shot resounded through the choking miasma. A lucky shot.

Again, the door shuddered in its death throes. The panelling began to come apart. Sharpwit could see fierce brown-furred faces through the ever-widening cracks in the dead oak.

Fang Dao cast about in a desperate search for an escape route. His eyes lingered on the cannon slits. They were wide enough and tall enough, and a sheer climb down seamless granite was no obstacle to a master of Clan Eshin – if a skaven fancied escaping the dragon’s maw by fleeing into its flaming belly.

‘Do not be a fool-fool,’ Sharpwit hissed, limping towards the narrow opening. ‘No way out that way.’ The smoke swirled and coiled, sauntered and writhed; it had currents and tides like a deep ocean of ash. The cry of the Thunderhorn keened through the Deep, mournful and solitary as whale song.

Kazador.

He stared into the flowing darkness. He could just make out the outline of the king. The winged helm made him obvious even to an eye as dim as Sharpwit’s, even in silhouette. The king was stooped and haggard, a reluctant avenger, a battle-weary titan.

Sharpwit turned to Fang Dao. The assassin was rigid, terror marshalled into poised readiness. Sharpwit grinned, warplight leaking from his fangs as he studied the assassin. He had just had the most delicious idea. Queek would not like it, but that was just going to be tough on Queek.

‘Come-come slow-meat,’ said Sharpwit, snapping his claws under the assassin’s nose. ‘Time we are away.’

Dao flinched as the battering ram crunched home once again. Its iron head gouged through the oak panelling. ‘There is another way out?’

The ram was dropped with a clatter, its place claimed by axes that vengefully chewed into the hole it had created. A quarrel sliced through it and took a gutter runner through the shoulder. The point-blank shot hoisted the skaven from the ground, footpaws scurrying as if to regain their footing, and slammed it into the body of a cannon. The skaven returned fire. A throwing knife opened the gullet of one of the axe-dwarfs. His body slumped through the sundered doorway, rapidly emptying his blood onto the skaven’s makeshift barricade until his comrades hauled him back and stubbornly filled his place.

Sharpwit stepped away from the firing platform and started towards the passage to the next battery in line. There were many more, a dozen at least, running several thousand tail-lengths around the circumference of a half-circle that jutted out from the Ninth Deep stair. He cackled despite the chaos. Much too far to service with only a single elevator platform. ‘There is always another way out.’

The skaven army lay in tatters. Licking its collective wounds, it skulked in shared misery in every dark alcove and hot, foul-smelling scrap of shadow in Deadclaw.

Queek stormed past quivering clanrats, kicking out at those too slow to move aside for his greatness. Even the dying found enough energy to drag their hides from his path. Even at the very precipice of death, skaven minds were sharp enough and would choose a lingering demise rather than a screaming end at the ravenous claws of the Headtaker’s wrath.

Queek growled inchoate rage. Defeat to a dwarf-thing? It was inconceivable.

Treachery, murmured Ikit Slash. Is the only possibility.

Yes. It surely had nothing to do with his forewarning of the dwarfs. Queek’s army was vast, and they were led by Queek the Undefeated. And he was still undefeated. This one didn’t count. Not when the fault clearly lay with the traitorous incompetence of jealous scheming underlings.

Why did he even trouble himself with such worthless ingrates ?

Azul-Place would be a cindered ruin by now, murmured Ikit Slash. If not for the feeble limits of lesser skaven, Kazador would be happy-safe with us on a spike of his own.

Yes, Queek agreed. It was all his worthless minions’ fault.

Skaven swarmed the narrows of Deadclaw, a thick soup of brown fur and russet rags. He fixed one in his sights; a wiry clanrat with a broken shield and a tarnished silver nose ring. He would be the first.

Go ahead, Krug encouraged. Kill them all.

The massed skaven, sensing the murder in his scent, scurried to flee his path. They clawed at the walls and they clawed at each other. Blood ran in rivers of catharsis as the bodies of the weak dropped to make way for the fleeing shapes of the strong. Queek breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction. Krug was right. He did feel better.

He bounded after them, the passage so dense with warriors that his footpaws never felt bare ground in his pursuit. He ran on a carpet of corpses. Crushed by their stampeding kin they lay three deep in places, forcing him into a four-legged scramble across the warmth of their matted fur.

His whiskers twitched at a subtle alteration in pressure, the minor lessening of staleness that bespoke the tunnel’s widening into a cavern ahead. War drums pounded and their echoes rebounded off the cavern walls, a pulsing thunder in his ears. Taking a firm grip on Dwarf Gouger, he pounced from the charnel passage. He landed on all fours, his maul gouging deeply into the trampled rock. The cavern was vast. Igneous rocks blasted into being in the forges of a younger and hotter world swirled white and brown in contorted patterns, trapped in the agonised throes of their creation. Driven by heat and pressure to ever greater extremes of self-preservation, skaven scampered for the relic lava tubes that led from the primeval chamber.

Even more skaven looked on in confusion, crammed around tinder-dry constructs of baked mud and wood. Faces seemed to swim together, coagulating into a synthesis like the coming together of living fluids from orc and dwarf and skaven. Was it the heat that contorted his vision so or did he suffer from some deeper ailment of the senses? Or was he really confronted by a monstrosity of a hundred petrified eyes and a thousand tearing claws? He stepped back, catching his breath at the sight of such horror. Shaking his muzzle, he blinked away the dreadful vision and the myriad faces settled into distinct shapes. He studied the maul in his paw, surprised to see it and to realise that it was as yet unbloodied, before rehousing it to its clasp on his thigh. The pounding in his ears died down, his recovering senses threatened instead by the shrill screams of the skaven multitudes still struggling for escape.

A number of the skaven already in the cavern attempted to join those who were in flight, but another, dark-furred and massive, restrained them with a snarl rich with the promise of what to expect should they disobey.

Now Queek remembered. He was come to confer with his chieftains. ‘Stupid dwarf-thing,’ he hissed at Krug’s leering skull. ‘Queek has no time to kill-kill all himself.’

The larger skaven broke from the group and jogged towards him.

Queek recognised him. At least he thought he did. But he was convinced he was dead. He recalled blood, murder, White-fur’s treachery, cannon, death roaring like thunder, squeals of agony and piety and terror, armour shards and ropey guts spilled like libations to the Horned Rat’s glory.

Could it be?

‘Ska?’ he hissed, trusting to this new visitation even less than he had to that of the thousand claws.

The hulking stormvermin was unarmoured and bare-chested, garbed in nothing but a ruddy skirt of mud-begrimed wool. His torso was girdled in a stinking wrap of yellow-brown bandages, knotted above the left shoulder and pressed tight over the collar and under the right arm. Skalm and other pungent ameliorators oozed from beneath their tight embrace, congealing amidst the skaven’s coarse fur. Queek’s whiskers recoiled from the thick cloud of menthol and eucalyptus incense that followed the giant fangleader like a malodorous avatar of healing.

‘Why are you here?’ Queek demanded, as Ska dropped his muzzle to an acceptable degree of prostration. ‘Why are you not killing dwarf-things where you are useful?’

Ska cringed, picking nervously at his bandaging. ‘Ska help-saved the great Queek. Do you not remember, most grateful of warlords? Ska was good.’

Now that he thought, he did remember something – a fight in a tunnel, a knife in the chest. A Clan Rictus thug squealing for a mercy he was never going to receive. He preened at the happy recollection, glancing up at his trophies for confirmation. It was no use, however. They had not been there. The memory summoned afresh the pain of Blacktooth’s absence. It reminded him as surely as the orc-thing’s own voice of what he was here for.

‘No. Ska is not good. Stupid-lazy Ska let traitor-meats steal Queek’s victory. It is all Ska’s fault!’

‘It is not his fault,’ another voice insisted. Queek glared up at his trophies, convinced it had been Krug again, but the voice went on, accompanied by the tinkling of discordant chimes. ‘The Great Horned Rat punishes you for your lack of faith. Defeat at the hands of simple-meat dwarf-things is warning from him that you lack his favour. Perhaps you should humble yourself before him by passing leadership to one more worthy, say, his prophet, hmmm?’

Grey Seer Razzel leant forward on his staff, the warpstone effigy of the Dark Under-Father glaring balefully from his wutroth throne. Bells and amulets cascaded from the seer’s horns, jangling discordantly as he moved.

Queek met the sorcerer’s stare. ‘You say it was the Horned Rat that robbed Queek of glory? Queek kill-kill!’

Razzel gaped. ‘What? No!’

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek hissed, eyes burning with a fervour that dwelt in the dark corners left abandoned by piety. He looked from face to face over the assembled ratkin, the leaders of Deadclaw and the strongest of Clan Mors. Where he looked, muzzles dropped and shoulders sagged in supplication.

Only Razzel dared meet him eye to eye and even the grey seer trembled to control the clenching of his glands. ‘Your impiety corrupts us all, and I suffer it only so long.’

Ska stepped in front of his warlord, blocking the sorcerer’s line of sight. He flexed his muscles menacingly and dropped his muzzle in a warning snarl.

Razzel bared his teeth. ‘Apparently I saved your life.’ He shook his horns in mock dismay. ‘Is this how you show gratitude for the Horned One’s clemency?’

Queek eyed the sorcerer warily, keeping the bulk of Ska Bloodtail firmly between himself and danger. He was not so consumed by his own glory that he would risk a blast of warp lightning from a deranged grey seer.

‘You warned the dwarf-things. That is how they were ready for us. I want you to admit before the Horned Rat and all who listen. Admit you did this just so that Queek could try his paw at Kazador-King.’

‘Lies,’ Queek hissed. He turned to address the onlookers. The skaven were huddled well clear, uncertain who to fear more, the mad warlord or the wild-eyed scorcerer-priest. ‘It is not Queek that does this thing. It is Stikslash, White-fur’s own rat.’

Razzel threw up his paws in exasperation. ‘He is mute, you idiot fool. And he was dead.’

‘Is true, he confides in Queek.’

‘Queek-Warlord is mad!’ Razzel shrieked at the top of his lungs, pointing an accusing finger across the charged gulf between them. ‘He listens to dead-things.’

‘Fool-fool White-fur wrong. Queek not hear-listen dead-things.’ He shoved Ska aside to stand before the grey seer unguarded, arms spread invitingly. His voice dropped to a growl. ‘Dead-things listen-hear Queek.’

Razzel gripped his staff in both paws. The idol at its crown began to glow as the sorcerer’s eyes turned dark. Winds unfelt by those who stood by played an evil melody on his unholy chimes. ‘Maybe they squeak-talk more sense when you are together-joined in the Horned One’s damnation, hmmm?’

Where is Fizqwik? Ikit Slash urgently interrupted.

‘Tinker-rat?’ Queek asked.

‘What do you squeak-say now, Mad-Queek? You think a Clan Skryre cog-botherer can save you from me?’ Power flared, a black gift from the bottomless soul of the Horned Rat that erupted about the seer’s ankles, tugging at his robes and blazing from the effigy atop his staff like a beacon of blackness sent from some hell to presage the night.

Queek ignored it.

Where was Tinker-rat? All his other most annoying underlings were present: White-fur, Bloodtail, even Old-thing. The aged skaven had arrived late and exhausted, skulking at the back in the hope that nobody would notice him in the company of a black-cloaked skaven that could only be a hireling from Clan Eshin. He ignored them too. Where was Tinker-rat?

The traitor, Ikit hissed. He tremble-hides from the omnipotence of Queek.

‘Yes-yes!’ Queek yelled, louder even than the grey seer’s sorcerous summoning. ‘Tinker-rat betrays us and now, knowing Queek knows, he hide-cowers from his mighty warlord.’

There was a chittering among the gathered chieftains as they confirmed that the warlock was not present. A look of confusion crossed Razzel’s face. The aurora of power sputtered but was not extinguished. ‘And just how did he betray us?’

But Queek was no longer listening. He spun away, raging at his swaying trophies, and at Ska, for not spotting such flagrant treachery sooner.

‘Come-come, fool-Ska. We teach the punishment for traitor-meat.’

The gathered chieftains blinked unbelievingly, like whelps emerging from their burrows into the light. Razzel himself stood in a state of utter perplexity. He watched as Queek disappeared into one of the lava tubes, still struggling through his mind’s version of what had just transpired as the last dregs of aetheric power fled his paws to the winds of change.

‘What…?’

‘Great Prophet Razzel,’ spoke a voice from behind his back. The tone was submissive, humble, but the seer spun nevertheless, his staff raised in preparedness to brain anyone foolhardy enough to sneak up behind the chosen of the Horned One.

Sharpwit cringed, cradling his muzzle in his paws. ‘I change my mind. Razzel, the most auspicious of apostles, is a far worthier beneficiary of the Council’s favour than stupid-mad Queek-Warlord.’

‘You are too late,’ Razzel snapped. ‘We have not the numbers to threaten Azul-Place now and we will never smell opportunity like we just had.’

‘You forget the bulk of Queek’s horde is still in the City of Pillars, untouched. For once, his foolishness works for us.’ He leaned closer, lowering his voice to a whisper that the other skaven nearby could not hear. ‘And we still have an opportunity. The dwarf-things are already beaten. They just don’t know.’

‘How?’

Sharpwit paused, shooting a suspicious glance at the curious clawleaders. He shared a look with the lurking shape of Fang Dao. ‘Not here, most prudent one. I know a place where none can disturb us. We will speak there of victory.’

CHAPTER NINE

The grim statuary of the Third Deep cast long shadows, flickering like those of a haunted forest by moonlight. The guttering torchlight illuminated luxurious tapestries. They depicted epic battles between dwarf and elf, scenes of triumph from the War of Vengeance. The wan light rendered such fabulous scenes humble and the rich fabrics, picked out in silver filigree and gold brocade, austere. The sound of Thordun’s boots on the cold slabs returned to him threefold. More than once he glanced over his shoulder, convinced he was being followed. It likely didn’t help that he walked halls he shouldn’t but, for him, a locked door had always proven a temptation too great.

He bent to examine the inscription on a statue. The light quivered, straining his eyes and dappling the delicate carving with shadow. Cursing, he removed one of the flaming brands from its sconce. The nearness of its heat brought a dampness to his forehead and infused his sweating beard with the smoky scent of burning cedar. He lowered the torch to better make out the words.

Kazgar. King of Karak Azul.

This was Kazador’s father. The statue was greater than life size, slightly taller than a man and of correspondingly magnified girth. His features were stern, cold. Thordun could see the resemblance.

Burning torch in hand, he picked his way further down the passageway. At first the crackling flame at his ear was a welcome distraction from the soulless echoes of his own footfalls, but the spectre of his own imaginings made him nervous. His backward glances redoubled in urgency and his pace quickened.

He cursed himself for a fool, helpless before a sealed treasure as a moth to a flame. Could he not pass his final nights in the place of his father’s birth without finding trouble? To him, the compulsion was akin to gold fever, that peculiarly dwarfish malady that could render insensible the most staid of longbeards, and his fingers had worked of their own accord. He had expected the king’s chambers to be blessed with doughtier locks, but that did not lessen the pride he felt in their breaking.

He suspected this was how his father had felt as he entered Kazador’s treasury all those years ago; the wild pulse of danger, the thrill of accomplishment. Would the old dwarf be proud of Thordun now? Did he look on with a drunken glow from the warmth of the Ancestors’ Hall? Thordun frowned. It was one matter to pledge a thing, quite another to ascertain whether it had been accomplished.

He paused in his reverie. He could have sworn he had heard something. In the city, he might have mistaken it for a gust of wind or a distant bird. But here, in the heart of the mountain? He pressed an ear to the wall. It seemed to shudder and moan, as if the stone itself were in pain.

Suddenly a scream tore through the silence of the passage. Thordun leapt from the wall. His heart thumped, pulse pounding at his temples like a madman against the walls of his gaol cell. He stepped back warily, watching the wall as though expecting it to come to life. The scream sounded again, this time breaking into a laugh of such unrepentant mania that Thordun felt unmanned simply to hear it. It came in short barks, each wilder and more disturbing than the last, ringing from every statue and column as though it truly was the madness of the mountain he heard.

As abruptly as it had begun, the laughter ceased, leaving Thordun alone but for his own breaths. With an effort he gathered himself, calming his heaving chest and willing his heart to follow suit. He edged further on, uncertain why he desired to know what or who it was that suffered so, except perhaps to dispel the frightful visions conjured in his own mind: nightmares of wraiths and daemons and the restless spirits of dishonoured dawi denied the succour of the Ancestors’ Hall.

He heard weeping now, deep ragged sobs that bespoke an anguish so deep it didn’t care who knew, or know who cared. The fact that none did but a dwarf who trod where he should not made it only more tragic. After a time the weeping ceased, bitten off by a brutish, almost orcish, howl of fury and the crunch of splintered wood that repeated over and over until its wooden component disappeared altogether and all that remained was naked rage and a thumping reminiscent of bloodied fists on bare rock. Distracted by the pain of that hidden soul, Thordun had unconsciously traversed the passage to its end when the sobbing ceased. His palms brushed solid rock.

He leapt back, startled, as the wall shuddered, something heavy smashing as if from the other side. A secret door. His fingers twitched for his tools as though they were the master and his conscious mind the appendage. Taking a slender copper rod and a small mallet from his tool belt, he pressed his beard to the rune-hidden doorway and set to work.

Sharpwit paced the perimeter of the grime-shrouded antechamber. He trod delicately, careful not to disturb a single mote of dust, sniffing with wary suspicion at every cobweb and forgotten furnishing. A set of high-backed chairs had been pushed against one wall and covered with mouldering throws that were themselves covered with a layer of moth eggs and grime. The skeletal frame of a table descended into slow decay in the centre of the room.

‘You make me nervous, Sharpwit,’ Razzel complained. The grey seer kept to one corner, the better to scrutinise the entire room. He tinkled mildly, the faintest of breezes from Sharpwit’s secret passage, now concealed anew, sufficent to give muted voice to his chimes.

‘Dwarf-things do not use this place. Sealed since… since long ago. Yet the Horned Rat watches over those that watch their own backs.’

‘And stick-stab knife in backs of skaven as do not,’ Razzel snarled. ‘I read-learn the teachings of the Horned One, old-meat.’

Sharpwit bowed with a mock flourish. ‘Forgive this most humble servant of the Council.’

‘Not so humble, I think, hmmm?’

Sharpwit merely grinned, his fangs glowering like the face of the Chaos moon.

‘What you try-think you find?’

Sharpwit frowned, pressing his ear to the wall and rapping experimentally on the stone with his claws. ‘Think-certain I heard a noise. Dwarf-things do come this way sometimes. Replace torches. Ensure all is safe-well.’

‘Why, if they never use?’

‘They keep-hide something in these halls. A precious thing, but broken. Something Kazador values more highly than gold.’

‘Gold,’ Razzel tittered dismissively. ‘True-sure sign of dwarf-thing stupidity.’

Satisfied that they were secure, Sharpwit swung around. ‘I grow tired-bored of telling you experts, but dwarf-things win because Queek underestimates them. I do not. Look-smell where we are, see what dwarf-things build. Different, yes-yes, but not stupid.’

Razzel did as Sharpwit suggested and looked. He took in the faded hangings, the table laid out beneath a sheet of dust. His keen ears caught the tiny patter of a cockroach scuttling from hiding. He returned his attention to Sharpwit, unimpressed. ‘This a royal chamber once, hmmm? Decay is king here now. When the Horned Rat visits ruination upon the heads of the dwarf-things and make-render all they build like this, will Sharpwit rejoice like a true child of darkness, or will he cry like a man-thing whelp at his glorious work?’

Sharpwit cringed, consciously placing the table between the grey seer and himself. ‘I serve truly. But do you not wonder what skaven will do and how skaven will eat when those that farm and build and throw away are gone? I do. I wonder.’

Razzel bluntly ignored him, continuing to look around with a faint air of disgust. ‘Why are we in this hole-place? There plenty-many quiet places in Deadclaw.’

Sharpwit’s tail lashed as he thought of the answer to that question, disturbing the carpet of dust he had been so careful to leave be. Queek. He coughed hard, spattering his balding paw with blood. Still coughing, his ribs brittle bars to imprison his pain, he inhaled deeply through the silk filter of his sleeve. All the while he glared at Razzel, annoyed by his comfortable smugness.

‘Like your burrow? Queek finds us there. He should not, but he did. How? I don’t want-think to know. Queek is mad-thing, but he knows things…’

‘Hah,’ Razzel scoffed. ‘Sharpwit is a scared-rat.’

Sharpwit toyed with confronting the seer with his own so-called courage. He hadn’t forgotten Razzel’s absence from the battle. Perhaps if the grey seer could have prevented that blasted runemaker from wreaking such havoc they might even have won. He swallowed the urge. Razzel would have his excuses ready, and it would achieve nothing. Sharpwit knew how the great game was played and, much as he despised it, he played it better than most. A skaven did not live as long as he if he did not.

‘Then why is Queek not already dead if the mighty Razzel does not fear him?’ Razzel chewed his lip, his silence testimony enough to the truth, and Sharpwit went on. ‘He know-learns the name of your bodyguard when even we did not.’

‘Maybe he makes up.’

‘Maybe,’ he relented. ‘But how then did he find us? And other things too. Little things. He is mad-thing, for certain, but perhaps he is so far past madness that he looks back and from such distance he see things all laid out, hidden things, things lost under the noses of those too close.’

‘The Horned Rat, he gift-gives such visions to his prophets, not to mad-thing warlords.’

Sharpwit scratched his ear anxiously. He was yet to be entirely convinced that Queek would not somehow find them even here. ‘We agree though he is a mad-thing. That it is time to think about completing the task set us without Queek.’

Razzel nodded to the accompaniment of discordant music. The seer tightened his grip on his dark wood staff, his eyes distant and unseeing as they conjured dreams of power. ‘Old-thing should have listened before. Razzel knew this would happen. The Horned Rat, he squeak-tells truths to his chosen.’

Sharpwit spread his open paws. ‘Queek is a mighty war-leader, paw-picked by Gnawdwell to lead.’ He regarded the grey seer carefully. ‘Did you know-hear of how Queek crushed Warlord Slash and the traitor-rats of Fester Spike?’

Razzel shook his head.

‘Queek-Warlord spent great-many days burrowing tunnels all under the lair to attack at once from many sides.’

‘Simple plan,’ Razzel scoffed.

‘Might seem so, yes-yes. Ikit Slash thought so. He sent warriors to guard every one because Queek made certain he learned of them. You know why?’

Razzel leant forward dangerously onto his staff. ‘Because he is a stupid mad-thing.’

‘They were decoys. Queek comes through one tunnel only, himself, in frontal assault with his strongest warriors.’

Razzel looked aghast. ‘He led himself? Like common slave-meat?’

‘Slash’s warriors were spread thin and killed-dead piecemeal. He kill-slay Slash himself and keep-take as trophy-meat. Then he crashes the place to the ground. He take-smash everything. Even,’ and here he paused, ensuring the seer was fully attentive before continuing, ‘toppling idol of the Horned Rat. And then he beheads it. Dead-dead.’ He mimed the action with a downward sweep of his crutch.

The grey seer’s mouth hung open like a griffon chick awaiting feeding. Eventually he gathered enough wit to speak. ‘How is such heretic heathen-meat allowed to live, much less to lead a glorious army in the Horned Rat’s name? This quest is cursed to fail-die so long as Queek is warlord.’

Sharpwit grinned as the grey seer spun away, paws clenching and unclenching at his side as they itched to exact pious vengeance. Razzel was a coward, but he just needed the proper levers pulling. It hardly mattered that it was all without a scrap of truth. It was the sort of thing Queek might have done, and truth really was whatever the beholder wished it to be.

‘Then there is the time he feuds with Grey Seer Thanquol…’

‘I hear enough. Queek is clearly unfit.’

‘As you say, most sagacious of seers.’

‘We destroy Queek!’ Razzel squealed. The warpstone idol atop his staff began to throb as the sorcerer worked himself into a zealous fury. Its dark glow traced shifting shadows between the cobwebs, scratching at the walls like the claws of the Horned Rat, burrowing from the bowels of the earth to embrace his wayward children.

‘And what will the Council say?’ Sharpwit interceded. ‘What will Gnawdwell do? He raises Queek high and treats him like a precious thing.’ Razzel paused in thought and Sharpwit went on. ‘No. First give the Council their prize. First we cripple Azul-Place, and then get rid of Queek. There are lots-many ways for crazy-meat warlords to perish without bloodying our paws.’

‘But Queek is a problem. We will not succeed as long as he lives.’

Sharpwit tittered, edging around the table towards Razzel, bobbing obsequiously as he shuffled closer. ‘Queek thinks he is in charge, but it will be the most shrewd of sorcerers, Razzel, who pulls strings and claims glory.’

Razzel preened, scratching the unholy brand on his face with the horns of his warpstone idol. ‘How do we do this thing?’

Sharpwit grinned slyly. ‘You did not ask what mighty treasure Kazador hides here. Kazador is a broken king, weak in heart, and we skaven, we like to kill-stab where our enemies are weak. Kazador will gift-give the wealth of Azul-Place to me.’ He held out his paw, the pale flesh wrinkled and old. ‘He will place it here in Sharpwit’s paw.’

‘Tell me how!’

Sharpwit froze as he made to answer. This time he had definitely heard something. Again, he pressed his ear to the wall and listened. It sounded like footsteps. It would help if the idiot grey seer could stop jangling like a one-skaven bell-ringing troupe and be quiet. He turned back to Razzel, nothing but eagerness to please. ‘Leave the details to me, most prodigious of prophets. You must return to Deadclaw. None will miss a tired old-thing, but the loss of your peerless leadership will be noted.’

Razzel nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes-yes. I imagine it will. Come speak-squeak with me when all is done. We plot-plan what must come next.’

‘I keenly anticipate your insights, most subtle of schemers.’

He suppressed a sigh of longing. Razzel might be a one-dimensional moron, but for now he was his moron. That wasn’t to say there wouldn’t come a time in the hopefully-not-too-distant future when he outlived his value. The thought made him feel warm inside. It made the insufferable genuflecting almost bearable. He sought out the pressure pads behind one of the hangings and the hidden door glided outwards. Razzel departed with an imperious sweep of his robes, and Sharpwit quietly pulled closed the door and heard it click into place. He leant back against it and breathed a sigh of relief.

He snickered softly. ‘Fool-fool.’

Hobbling around the table back to the opposite wall, he flattened his better ear against it. He tried to still his breathing. It was definitely footsteps. Two pairs in fact, with a heavy tread. And he could hear gruff voices, although they were too muffled for him to make out their words.

Perfect, he thought, as he swiftly sought out the mechanism to the chamber’s second concealed door.

He always had been a lucky rat.

Handrik wandered the halls alone. A sombre mood had settled over the corridors of Karak Azul. He recalled victories from ages past. The carousing would stretch well into the following morning, and Handrik would have been hard pressed to find a passage not occupied by cherry-faced dwarfs intent on drinking the great hold dry.

His fondest such instance had been two hundred years ago, after King Kazgar had crushed a Black Orc warlord on the plains of Zharr. It had been one of the last actions of the Great War, and the throng had returned to a heroes’ welcome. Handrik had been among the eldest left behind. Half of the hold’s Ironbreakers had departed for the war in the north, the oldest and the best but for himself. He hadn’t earned his command; it had been foisted on him, like a chain around a guard dog’s neck. Kazador had been but a beardling, but already a strong lad, and mighty had been the tantrum he’d thrown when the king bade him remain under Handrik’s regency rather than join him in war. Handrik had been enamoured with it still less, but was not nearly so sparse on the chin to let it show.

Kazgar was ultimately proven right, as he almost always was, and their victorious return would swift become the stuff of legend.

Kazador had been pursued from the gates by his Hammerer guard, their blushes as much from the shame of allowing their charge from their sights as from the effort of pursuit. For the prince who would be king was ever the peerless athlete, with an uncommon fleetness of foot even when gleaming from head to foot in gromril. He had shone in the sun of the new day, a beacon of hope that shone all the brighter for the defeat of the Ruinous Powers. Handrik still recalled the young dwarf’s indecision, uncertain who to embrace first: Handrik, or his father. The memory gladdened him even now. He had never married, never considered marrying. But had he ever had a son, or indeed a daughter, of his own, he could have loved them no more deeply.

Such had been the occasion’s joy that the celebrations had taken place right there in the valley beneath the naked sun and, later, the stars. And then the sun again. Roast boar and warm ale had been carted up from the kitchens with huge platters of vegetables and sweet breads all laid out on the bare earth where kings and thanes mingled freely with potboys and goatherds. Kazador himself out-drank and out-competed all comers and did it with the broadest of smiles that bespoke no triumphalism. During the impromptu feast, the famous Karak Azul miners’ brass band set up amidst great anticipation and played through to midnight, the peaks resounding to the joyous blasts of horns and trumpets, and there had been as much dancing and singing as there had been hard drinking.

Handrik sighed deeply. This time there was no such sense of triumph. Only in Karak Azul could victory taste so bitterly of defeat. They had crushed a skaven force many times their own number, but it was a battle no one wanted. The victory was a token one. One that brought the purging of Black Crag no closer.

And then there was Logan.

Handrik missed him already, more than he thought he would. Whatever Kazador’s decree, Handrik knew Logan’s death was his own fault – because of his own stubbornness. In the hours after the battle he had considered shaving his head and swearing the Slayer Oath, but had immediately dismissed the idea as laughable. Who ever heard of one of the cult of Grimnir who could scarce walk, much less pick a fight? Some glorious end that would be.

He would have to find some other way to atone. He simply did not know how.

Without any further guidance to the contrary, his feet bore him on.

He looked up from his memories as a door swung open. One of the ancient carved oak portals stylistically banded with gold and gromril that led to Kazador’s own rooms. Handrik checked his steps. Maybe whoever it was would turn the other way and miss him. He desired nothing but solitude.

A pair of Hammerers emerged from the open doorway. Keldur and Narfi were their names and he knew them well. They were brothers, inseparable since birth and strong warriors, although he still saw in them the fearless beardlings he had once known. Their mighty weapons were strapped across their backs, and between them they dragged a struggling figure across the lacquered flagstones.

Handrik got a good look. ‘Merciful Valaya,’ he mouthed, breaking into a trot to intercept the guards and their prisoner.

The dwarfs looked over up over their shoulders at Handrik’s approach. Both offered a respectful nod without letting go of their captive. ‘Longbeard,’ they intoned in unison.

Handrik shook his head disapprovingly at the dishevelled young dwarf in his scuffed breeches and jerkin that sat on his behind between the two Hammerers.

Thordun looked up and offered a nervous smile, evidently none too reassured by the sight of this particular familiar face. ‘I didn’t steal anything, I swear it.’

Handrik forced a smile he did not feel. ‘This one’s with me, lads.’ He offered a helpless shrug. ‘Thordred’s boy.’

The revelation elicited smiles. Narfi, ever the more avuncular, broke into a chuckle. His mail vest rustled against his ample girth. ‘Well there’s a name I’ve not heard in a good while.’ He offered Thordun his hand, which the younger dwarf took, and hauled him to his feet. ‘The ore hasn’t fallen far from the seam, eh? You’ve inherited the old Locksplitter sticky fingers.’

Keldur, broader and less well padded than his younger sibling, soon gave up the pretence of appearing stern. His auburn beard parted into a grin and he jabbed Thordun with a comradely elbow in the ribs. ‘Has Handrik told you of the time we caught your father in the king’s vault?’

‘He didn’t try to deny it,’ Narfi added. ‘But then being neck deep in the king’s gold would’ve taken some explaining.’

‘A terrible liar your father. Always an honest dawi.’

The chuckling Hammerers shared a look and their mirth dried up. Their heads shook sadly. ‘Happier times.’

‘Aye,’ Handrik agreed. ‘That they were.’

Keldur held Thordun’s shoulder with a fist like a ham. There was no amusement in his eyes now and he regarded the young dwarf with steel. ‘Stay away from these corridors, beardling. For Handrik, and for Thordred, we’ll let this pass just one time.’ He turned to his brother for confirmation. The other dwarf simply nodded. ‘If Kazador were to hear you’d been here…’ He trailed off.

There was no need to continue. Handrik could see in Thordun’s face that he realised the consequences, a fate worse than any but the most sadistic of kings might devise. He really does want to be accepted here, Handrik realised, surprised and more than a little ashamed to have doubted it. His heart broke a little to see the young dwarf’s distress, but the most important lessons were ever the hardest.

‘Chin up, lad. No harm done.’

Gently, he eased the beardling on his way. The Hammerers bowed as he passed. He swore silently as he returned their farewells. He resented their pity, no less than he wished to shun their ill-placed respect. He warranted neither.

‘Best get you back to your own quarters where you can’t find trouble,’ he said after he and Thordun had walked some distance in silence.

‘Who is in there, Handrik?’ Thordun blurted the question, tactless as usual. ‘Who does Kazador keep imprisoned there?’

Handrik studied the face of the young dwarf of the Empire. Could he understand? Was the lad dawi enough for that?

‘He’s nobody’s prisoner, lad.’

‘Then why–’

‘It’s Prince Kazrik, damn it!’ Handrik roared. He winced as he realised how loud he’d shouted. He rubbed the back of his hand across his lips as though the words could be scrubbed away in retrospect. ‘It’s the king’s son,’ he hissed.

‘The prince,’ Thordun gasped. ‘Then why? I heard his screams. It sounded like torture.’

Handrik scrunched his eyes tight. If Kazgar’s return from the north had been the happiest moment in Handrik’s long life then the most ignoble was recalled with equal, if less welcome, clarity; right down to the stink of blood and excrement and foul orcish corpses that had somehow absorbed into the stones of Karak Azul to endure to this day. Something had broken in the king that day. His heir and only son brutalised upon his own throne, shaven and nailed into the iron. A challenge from the squatter king of Karak Drazh wrought in Kazador’s own blood.

‘Aye,’ he whispered, opening his eyes. ‘Prince Zaki, I’ve heard him called. Clever wordplay, eh?’

‘Zaki… but doesn’t that mean–’

‘Mad. Aye lad, and Kazrik is mad. He’s tough as his father and stubborn as his grandfather. He should rightfully have perished that day, but no dwarf could endure what he did and not suffer… scars.’

‘Can he not be helped?’

‘You think we didn’t try? You think Kazador’s heart is stone? We dwarfs are hardy, lad, but some wounds even we can’t abide.’ Handrik stiffened. The truth cut a little too close to the bone. ‘He’s kept away as much for his own safety as for Kazador’s pride.’

‘The king’s pride–’

‘Is everything! If you can’t accept that, then I suggest you not return from your journey to Karaz-a-Karak. And I wouldn’t tarry overlong either, for Thorgrim Grudgebearer is a very proud king.’

Thordun looked at his feet, suitably chastened. ‘I understand.’ He seemed to notice for the first time that they’d stopped walking. He looked up and examined the door they stood beside. The sounds of drunken revelry filtered through the sturdy wood. His face dropped at the strains of a bawdy Bretonnian drinking song. ‘We’re here,’ he observed sadly.

‘Aye, and I suggest you stay here if you know what’s good for you.’

Thordun opened the door a fraction, a warm glow slicing across his golden beard. The boisterous clamour escalated in volume. He spun around, just as Handrik made to leave. ‘Handrik, why did my father leave Karak Azul?’

Handrik answered with a shrug. ‘You never knew your mother, did you? Let’s just say a dwarf doesn’t have it in him to forget. But that’s not to stop him trying.’ He gave a sad sigh and cocked his head towards the door. ‘Get some sleep. If you can. Grungni alone knows what the umgi have done to earn such celebration.’

‘I will try.’

‘The road to the Eight Peaks is short but perilous.’

‘I’ll be careful Handrik, and thank you.’

‘For what?’

Now it was Thordun’s turn to be embarrassed. ‘After the battle I… I thought I had offended you somehow. I would not have expected you to help me.’ He smiled and bowed once before leaving, easing the door closed behind him.

Handrik grumbled as the dwarf vanished into his quarters, muttering under his breath at the strange ways of the young. Dwarfs had never used to have such bleeding hearts.

A prickling at the nape of his neck bade him turn. Three centuries immersed in the forsaken places of the Underdeep had honed an intuition that only an Ironbreaker could understand. His gaze swept the corridor, scrutinising every crack and cranny. It was possible he had heard another dwarf, perhaps even the Hammerers continuing their patrol. This area of the Third Deep was well frequented. But a dwarf wandering his own halls would not go to such lengths to remain unnoticed.

There was nothing there. And yet he felt the attentions of another.

Deciding that something trying to hide wasn’t about to reveal itself with Handrik looking right at it, he turned and shuffled for his own bed. The prickling unease lessened as he walked and he relented that his disquiet must have been misplaced. Evidently, his vaunted intuition wasn’t what it used to be.

‘Grimnir take you then,’ he muttered.

It was high time that Handrik Hallgakrin hang up his axe.

Sharpwit sank into the shadow of an alcove, hidden from prying eyes by the imposing thighs of a dwarf-thing breeder-queen. He sat with his back to the statue, tail coiled around his waist and crutches set stacked over his crossed legs.

He still buzzed with the residual charge of power, his blood singing with the electric thrill of it. It was all so brazenly unfair. He had been and would be a far better warlord; instead his brief rise and public fall had made him fair game, every glance from all but the lowest of slaves accompanied by a calculated licking of covetous lips. For all his treacherous words to Razzel, he needed Queek. Fear of the Headtaker rather than of the Council had spared his hide so far and he needed that protection back, however unwittingly or begrudgingly it was bestowed.

He listened quietly as the long-furred dwarf-thing departed, rubbing his paws together in delight of his own irresistible genius. The ancient dwarf-thing was never going to spot him behind the statue. Sharpwit, on the other paw, could smell the old sweat on his goat wool undergarments, the ale on his breath and even the lingering trace of wax from the gold-furred dwarf-thing’s cloak. Truly, he was the luckiest of rats. And while he was old enough to appreciate the notion that it was better to be lucky than good, a fair dose of brilliance never went amiss. Sometimes, he supposed, it helped to be lucky and good.

For who else but Sharpwit would have dared to shadow such fearsome dwarf-thing warriors as the two hammer-dwarfs? Padding silently in their footsteps, he had heard them stumble upon the younger, gold-furred dwarf-thing at the mad prince’s cell. He had considered and swiftly abandoned the idea of co-opting Kazrik into his scheme. He had suffered quite enough of mad-things. And besides, even a dwarf-thing as unhinged as Kazrik would likely tear Sharpwit’s head from his shoulders before he could open his mouth. A lesser skaven mind might have abandoned his fruitless quest there. But Sharpwit knew himself to be a skaven of rare insight and purpose. Who else, besides Sharpwit, would have been clever enough to follow the gold-furred dwarf-thing to his burrow? True, he hadn’t known exactly what he was looking for, but he knew a skaven of his perceptiveness would recognise it when it fell into his paws.

And it had. And he did. Man-things.

He had had few dealings with the tall furless race that tilled the fields of the surface world, but from his general gleanings, he understood them to be the closest among all the world’s races to emulating the purest majesty of the skaven. Such notions were deeply heretical, but dogmatic principle was something else for which Sharpwit had little time. Particularly as it was plainly true, at least to anyone able to recognise the man-thing capacity for self-interest, treachery and deceit. Such concepts he could understand. And exploit.

His keen ears twitched to the unfamiliar syllables of their speech. He estimated between five and ten man-things. Eventually one of them must leave.

All he had to do was wait.

‘This is the tinker-place?’

‘Yes-yes, most vengeful of victors,’ said Ska, following his warlord into the booming underbelly of the Clan Skryre foundry.

The air was thick with fumes and stifling in a way that even the aridity of Deadclaw had not prepared them for. The heat pawed at him, abasing itself at his all-conquering footpaws. Little shapes scurried through the cloying cloud. From vats suspended just above head height between iron pylons erupted silvery jets of molten steel, the eructations throwing off great bodies of steam that turned titanic wheels. It was this that caused the numbing din. Queek was fascinated despite himself, that something so insubstantial could generate force enough to drive something so huge as the great chain of toothed wheels that traversed the ceiling.

‘What is all this?’ Queek asked, perplexed. ‘What is it for?’

‘I do not know, most mighty warlord.’

‘Pull it down,’ Queek ordered, making a ripping gesture as though he might rend iron with his own claws. ‘Tear-smash all. That teaches Tinker-rat to betray, yes-yes.’

Ska eyed the nearest such engine-pylon dubiously. It was five times his height, wrought of iron and who knew what else, and likely hot enough to sear the fur from an incautious skaven’s hide. ‘Maybe just pull down one?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Maybe just part way?’

‘Where is Tinker-rat?’ Queek asked, deaf to his lackey’s whining. He stabbed a claw at a hurrying shape. The target of his attention was a runtish creature with bright orange eyes, enwrapped in oversized leather overalls and cumbersome flame-retardant gloves. He squealed, releasing a squirt of fear musk, and hastened to abase himself at the footpaws of the Headtaker.

‘Where is Tinker-rat?’

The wiry skaven gawped, horrified. His eyes were blank of anything but reflected dread.

Ska prodded him with the haft of his axe. ‘What is your name-scent, Skryre-thing?’

‘No,’ Queek cut in. ‘Queek does not care. Where is Tinker-rat?’

‘Fizqwik?’

‘Where is he? Perhaps runt-thing hides him, perhaps he and Tinker-rat share in their plotting.’

‘No-no,’ the runt squealed, trying to wriggle even deeper into the soil at Queek’s footpaws. ‘Was all Fizqwik’s doing! He take-steals everything for fool-fool invention, even from dwarf-things, even when the old-thing tells him stop.’ The warlock unholstered his warplock pistol and passed it butt first to the warlord. Queek sniffed it warily but didn’t take it. The little-tinker jiggled it under his nose until it became apparent Queek was not going to take it. ‘See how light it is? Is hollow. Fizqwik steals even from his own hard-working and loyal apprentices.’ He looked around bitterly, pointing out the slag heaps littered with corroded gun barrels and engine parts. ‘Nothing here works.’

‘What does Tinker-rat build?’

‘I don’t know. He keeps it boxed and works on it only when nobody looks.’

‘Get out, runt-thing. You serve Queek good-well.’

The skaven’s skinny muzzle lit up and he scrabbled to his footpaws, hunching his body into the most wretched display of unworthiness. He scurried for the exit, spinning about to offer a last swift bow only to trip over a pipe and plunge loudly into a pile of scrap.

‘Ska!’ Queek yelled over the desperate clatter of displaced metal parts.

‘Yes-yes, mighty Queek.’

‘Step away from stupid wheel-thing. You are never where Queek needs you.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Ska, looking relieved.

‘Follow runt-thing and let none other leave.’ Queek turned to face the smog-ridden blackness of the foundry. He interlocked his claws and pushed them apart, hearing his knuckles crack. ‘I find Tinker-rat.’

It had been over long since he had killed something. And Tinker-rat was bound to be in here somewhere.

CHAPTER TEN

Bernard Servat knuckled the crick from his neck. The great gate to the Throne Hall of Karak Azul was a grand sight to be sure and it was hard to not be impressed. The lords of Bretonnia went to extravagant lengths to inspire such awe without ever approaching a shadow of the monolithic constructions he had witnessed under the earth, far beneath the sight of men. The Ninth Deep fortifications alone made Chateau Brionne look like the hill fort of some mountain tribe savage.

He wished some of those perfumed lords could be here to see this.

The door alone was immense. The richly scented red pine was engraved with blockish dwarfish runes. The runes were embellished with gold paint and each row of script was offset from the next by heavy bands of iron polished to a high shine and interleaved with threads of gold into rigid, angular motifs. Bernard wondered how much gold was in this one door. Probably enough to buy himself a modest duchy. It glittered in the light of dozens of flickering torches, held immobile in the fists of the statues that lined the approach.

The casual display of wealth rankled. He wondered where the famed King Kazador concealed the serfs that built such wonders for him. Every kingdom depended on the dullards that kept its cellars full and their knees bent to their betters. Two weeks in Nuln had soon soured the dream that the Empire, or anywhere, was any different from his homeland. You were weak or you were strong, and the weak seldom enjoyed such grandeur.

But it was still hard not to be impressed.

A short line stretched behind him, the dwarfs grumbling softly in their flinty tongue. Some had brought ale and bided the wait with a tankard moistening their lips. Towards the back of the line, a scruffy dwarf with the look of a goatherd was being upbraided by a hook-nosed official with a long beard plaited through silver clasps. Despite the language barrier, Bernard found the exchange diverting enough. The nearby dwarfs shook their heads disapprovingly as the disagreement rumbled on, the bureaucrat evidently objecting to the newcomer tethering his mule to the leg of one of the statues.

He turned to the two Hammerers that stood watch on the gate. The grim-faced soldiers barely reached his chest, but they were broader than he and muscled like oxen. He rubbed the bruised knuckles of his right hand ruefully. An ill-advised arm wrestle with a dwarf miner in the alcohol-hazed aftermath of yesterday’s battle was testament to the brute power in those squat bodies.

‘How much longer?’

The two dwarfs looked up at him, mirror images of disdain.

‘Kazador won’t be rushed,’ grunted one.

He stared coldly at the dwarf, recalling every feature. His eyes were icy green and sombre, grim lines chiselled into a scarred face half-concealed by a thick brown beard that spilled down his broad chest in two plaits that were knotted behind his waist. A huge hammer was strapped across his shoulders. The head had been rouged, like a careless lady’s lips, the blood of ages polished ever deeper into the ancient metal. The dwarf stared back, unmoved and unrepentant.

The great door creaked open and the moment was broken. A dwarf in the austerely cut green robes of a journeyman lorekeeper squeezed his belly through the opening, carefully guiding a piled stack of tomes between hands and chin. He mumbled something incomprehensible to the Hammerer guards and made an expansive gesture with his eyebrows before hurrying off on his own errand.

The green-eyed dwarf jerked his thumb towards the open door. ‘In you go then, human.’

Sharpwit hobbled nervously into Queek’s burrow. The place was no less disturbing on a second visit. The scent of death was almost overpowering and his eyes gravitated of their own volition to where Toskitt’s corpse still lay. Twinkling eyes followed him hungrily, and he contrived to ignore the murderous chittering of rats with a taste for skaven meat. Insects marched in ordered columns across the gore-strewn floor, bearing aloft their scraps of flesh, but even their basic impulses steered them well clear of the Headtaker.

Queek lay flat along the floor, muzzle resting on his crossed arms, and watched the industrious insects, enraptured. He had shed his armour and lay naked, any modesty the feral creature might have possessed evidently satisfied by the thorough smearing of gore that pasted him from nose to tail.

‘Old-thing,’ Queek hissed dreamily. He did not look up. ‘You would not believe the wicked things this traitor-rat whispers.’

Sharpwit shrank back. How could the warlord even know it was him? He doubted Queek could smell a thing the way his snout was clotted with gore. His cloudy eye flicked left and right to where the skull of a dwarf and a skaven seemed to follow his every move.

Surely not.

A rat appeared from the dwarf’s eye socket and regarded him with a wary, alien intellect. He tightened his grip on his crutch to keep from striking it. If Razzel wanted so badly to know what was going on, he should have come himself rather than hide in the tunnel and send Sharpwit alone.

‘Toskitt squeaks seditious lies–’

‘Shhh.’ Queek raised a claw to bid him silent. ‘Traitor-meat is not finished.’

‘But, mighty Queek. I bring a plan to pick victory from the carcass of this defeat.’

Queek reached forward languorously. His paw hovered over the streaming insects before flashing down with impossible speed. He raised his paw and studied the helpless creature skewered upon his claw. A beetle the size of Sharpwit’s thumb scurried with impotent haste.

‘Queek is the Undefeated. He is the Terrible.’

‘Yes-yes, great Queek. It was all Fizqwik’s doing. But despite his treachery, we have a mission to accomplish.’

‘What then is Old-thing’s clever plot-scheme?’

‘I suggest a different way, a way less vulnerable to the many jealous rivals of mighty-great Queek. We can weaken Azul-Place without swinging another sword.’

Queek popped the struggling insect into his mouth and rolled into a crouch. His serpentine tail wavered threateningly above his head. ‘Queek’s sword likes being swung.’

Sharpwit waved his paws placatingly. ‘I have an agent in Azul-Place, a man-thing. He will bring us this prize.’

Queek leant forward until his muzzle, even in his crouch, was inches from Sharpwit’s. He flexed his claws and Sharpwit could not mistake the deadliness of his intent should he answer Queek’s next question incorrectly.

‘Does he kill-slay Kazador-King?’

Bernard started for the open door but the immovable bulk of the Hammerer barred his path.

‘Your weapon, human.’

Bernard glanced at the thick chain coiled about his left shoulder. The spike-studded head of his morning star lay cosseted against his back, enwrapped in half a dozen folds of an old fleece shawl.

‘I took your king’s coin. I can bear arms where I please.’

‘We wouldn’t allow a king before Kazador so armed. Either drop it or take your petition elsewhere.’

‘Fine,’ said Bernard, sliding the coiled chain from his arm and dropping it noisily at the dwarf’s feet. The guard made no move to pick it up.

‘And the rest.’

Cursing ripely in his mother tongue, Bernard unbuckled his belt, tossing it and the sheathed short sword on top of his flail.

Still the Hammerer would not move. The old dwarf’s face betrayed nothing but profound disapproval. His dour gaze flickered over the line at Bernard’s back.

‘We can wait all day, human.’

Bernard growled, raising his knee to plant his boot against the wall. The second Hammerer winced. He ignored it, withdrawing a set of three throwing knives and adding them to the pile.

‘Are you happy now?’

The guard smiled grimly and stepped aside.

‘Happy? This is Karak Azul.’

‘No-no,’ Sharpwit insisted. ‘Man-thing is not there to kill-kill. Kazador is the mightiest of dwarf-things. It would take a warrior of Queek’s unrivalled deadliness to defeat him.’

Queek preened. ‘And Kazador will say, “Here is Queek, see-smell his greatness,“ and all skaven will tremble like Old-thing.’

Sharpwit clamped his jaw to keep his fangs from chattering. He was a proud skaven, his accomplishments were legion, but there was something about Queek that terrified him, made him want to cast aside his crutches and limp back to Skavenblight to throw himself on Clanlord Gnawdwell’s merciless sympathy. Anything but spend another moment in the company of the Headtaker.

‘Long ago, Kazador built a trap for himself, a cage of promises and words. The man-thing is the bait that will see the dwarf-king step inside it.’

Queek sat back, thoughtfully scratching blood from his ear. Mad as he was, no skaven could resist a victory achieved by cunning. It appealed to the superior ratkin intellect.

‘Then how? What could a simple man-thing say to bring down Azul-Place?’

Sharpwit grinned. His fangs pulsed dully. ‘A most clever question, oh wise warlord.’

Bernard marched into the Throne Hall, flanked on each side by an expressionless Hammerer garbed in gleaming helmet and mail. Gigantic statues loomed majestic. More than once his steps faltered, and he was forced to drag back his gaze to focus on the task of placing one foot before the other. The limestone flags were strewn with the pelts of mountain lions and bears. Bernard stepped over them where possible, unsure whether doing otherwise might be seen as disrespectful.

If the vestibule had been a sight to inspire reverence, the Throne Hall itself was fit for the abode of a god. And well-deserving of his own place among that pantheon of ancestors was Kazador himself. His great iron throne was the focus of the room, the point upon which the assembled deities of stone directed their notice. It stood tall upon a marble dais, its hard edges in stark contrast to the opulence that surrounded it. Kazador was a fitting resident for such a grim piece of furniture. His brow was harder than the iron upon which he sat, his expression darker than the lightless deeps.

Two iron grips on each shoulder stopped Bernard just shy of the dais and he lowered himself to his knees without reservation. This was not a lord of the perfumed kind to which he was accustomed. Here was a king who would tear the limbs from an orc and bludgeon it to death with them. His mouth felt suddenly dry, the words he had practised over and over firmly in the grip of some stubborn corner of his mind.

The Hammerer to his left cleared his throat pointedly.

‘Do you come for some purpose, human?’ Kazador asked.

Bernard licked his lips.

Kazador looked down from his dais. His thin circlet glinted dully in the torchlight, but Bernard found his avarice drawn by the thick golden bracers clasped about the dwarf-king’s massive forearms. Together, they must have weighed as much as a small child. One last payday. That’s what Splitter had promised, but the dwarf had lurched from one change of plan to the next. Mercenary work was for younger men, and he would get what he was owed.

‘Yes, your… er… majesty,’ he began. His voice broke, intimidated by the vastness of the hall and its mighty king.

He closed his eyes and tried to recall exactly what the shrivelled old ratman had said. The wizened creature had snuck up on him as he’d left Thordun’s chamber to relieve himself behind a statue. He recalled the stench of it, like half-decayed meat and stale piss. He’d expected to die, had felt the stream of spreading warmth down his thigh as he’d prepared for it, but instead of a knife in the back the ratman had given him something almost too good to be true: the riches of Karak Azul. And all he had to do was attend the Throne Hall and present himself with an offer to the king. The ratman had been insistent about that last part, made him repeat its instructions word for word.

‘Yes, your majesty,’ he continued with renewed confidence. Soon all this would be his, and people like Kazador would be kneeling before him. ‘I offer my services to journey to the Black Crag and retrieve your long lost kin…’

‘What care has Queek for litter-mates of Kazador?’ Queek asked after a tortuous period of thought. ‘If Queek had litter-brothers lost, he would not want them back.’ He tittered at a sudden thought but said no more, seemingly content to keep the joke between himself and whatever passing madness had his ear.

‘Dwarf-things care for such things,’ said Sharpwit, ‘and the king pledges half his wealth to any that save his blood-kin.’ In actual fact, only a dwarf could claim a half. For a human the offer was a mere third, but Sharpwit saw no purpose in belabouring the point. Queek’s simple mind would only be confused by details. ‘None are better than skaven for finding lost things, and Kazador will deal with the man-thing where he would not with us. But we will find his blood-kin and we will take his gold.’

‘This not destroy dwarf forges as Council wants. And what use has Queek for silly-soft gold-metal?’

Sharpwit bashed his forehead against his crutches despairingly. Now Queek cared about the dwarf-things’ weapons! ‘Azul-Place will be impoverished and most terrifying Queek will be enriched. Think-dream what can be done with such fortune. There are lots-many ways to bring a dwarf-place to its knees.’

‘It won’t work.’

Sharpwit squealed at the unexpected voice from behind. He twisted on the spot and quailed before the monstrous bulk of Ska Bloodtail. The fangleader, frighteningly close to a full recovery, lounged against a wall. He wore a grubby scarlet loincloth and his black fur blended almost seamlessly into the dry earth wall. The scent of death was so pervasive that he had not even detected the presence of another. Sharpwit glanced back at the madly grinning warlord, an inkling of respect and a healthy dose of renewed suspicion colouring his monochromatic worldview. Was this deliberate, the blood, the heads, the decaying corpses strewn over every surface? Was it possible the Headtaker merely played the mad-thing to disarm and disorient? Surely, Queek was not nearly so cunning. Nevertheless, the thought bothered him, the niggling fear that he had somehow been tricked without really knowing why or how.

‘The dwarf-king abandons hirelings to chase litter-brothers himself,’ Ska said. ‘He will not gnaw at your bone.’

The oaf spoke with a measure of satisfaction of which Sharpwit did not approve. Perhaps he needed reminding just who it was he owed his worthless life to. He hissed warningly at the giant warrior and turned back to Queek. ‘Ska is not well-versed in dwarf-thing ways. He is not sent by the Council to advise on such things.’ He fingered the sacred seal of the Thirteen within the pocket of his jerkin, drawing assurance from its touch. ‘With his forces depleted by the mighty Queek, Kazador will be desperate. He will not suspect the man-thing come to exploit him in his grief. He will say yes-yes.’

Sharpwit shrank from Queek’s stare. The warlord’s eyes, soulless as blood-red stars, seemed to swell to fill his world. He floundered in the depths of madness within. He found himself counting off the heartbeats to the moment’s relief when the mad-thing would blink. But he did not. He simply stared and Sharpwit wilted still further.

Say yes, Sharpwit prayed. For once, see sense and say yes.

‘And Thordun Locksplitter,’ said Kazador. ‘Does he intend to join this quest?’

‘Splitter?’ Bernard laughed. ‘No, he’s far too excited by his voyage to the Everpeak. But I’ve not forgotten what I was dragged across the Worlds Edge for.’

His laughter echoed back to him. The king regarded him soberly, his Hammerer guard wearing expressions of profound disapproval. He cleared his throat and cast his eyes down at the dense rug under his knees.

‘Very well. You come with the good word of one of our own, and since the throng of Karak Azul requires yet more time to muster…’ Kazador shifted in his throne, positioning himself to better address the azure-robed scribe who stood hunched over a weighty ledger that, even lying open, rose above the marble lectern to the height of the dwarf’s fat red nose. ‘Loga… forgive me, Boric, please make the following entry in the record.’

The scribe grunted but did not look up. He scribbled away furiously, chewing determinedly on his lower lip as sweat beaded the craggy furrows of his brow.

‘Let it be recorded that Bernard Servat, friend of the dwarfs, is granted permission to venture into Black Crag, the protectorate of Karak Azul. Should he return,’ and here, Kazador hesitated only briefly before continuing, even his grey stone mask unable to conceal how highly he rated such hopes, ‘then the reward of one third of my treasury shall be owed to him…’

Queek seemed to consider for an inordinate length of time. Sharpwit watched him anxiously, his tail whipping to and fro of its own will as it was always in the habit of doing when he was nervous. He could almost hear the wheels grinding within the warlord’s strange and upsetting mind.

‘Very well, Old-thing. We do this your way.’

‘W-we do? Really?’

‘Yes-yes, is a good plan.’ Queek leant forward menacingly. ‘Old-thing thinks Queek not recognise good plans when he smells one?’

‘Of course not, most devious of despots! This humble slave-thing simply did not realise how good-good was his plan. But if Queek thinks so then it must be true.’

‘Is that so?’ Queek snickered, leaving Sharpwit once again with the disconcerting sense that he was only the second cleverest skaven in this warren. It was not a feeling to which he was accustomed. ‘Ska, rouse these lazy-meats for marching on Black Crag. I want gone now.’

‘Your army?’ spluttered Sharpwit. ‘You misunderstand my plan.’

‘Do I now?’

Sharpwit hesitated. He suppressed a shiver at the not-so-latent hunger in the warlord’s eyes, the challenge and the promise they threatened. He scrunched his eye tight and sought to remind himself why he was here. He was the chosen of Clanlord Gnawdwell, his favoured agent when wits and cunning were favoured over idiot brawn, the one whose experience and knowledge of the dwarf-things surpassed that of any skaven. His paw tightened around the Council’s seal and he withdrew it from his pocket, clutching it to his breast.

‘You do,’ he said and immediately flinched from the expected blow. From wherever it came. But neither Queek nor Ska had moved. ‘Queek’s army will do no better than lumbering dwarf-meat. We have Clan Eshin adepts in your pay. Send Fang Dao, most perspicacious of potentates, let him sneak-sneak as assassin-things do best. He find-brings what we need. Azul-Place will still need to fall,’ he continued in his most reasonable tone. ‘Queek will still have his chance at the great Kazador.’

Sharpwit offered his unguarded throat nervously. He desperately needed to cough, an unbearable tickle like ants crawling from his lungs. He fought down his old body’s failings, knowing that to show weakness now would mean death. Still Queek offered nothing. The warlord lifted his muzzle to peer over Sharpwit’s shoulder. He felt the powerful shape behind him shift.

‘Does Old-thing not squeak-tell the rest?’

‘The rest?’

‘Old-thing brain filled with worms, Queek thinks. Ska, tell him the rest.’

‘Kazador-King offers a bigger prize,’ Ska said. ‘Kill Gorfang orc-meat and claim choice-pick of dwarf-thing treasures.’

‘Imagine not knowing that.’ Queek shook his gore-slickened muzzle sadly. ‘Queek will demand Kazador’s head! He not care for other dwarf-thing treasures.’

Somehow, Sharpwit doubted that even a dwarf would feel compelled to surrender his own head in payment of a debt. As much as he undoubtedly did treasure it, it seemed a rather loose interpretation of Kazador’s promise. Not that he intended to share such doubts with Queek. Instead, he endeavoured to prostrate himself still further but, even in the prime of youth, there were limits to the contortions the skaven body could achieve. How did Ska know so much anyway? He was a cretin! Wasn’t he?

‘I did not mention it, most terrifying of tyrants, as Eshin-things obviously can do that too.’

‘No,’ Queek snarled. ‘Big-meat is mine. This will teach him to consort with Queek’s enemies. To send his warriors to Skarsnik while Queek’s back is turned.’ He looked across to Ska, who nodded.

‘So squeak my spies, great warlord. Weakening Belegar’s allies in Azul-Place helps Skarsnik as much as us, and we are not there to take-steal the advantage. Sources say that orc-things showing the red fang joined with Skarsnik to attack the City of Pillars just after we left and take-grab many dwarf-thing places too.’

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek murmured absently. ‘Skarsnik is a tricky one.’

Sharpwit bit his tongue. It did not take the finest mind in Skavendom to sense that disagreement on this point would be a deeply stupid move. ‘But what of Kazador?’ he suggested, hoping to coax the warlord back to the course of sanity.

‘Queek will have Big-meat’s head,’ Queek insisted. ‘He will sit on Blacktooth’s spike. With him gone, Ikit and Krug do nothing but argue.’ Queek bared his fangs and snarled in the direction of the dwarf skull. ‘It drives Queek crazy.’

‘What of Deadclaw? Gnawdwell will be most unhappy if you abandon it.’

Queek dismissed the concern with a wave of his paw. ‘Give-leave to Tinker-rat. That idiot-meat deserves his hot-stink hole.’

Sharpwit lifted his chin from the floor and eyed afresh the volume of blood that clung to the warlord’s hide. ‘Fizqwik still lives?’

Queek considered the question. Looking down, he seemed to see the blood for the first time. He slowly rotated his paws as though enthralled by every bloody hair.

‘Queek thinks so. Forge place had so many, is hard to know.’

Sharpwit limped purposefully from the warlord’s burrow. Finally free, he crumpled to his knees and hacked up blood-flecked phlegm. His chest calmed and the waves of pain gradually subsided. He drew in grateful breaths, his lungs crackling like ancient parchment. The air was hot and heavy with lizard musk. How he hated it here.

‘You are late,’ said Razzel.

‘I know I am!’ Sharpwit spat back. ‘Is hardly my fault, that ridiculous mad-thing…’

‘Did he agree to our plan? Do we move-go as we decided?’

Sharpwit glared malevolently at the grey seer. Resigned to receiving no aid from a brother skaven, he clawed his crutches into the tinder-dry earth and levered himself upright. He noisily cleared a wad of bloody tissue from the back of his throat and spat it out. When did the grey seer decide to claim Sharpwit’s cunning scheme as theirs? At what point would he decide that it was his? Much as he would gladly let Razzel handle such audiences with Queek in future, somehow he saw the only outcome to that being Razzel’s head on a spike. He shuddered. And then who knew what truths the grey seer might whisper into his new master’s ear. He consoled himself with the certainty that even Queek would one day outlive his usefulness and Gnawdwell would not be unduly moved by his passing. Like all of the Council of Thirteen, Gnawdwell was practically immortal, imbued with life by the will of the Horned One for as long as he deemed fit. Queek was not the clanlord’s first favourite, and he would not be the last.

‘What did Queek say?’ asked Razzel.

‘There is a change of plan. Come-come, we must hurry.’

Bernard left the Throne Hall behind him, his face plastered with an enormous grin. Everything was going exactly as the ratman had said it would.

He recalled the fables his grandmother had told him when he’d been a boy in Brionne. The old woman had been tough as cured leather and had loved terrifying her eldest grandson witless with stories of the mythical underfolk… or not so mythical, as he had since learned. He recalled one tale in particular, about a Prince Karsten of Waldenhof, who petitioned the underfolk to destroy his enemies. True to their deal, the underfolk brought down the impregnable walls of Castle Siegried and slaughtered its people to the last wailing babe. The underfolk returned to Waldenhof for their payment only for the prince, flushed with success, to refuse them their due. The ratmen retreated to their Underworld, leaving Waldenhof for a time at peace, only to return one month later by the full light of the witch moon to steal away every child as payment in kind.

His grandmother had oft promised she would offer him to the underfolk, but perhaps the tale was not fanciful after all. Real or not, he’d not make the same mistake. If he played right by this old ratman, he felt certain it would honour their deal.

‘You look improperly pleased, manling.’

A particularly old and timeworn dwarf stood in his way. Long hair, grey as weathered stone, swept over his massive shoulders to fall against an impressive beard. What impressed Bernard most about it was the wealth of golden beads through which it had been braided. He had seen this dwarf before, he knew, but all these longbeards looked very much alike.

‘Is there some reason I should not? Must I be as grim as everyone here?’

‘Mind your tone, manling.’

Bernard had never minded anything, and he wasn’t about to start now, not flushed as he was with the vision of wealth and glory that was now close enough to be almost tangible. ‘Maybe you should be the one showing some respect. I’m the one who will get your lost dwarfs back from Black Crag.’ He laughed drily. ‘Maybe that’ll cheer you all up.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘No, I suspect you secretly enjoy being so damned joyless.’

‘I was speaking of returning our kinsdwarfs. It’s been tried before, by stout-hearted dwarfs and by better men than you.’

Bernard leered down at the sullen ancient, so noble, so bloody superior. ‘I’m late, greybeard, and you’re in my way.’ He shouldered his way past, turning briefly to snipe back. ‘So I reckon we’ll just see, won’t we?’

Handrik’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as he watched him leave. ‘Aye, manling. That we will.’

‘I hate this place,’ Razzel complained. ‘Can we not meet-treat with this man-thing elsewhere?’

‘And where would the chosen one suggest?’ Sharpwit asked sarcastically. He tittered softly when the grey seer did not answer. He surveyed the dim and dusty chamber, a fitting gaol for Kazador’s secret shame. ‘A secret room in the heart of Azul-Place. It is easy for the man-thing to find, it keeps us far-distant from mad-thing eyes, and dwarf-thing guards keep wandering footpaws from disturbing us. This place could be no more perfect.’

Razzel crossed his arms and settled into a huff.

‘Queek will soon have us leave, so we cannot keep eyes on this man-thing until we return.’

‘Why should this matter?’

Sharpwit stifled the impulse to throttle the sorcerer. That would teach him to be an idiot. ‘Would Grey Seer Razzel like to enter the Throne-Burrow of Azul-Place, present himself the recovered dwarf-things to Kazador, and claim the reward for Skavendom?’

Razzel flicked his chimes angrily. The sorcerer’s white-fanged snarl was all the answer he needed.

‘Then it will be on you to keep him safe-well.’

‘Why me? I will be on Queek’s mad errand too.’

‘With your possession magic, you can watch him, and we leave warriors behind just in case they are needed. Deadclaw will not be emptied and there will be enough coward-meat deserters that a pawful on our orders will not be missed.’

‘It seems you think of everything.’

‘This is why I am still alive.’

Razzel snickered.

‘Be quiet-still,’ Sharpwit hissed, concerned that an observant dwarf-thing might pick up the errant tinkling of the grey seer’s horn chimes. ‘We would not want to frighten-scare the man-thing.’

The sorcerer settled, and Sharpwit wished he could do the same. It was the curse of an intellect as keen as his that there could never be any respite from plots and schemes, his overactive brain continually plaguing him with every worst case scenario it could conjure, each successively more disastrous than the last. What if the man-thing had failed in his most simple of tasks and even now Kazador and a legion of dwarf-things marched on this place? What if Queek suspected his double-dealing and crept stealthily through the secret passageways? What if…?

Razzel brought him back. The grey seer’s eyes were eager as he lifted his snout to test the musty air.

‘Something comes.’

Handrik pressed his back to the wall and peered around the corner. The hall ahead was empty, but the human could not have gone far. Humans were an untrustworthy lot, and Thordun hadn’t painted the prettiest picture of those he’d brought with him. And that big one, Bernard, had looked the worst of the bunch. So he had followed him. The old instincts kicked in almost at once. It took more than a gromril coat to make an Ironbreaker and it could not be set aside as easily.

He peered down the corridor, picking out the scuffs the man’s boots had made on the tiles. He wondered what business could bring a human so far from the taverns and stores to the royal quarter. He waited a moment until it became evident that the human had definitely gone before pushing his leaden legs from the wall and dragging himself down the hall. He stomped his feet aggressively, giving his thighs a vigorous thumping as he did so. They were fine as long as he stayed active, but they sank swiftly into deadening pins and needles if he tarried overlong at a bench or even simply stood idle.

He walked some way down the corridor before pausing and doubling back. The signs of passage had ceased at an ornate doorway inset into the right-hand wall: the gold and gromril portal to Kazrik’s chambers. He felt a sickness in his gut as he reached out to grasp the solid gold handle. His heart sank as it twisted under the pressure of his wrist. It was improbable that the Hammerers had been negligent enough to leave this door unlocked after Thordun’s entry the previous night and even in the highly unlikely event that a human could match a dwarf at picking locks, Bernard had not had the time to do so.

The door swung open in his hand. It had been unlocked from the inside.

A gust of dry and musk-scented air greeted the open doorway, speaking of some other opening somewhere within. That in itself was disturbing. There were no other passages within this wing as far as Handrik knew, and for over three centuries it had been his duty to know them all. He stared into the deepest intensity of darkness. The human had definitely come this way, but why would he remove the torches from their brackets? Likely it had been the work of another, one who hoped to shield their meeting from prying eyes. Like all dwarfs, Handrik’s night vision was excellent, but even he could not see in total blackness. But there were other races that could, as well as those that deemed sight secondary to other senses, such as the thaggoraki.

For the briefest instant he hesitated. He was in defiance of the king simply by opening that door. By rights he should fetch the Hammerers and go no further, but even as he thought it he knew he would not. Whatever treachery this human was engaged in might be done by the time help arrived and, despite the previous night’s despair, Handrik Hallgakrin was not ready to put up his feet and spend his days lecturing beardlings on the proper way to stew thaggoraki.

Drawing a fortifying pull on his ale-skin, he crept deeper in. Whispered sounds brushed the grey hairs of his ears, muffled voices. One was the gruff voice of the human, Bernard, but the other was different, high-pitched and rapid.

Hugging close to the wall, he paused to listen, straining his ears in painful futility to catch their words. He scraped further along the passage before stopping again. The voices were clearer now. They conversed in heavily accented Reikspiel and he could just about make them out.

‘…we leave-go with Queek to Black Crag,’ said the chittering voice, the voice of a ratman.

‘That wasn’t the plan,’ Bernard returned. He sounded angry.

‘Is what is happening. We take precautions to keep you safe, man-thing. Just keep from sight until we return with the missing dwarf-things.’

Handrik’s mouth worked in silent horror. The man had thrown in his lot with the thaggoraki! A race renowned for backstabbing and treachery, even among their own. Even a man couldn’t be fool enough to expect a skaven to honour any deal they had made. Despite his already low opinions of humans, the idea of one acting as a skaven proxy to steal dwarfish gold still managed to enrage him. He trembled to think of what evil such a fortune might be turned to by those devious hands.

Well no matter, it would end right here.

Light flickered from an opening ahead. There was a door where his memory insisted there should be a wall. It was from there that the voices came. His hand closed instinctively about his belt, but his axe was not there. It hung on a wall in his quarters. He cursed in silent fury. The first time in three hundred years that he wasn’t carrying an axe and look what happens. He made up his mind.

It ended here.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Handrik burst into the antechamber, bellowing a war-cry at the top of his lungs. The secret room was small, with a pair of old and dusty chairs stacked against the near wall and a large table set slightly off centre. What scant space remained was occupied by three figures standing beneath a tapestry on the far side of the table. The traitorous human, Bernard, stood between two of the vile skaven creatures, and hunched under a ceiling too low for his stature. One of the skaven was a wizened and balding creature in a glittering blue jerkin and looked older than any skaven he had ever seen, while the other was one of their horn-headed sorcerer-priests, white furred and immaculately robed.

All three looked up in shock. Bernard and the balding one shrank against the far wall but the grey seer retained its wits marginally better. The sorcerer slammed its staff against the ground and extended a claw towards him. The outstretched paw crackled with black-tinted lightning from the depths of the ratman’s dark hell. Aetheric winds jangled like the heralds of capricious gods.

Acting on impulse, Handrik grabbed an old high-backed chair in one fist and hurled it across the room. It sailed over the squat oak table, eliciting a squeal of shock from the grey seer as it shattered to splinters across his face. The seer shrieked and buried his snout in his robe, the dark magic he had summoned dissipating into the nothingness from which it had arisen.

Handrik turned his attention to Bernard. The sight of him made his blood boil. His heart thumped its fury, energising his shambling legs with a wrathful vigour. The human looked ashen at the realisation of his discovery, but the terrified guilt lasted only a moment before he realised that Handrik was both unarmed and outnumbered. Bernard chuckled as he drew his short stabbing sword, evidently judging his flail ill-suited to the cramped chamber.

‘Stop-back, man-thing,’ the old skaven ordered. ‘If you are hurt-killed then all is for nothing.’

The human did as he was told. His sword held ready, he dropped back behind the old skaven’s back.

‘Aye, hide behind your true master, human. My heart weeps for poor Thordun. Kazador will see him shorn for this betrayal.’

‘Splitter promised to make us rich,’ Bernard spat. ‘And now I will be, no thanks to him.’

‘You’re a fool, umgi, even by the standards of your kind. The day this vermin keeps its word is the day an elf gets down on his effeminate knees and begs the secret behind a well-made shelf.’

‘Enough talk-talk!’ the old one hissed. ‘Razzel, destroy this dwarf-thing. I help the man-thing escape.’

Handrik saw a calculating look cross the grey seer’s wounded muzzle. It eyed him hatefully, cruel splinters jutting from its sensitive nose. Then its red eyes turned on its companion. ‘That is one plan. Here is one other.’ The sorcerer flung both arms wide. Black light throbbed from the warpstone-headed staff in its right paw with frantically increasing frequency until the lull between light and dark was so brief that the strobing pained the eyes. Handrik was forced to raise a hand to shield his sight just as the grey seer shrilled a distended syllable in its own garbled tongue and vanished in a clap of warp lightning and a cloud of noxious green-black smoke.

Handrik coughed and waved a hand through the billowing fog. With a stab of rage he noticed that Bernard had vanished too. A hacking cough that was not his own summoned his attention. Despite having skill enough to take the human with him, the grey seer had obviously opted to leave the old one behind. It clasped a satin sleeve to its jaw, its chest heaving with uncontrollable spasms and its ghostly white eye filming with tears as it struggled to catch its breath.

‘Double crossed, eh?’ Handrik observed with a faint smile. ‘Would you ever credit it?’

The old skaven backed off, glaring at Handrik as though its current plight was entirely his fault.

Handrik advanced on the skaven. He was a longbeard: dense muscles strained against the weave of his goat wool vest, his skin was as hard as the stone beneath his boots. Even unarmed he’d have fancied his chances. But against one similarly without weapon, and as feeble as this decrepit creature, it would be only too easy. Maybe he’d even be able to capture it and return it to Kazador for answers.

The skaven retreated before him, its crutches clattering on the stone flags, but the room was painfully small and soon it had nowhere left to go. It lowered its head and spread its arms, a gesture he recognised as one of submission among its kind.

‘Do not kill-kill dwarf-thing. I help-help if you let-allow to live. I can give you mad-thing Queek.’

For a heartbeat, Handrik was stunned. The skaven had spoken Khazalid, a language supposedly known only to the dwarfs themselves and a select handful of dwarf-friends. But the skaven had spoken it perfectly. Better than Thordun even. Were it not for its rat-ish manner, it could easily have passed for a dwarf itself.

‘Where did you learn to speak like that?’

The ratman didn’t answer. It cowered low into the corner, its paws gripping its crutches for support, its blotched and wrinkled tail coiled protectively about its waist as though to soothe the tremors that still rippled between its ribs. It beckoned Handrik nearer. Realising that the creature was having too much difficulty breathing to answer his questions, he did as it bade him. The old skaven grinned, startling Handrik with a gaping maw broken by glowing fangs of warpstone.

‘I learn in Karak Azul.’

Too late Handrik realised his foolishness. The skaven suddenly did not seem so breathless after all, the desperate glaze in its milky orb taking on a deeply malicious glint.

‘Fool-fool, dwarf-thing!’

The skaven lunged, swifter than Handrik had thought possible. Maleficent fangs tore through the precious braids that threaded his beard and sank into his collar. The teeth pierced his thin shirt and tough flesh with ease, crunching through to the bone, where they splintered. Shards of evil, the very essence of mutation and madness, broke off into the hard muscle of his chest.

Vision faded. Awareness became a black-hazed swirl of colour and leering skaven faces sublimated under the stubborn pounding of his dwarfish heart. He heard shouting. He wondered if it was his ancestors welcoming him to the threshold of Gazul’s Gate. If it was, they must have been greatly distant as their efforts faded to insignificance beneath the power of that steadily slowing beat. Unnoticed, the skaven released its hold and he fell.

Handrik knew he was already as good as dead.

The only question was how bad it was going to be.

Bernard flopped to the floor and dry heaved. The cool stones were a wonder against his face. The ceiling turned like the night sky in nauseatingly accelerated motion. It was his room. He recognised the hangings as they swam on the wall and from the other side of the door came a babble of half-familiar voices. He struggled to lift himself, but it was as though his bones had been stuffed with cotton. His head sank back into delicious coolness. It felt twice as large as it should be, and impossibly heavy.

‘Easy, man-thing. The skitterleap is hard on us all the first time, hmmm?’

A nightmarish shape appeared before him, white fur and black horns swirling like oil colours around bleeding red eyes.

‘I must be away with Queek. You will rest-stay until my return.’

Bernard’s mouth lolled open. His tongue felt fat. It still tasted of the foul green gas that had swept him up and thrown him across black, daemon-haunted space before dropping him here.

‘Le… le… nain.’

The rat sorcerer tittered.

The dwarf, he wanted to scream, but his addled mind couldn’t find the words even if his tongue could form them.

‘Shhh,’ the horned rodent soothed over a somnolent chittering of its own alien speech. Bernard felt his hyper-sensitive skin tingle, then fall flaccid. His eyes fluttered closed. ‘Sleep, man-thing, and worry-fear no more. The Great Horned Rat, he takes care of all things.’

If it was true what they said, about life being pain, then Handrik was very much alive. Heat and unbearable pressure flared within his breast and he screamed. He gagged on vomit and bile bitterness and struggled to rise. Firm hands pinned him down.

‘Grungni’s gold! He lives.’

‘I see that, Narfi. Hold him still.’

‘I’m doing my best. Hurry up and get those fragments out before he goes under again.’

Again, pain exploded within him like a mining charge. Even in the unconscious grip of agony, his broken body clung to its pride as if it were a shield in the shield wall. To lose control would shame not only himself but all who held him in respect and trust. Through stubbornly clenched teeth, he screamed. He retched but his guts were empty, responding instead with agonised spasms. And all the while strong arms pinned him against the stone like a living dissection on the mortician’s slab.

‘All right Narfi, I think that’s most of it.’

Arms wrapped his shoulders and pulled him up, shuffling him back to rest against a wall. A bare hand slapped him none too gently across the jaw and his eyes flickered open. At first everything was a gummy blur. Two shadowed forms filled his vision. He ignored them. Something more pressing drew his attention and he looked down at his chest.

Breath shuddered through him, pain coming in pulsing waves in time to the beating of his heart as if to remind him with each stroke of life of the grim and painful realities of death. With fingers that felt wrapped in wool, he picked clumsily through his beard, removing the dried chunks of vomit that had stuck between the glittering braids. Even with one foot through Gazul’s Gate – especially then – there were standards.

His fingers settled on the shattered gold links above his collar. They burrowed between the cracked metal, questing beneath the silver hair. Calloused fingertips brushed his torn shirt. He gasped, only pride preventing him from crying out anew. The skin of his breast felt hard and dead, and strangely numb despite the agony his touch induced. His withdrawn hand came away bloody, but that was the least of it; his bloodied fingertips were speckled with tiny motes of glowing warpstone.

He gritted his teeth stubbornly against a shuddering wave of pain. He could feel the warpstone within him, the touch of its dark influence, its mutating power corrupting even his hardy dwarfish heart. There were worse fates than death in this world. He forced a smile. At least his legs didn’t hurt.

‘How do you feel?’ Keldur asked. The Hammerer looked sick with worry. The knife, still in his hand, was dark with Handrik’s blood. His brother, Narfi, released Handrik’s shoulders. The absence of a joke from the young soldier told him all he needed to know.

Handrik opened his mouth. It was dry and tasted foul, crusts of vomit stuck between his teeth. When finally he felt able to speak, he barely recognised his own voice. It was feeble and hoarse. ‘I look that bad, do I lad?’

‘Not at all,’ Keldur assured him. ‘I’d wager on you in a pony lift against anyone in Karak Azul.’

‘Don’t insult me, lad. You’re poorer than a snotling and barred from every gambling den in the Karaz Ankor.’ He managed a chuckle that soon broke off into a grimace as a fresh wave of dark magic emanating from his wound broke agonisingly on his chest. ‘I feel like death just choked on me.’

Narfi laughed then. ‘I’m sure he’ll always rue the day he tried to take Handrik Hallgakrin!’

‘He’ll have his chance to redeem himself soon, I fear.’

‘Longbeard, don’t say–’

‘Enough of that. I need no coddling. Tell me what became of the skaven? Did you kill it?’

The two dwarfs regarded him blankly. It was Keldur that answered. ‘We saw nothing. We assumed you had already avenged yourself on whatever creature did this to you.’

Handrik swore. Then the old skaven had fled. That could only mean there was another tunnel here. It would not be the first time a dwarf had been surprised within his own hold from tunnels thought lost to time. It was not the fault of his ancestors for concealing their masterworks so thoroughly. The failing lay with those now living, this lesser generation, unable to retain the skills of a more illuminated age.

‘Summon Lothgrim. The Ironbreakers must be brought here at once.’

‘Forget Lothgrim,’ Keldur said, turning to his brother. ‘Find Sister Grimhildur at the Valayan temple. There must be more that can be done for him.’

‘No,’ Handrik said, weakly but firmly. ‘Get me Lothgrim.’ Suddenly, he remembered Bernard. The skaven needed dealing with, but the problem of the human turncoat needed resolving first. ‘And fetch Thordun Locksplitter.’

Sharpwit seethed. Betrayed. By Razzel!

He limped along the roughly cut stone passage, granite blocks soon giving way to bare earth crudely gouged by skaven claws. The last dwarf-thing statue had been left behind some way back. Sharpwit missed it. You knew where you stood in dwarf-thing tunnels. You did not have to check the ceiling every five paces.

In truth he was not so much angry as he was ashamed. The indignity of it burned. He shook his head and tried to concentrate. He wasn’t ready to surrender just yet, but thoughts of how he might have acted differently played continually through his mind. Over and over he relived the moment when Razzel turned, when he snatched his prize from his paw, opened and giving in the name of friendship and cooperation. Unable to hold it in any longer, he smashed his crutch into the wall and gave a long shriek of fury.

Damn him. Damn his unholier-than-thou hide!

He summoned a deep breath and forced himself to be calm. He listened to the fading echo of his rage, imagined it as his bitterness receding into the rock. Someone like Razzel did not get the better of a mind as brilliant as his without a helping hand. He had been too distracted. He felt like he carried overflowing pails in each paw, one on his head and another in his tail. No matter what he did to spare one, another would spill and whatever corrective measures he took always made matters worse.

Never in all the years since his patron, Gnawdwell, had plucked him from the City of Pillars to serve as his aide had he considered life in Skavenblight as simple. Yes, he had acclimatised. There was no time to be disarmed by the open sky of Skavendom’s prehistoric capital, not if one intended to survive long in the Under-Empire’s dark and rat-infested heart, where poison floated in every bowl and a knife hid beneath every cloak, where even the simple necessity of closing one’s eyes in sleep became an act of daring. In Skavenblight, no plot was as it seemed. Even the lowliest functionaries had schemes wrapped within schemes hidden behind schemes. And then there were the Lords of Decay themselves. He trembled slightly at the recollection of his audiences within their chambers.

He had welcomed the opportunity to return home. Advising Queek had appealed as the antithesis to that cesspit of rumour and betrayal. And it was true, there were no secrets with Queek, no half-truths or cunningly layered deceptions. At least none he had yet unravelled, which meant much the same thing. His behaviour was inexplicable. Even looking back, he could not quite believe the warlord’s actions, much less try to explain them. Why could he not await the gathering of the full horde that he and Ska had assembled for him? Why would he insist on attacking Kazador head on even when the full strength of Karak Azul was arrayed against him? And given his earlier obsessions, why would he then abandon his quest for Kazador’s head to charge so readily after a new rival in Gorfang Rotgut? Fickle didn’t quite seem to cover it!

On balance, he would gladly crawl back into his burrow in Skavenblight right now. Despite his initial misgivings, the sky had never fallen in, even if he did have to sleep with his one eye open and a paw on his dagger.

But he wasn’t in Skavenblight. He was trapped beneath Karak Azul and it was time to disregard the distractions and focus on essentials. He was here to stem the flow of weapons from Karak Azul. He could forget Queek. The mad warlord was beyond irrelevance now. He would enter Black Crag and recover the captive dwarf-things himself. Let Queek hurl himself against the walls of that impregnable fortress until the day he dies, assuming Gnawdwell would allow him that long. The clanlord was going to receive a less than flattering portrait of his soon-to-be-former favourite when Sharpwit made his victorious return to the Clan Mors quarter of Skavenblight.

There remained one snag, however intently he tried to simplify things. The man-thing Bernard Servat simply had to be kept alive. There was no way around it, not without trying to persuade another man-thing, and Kazador might find that suspicious. And he needed Grey Seer Razzel to do that. It really was as simple as that. Perhaps the Horned Rat truly did watch over his craven priest. He could think of no other reason for the inordinate degree of good fortune that seemed to come his way. He swiftly stifled his resentment at the unpropitious apportionment of the Horned One’s blessings, ever reluctant to attract his god’s disfavour with such blasphemous sentiments.

Dry musk tickled his whiskers and he quickened his pace now he was certain nobody was watching.

‘Poor pathetic Sharpwit,’ he cackled, the taste of dwarf-meat still rich in his mouth. It was no surprise that Queek and Razzel had fallen for it so readily, but he had really expected better of a dwarf.

From beneath Azul there would be other tunnels to join with those for Black Crag. Razzel didn’t know them. Queek certainly didn’t know them. Sharpwit would beat them both.

He grinned. The warplight guided his way to glory. Perhaps he was the lucky one after all.

Even with Narfi by his side to legitimise his presence, Thordun’s skin prickled as though he had crossed a runic barrier. His stomach churned as though with molten lead, his feet dragging as if wilfully numb.

‘You are certain it’s fine for me to be here,’ he asked for what must have been the fifth time since passing the rune-engraved threshold.

Narfi eyed him coldly.

Thordun resented the Hammerer’s manner. The royal guard couldn’t have too many decades on him yet looked down as though he were a venerable elder. He wanted to say as much, but instead bowed his head, meekly accepting his admonishment.

‘What has happened? Has it to do with Kazrik?’

‘The prince is undisturbed. By Grungni’s mercy we can at least be thankful for that.’

‘Tell me something!’

‘See for yourself.’

Narfi had led him to an opening in the hall. It was not one he could remember seeing from his earlier visit. A perfect square of stone seemed simply to have vanished into the air. There was no rough edge to indicate the prior existence of anything other than that which remained, no scars in the rock to evidence a door that might previously have covered it. The Hammerer held his position and turned his back on the opening. He jerked his head to indicate that Thordun should go through.

As Thordun moved past, Narfi’s hand shot out and squeezed his shoulder. An unexpected kindness that bore no relation to the grim look in his eyes. ‘Steel yourself. It’s not pretty.’ The Hammerer withdrew his hand and locked it behind his back. He cleared his throat and gestured again that Thordun should pass.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. It immediately evoked unwelcome memories of Nuln. The homes of the sick had been boarded up in the dead of night, their occupants consigned to swelter and die, and then to rot in the summer heat. Entire districts had been abandoned to the plague, bloated bodies lying untended on the streets among the rats and the roaches. The memory was an ill one. His dwarfish constitution had spared him the disease, but not the grief of the many good men less fortunate in their birth. And disease had ultimately proven the least of their woes.

He girded himself and stepped inside. The small room resembled the interior of the Blind Pig after Bernard had lost at dice. A stout table had been upended, a torn tapestry hanging draped about one projecting leg like an abject symbol of surrender. The floor was strewn with splinters and short spears of broken wood, while dust, inches thick in places, blanketed every surface. In the far corner, at the epicentre of destruction, Narfi’s elder brother Keldur helped a very sick-looking Handrik remain upright while the longbeard spoke softly but firmly to a fierce-looking dwarf Thordun did not recognise.

The stranger was short and broad, even for a dwarf, and almost perfectly round in his encasing suit of runic gromril plate, a sphere of spiked death, tough as the head of a mace.

‘This skaven wasn’t just swallowed up by the mountain, Lothgrim,’ Handrik said, his voice cracked and weak. ‘Somewhere, perhaps in this very room, there’s a way to the skaven lair.’

The dwarf Lothgrim bowed deeply and long, and Thordun needed no familiarity with the customs of his people to read the esteem in which Handrik was held.

‘It will be done. I’ll scour every inch of these halls.’

‘Discreetly,’ Keldur insisted. ‘Remember where we are. Bring only those that can keep their mouths shut.’

Handrik and Lothgrim both frowned, offended by the very notion that any Ironbreaker could not be trusted with Kazador’s secret.

Grudgingly, Handrik nodded. ‘That’s fair.’ He turned to Lothgrim. ‘Get your oldest up here to find that tunnel. Bring along a runesmith. Not Thorek,’ he hastened to add. ‘Old Snaggi knows his secret doors as well as any and he owes me more than one favour. Have the rest of your lads suit up and marching on the Underdeep within the hour. It’s high time we dredged that hole for thaggoraki and time presses already.’

He looked up and spotted Thordun. He dismissed Lothgrim and Keldur with a nod.

‘Dreng Tromm,’ Lothgrim said, stepping back and offering another low bow before spinning on his heel and marching into the hall.

Keldur released Handrik gently. His hands hovered over the longbeard’s shoulders, ready to grasp him again should the old dwarf fall. Handrik slapped them down testily.

‘Out I said, you irritating dongliz.’

Keldur’s jaw tightened but he did as he was bid. ‘What should I tell Kazador?’ he asked.

A pained look crossed Handrik’s face. He reached out a well-muscled arm to steady himself against the wall. ‘Tell him nothing. Kazrik remains safe. The threat is passed. There is nothing here with which to trouble him.’

Keldur’s lips pinched dubiously, but he nodded agreement. Thordun wondered whether the dwarf could be trusted to keep his word, but Handrik seemed to harbour no such doubts and returned the younger dwarf’s gesture gratefully. The Hammerer gave Thordun a pat on the shoulder and turned to depart, leaving him and Handrik alone.

The longbeard looked old, the way humans employed the term, his skin clammy and pale, his green eyes listless and lacking their usual lustre. The elder began to pace, his movements spasmodic. Being one of the few dwarfs within Karak Azul to understand the nature of Handrik’s old injury, Thordun realised he moved simply to keep his back from seizing up.

‘When did you last see that big hairy umgi you keep for company?’ Handrik asked suddenly.

‘Bernard? In his room barely a moment ago. It was the strangest thing, but I hadn’t even realised he was there. Must have been there a time though, looked like he’d drunk himself out cold.’

Handrik cursed, some bitter invocation growled into his ruined beard, and ceased in his pacing. He set his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes.

‘Handrik, are you well?’

Handrik pushed himself away from the wall and shuffled back around to Thordun. He gestured towards the open door. ‘Are we alone?’

Throwing his elder a curious look, Thordun edged back to the opening and peered out. There was nobody there. If he strained, he could make out the murmuring of a distant conversation which he assumed must be Keldur and Narfi. He pulled his head back inside. Curiosity had always been his curse, and by now he was deadly curious as to what Handrik could want that demanded such secrecy.

‘Yes. Nobody can hear us.’

‘Good.’ Handrik looked down, uncertain how to continue. ‘I don’t how to break this, so I’ll just be right out with it. The manling has betrayed you. The fool has thrown in his lot with the skaven for a fistful of gold.’

Thordun staggered as though struck. His questing hand found the back of a wooden chair that had somehow survived the devastation and he steadied himself against the chair’s solidity. He had known Bernard to be ruthless. He had known him to be an amoral thief and murderer, the very lowest of men. But he had seen goodness in him. They had drunk together, fought together, and never would he have imagined he could fall this low.

‘Why?’ a voice breathed and it took him a moment to realise it was his own. He swallowed the lump that blockaded his throat and asked again. ‘Why?’

‘Who really cares why, lad? And who knows what the skaven hope to gain from it. All we need know is that whatever they want, they shan’t have.’

Without looking up, not trusting his broken heart to face the honoured longbeard he had dared to call friend, he gave a nod. He felt numb, like this was an event observed at a remove, the nightmare of another related through a drunken fugue. He had come seeking honour and redemption. And look what he had brought on himself instead. What among his prior misdeeds could approach the damage he had now wrought?

A powerful grip on his chin snapped his face upwards, forcing his eyes to meet Handrik’s.

‘Snap out of it, beardling. Look at me. If I’m not yet beaten then neither are you.’

‘What can we do?’

‘We fix it, that’s what. We find everything we can from the gutter-dealing umgi, we rescue Kazador’s kin ourselves and we make those skaven regret the day their stinking paws ever scratched the flagstones of Karak Azul!’ Handrik’s shoulders heaved with the effort of controlling his wrath.

Thordun shuddered as some of the bound tension released its grip. ‘How?’

‘Enough of that later. We must move fast and in secret. I’ll not allow Kazador to know he has been tricked by a skaven flunkey. The shame would surely break him.’

‘But if we act without his consent–’

‘Curb your honourless tongue, skaz. A better dwarf than you would already have sworn the Slayer Oath.’

Thordun’s arms trembled and he grasped both hands to the back of the chair that supported him. He should not have been so surprised that one so old as Handrik had seen through him so easily. He was a skaz. A thief.

Handrik reached out and gave his biceps a squeeze. It was comforting, fatherly, and he looked up, determined not to weep.

‘Aye lad. The king may disavow us, even should we succeed. But honour demands no less of us. I’ll make that sacrifice but I cannot do this alone. I’ll need help, if not yours then the help of another, and would you truly set your own honour higher than another’s?’

Thordun considered a moment and offered his hand with a resigned shrug. Handrik slapped it angrily down. ‘Let’s try that again shall we. We are dwarfs. Our word is not some trinket to be thoughtlessly bestowed on a whim. It is a solemn trade, an oath for an oath, and our oaths are iron. Think on it, mean it. Give me your word and you shall have mine.’

‘You have it,’ Thordun said, this time with an intensity that surprised even him. ‘I will help you undo my disgrace.’

Handrik took his wrist in his, gripping tightly enough to make him wince.

Thordun shook it solemnly, gratefully, but still something left him troubled. ‘Handrik,’ he began, hesitantly. ‘Do you believe that good deeds can expunge bad?’

Handrik stroked his beard, his eyes taking on a distant glaze of remembrance. ‘I hope so, lad.’ The longbeard smiled grimly and ushered him from the despoiled chamber. ‘Come on, there’s much to prepare.’

Thordun looked at the old dwarf, the most incongruous ally for an honourless thief. Despite Handrik’s great age and granite solidity, he couldn’t help but feel a measure of protectiveness. He didn’t know what the dwarf had in mind. Surely he could not expect to be doing any fighting himself. ‘Whatever would Grimhildur say?’

He had intended the question as a joke, but Handrik received it in all seriousness. He considered it gravely. ‘Tell her I’ll not be wearing the damned armour.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Queek lifted his snout and sniffed. Curious. It was wet like blood, except icy cold and clear, falling in speeding droplets from above as though fleeing the gutted corpse of some cold-hearted leviathan. The barrage made gazing upwards difficult, but if he squinted hard enough he saw it, black on black, a monstrous visage of bulbous fins and bloated misshapen heads. A mutated behemoth such as was purported to lurk within the poisoned depths of Karak Varn, prolonging their tortured existence with the flesh of skaven and other, darker, beasts.

It is called rain, said Krug, his voice perilously close to patronising. It is water that falls from the sky. It happens often out here on the surface.

Queek ignored the dwarf-thing and his so-called wisdom. Water could not fly.

So far he had seen little of the surface world to justify the terror it evoked in the hearts of his minions. They scurried timidly over the rain-lashed peaks, fur slicked flat to their shivering bodies. A scouring wind howled across the exposed mountain face, whipping freezing torrents into downcast faces to rob them of both scent and sound. The skaven hunched low, running in unbroken files, each keeping close to the comfort of the warm body in front of them and never once risking an upward glance at the stomach-upending infinity of emptiness that soared above their heads.

It was as if they feared that the sky-titan would sweep down to crush them into bloody paste beneath its swollen many-headed hide. Queek stared into its churning body. He wondered what it would be like to slay such a beast. No doubt its great size and the fact he would have to fight it so high above the ground would disadvantage him greatly, but that could only increase the adulation that would come with his inevitable victory. Idly he wondered which of those shapeless heads he would keep as a trophy and where he would find a spike large enough to display it.

It is a cloud. You cannot kill it.

As if on cue, the dark sky was suddenly rent apart by searing light. It was followed an instant later by the bellow of the sky-beast, a challenge voiced in thunder that shook the ground beneath Queek’s feet. Queek threw back his head in defiance. He exulted in the tremors the storm evoked beneath his fur. Queek could kill anything.

As terrified by the raging storm as they were by the open sky, the massed hordes huddled ever closer together. The sheer number of them cloaked every shallow defile and rainswept promontory with mangy fur and ragged hoods from which cheap scarlet dye had already begun to leach away to reveal a jumbled assortment of greys and browns and sodden, threadbare cloaks. They were pathetic. He wondered which scheming rival he could blame for bestowing on him such insipid troops.

Mighty-great Queek has no rival, Ikit assured him.

That much was certainly undeniable. These blunt-fanged lowlifes were fortunate to have as renowned a leader as Queek to inspire them by example to the greatness that was required.

It is down to Queek, said Ikit. He must destroy the orc-things himself and leave these others to eat-feed on the corpses he leaves.

Queek grunted silent acknowledgement. He would tear apart every orc-thing that crossed his path and hunt down every other that dared not. He would amass a pile of skulls to contest the mountains themselves for their dominion of the clouds, and from its pinnacle he would face down a world and make it concede the might of Queek. But still, more warriors were always desirable. Useful for digging holes and carrying things and for doing all those other menial things that were too far beneath Queek’s notice to even bother himself becoming aware of. With that in mind, he had ordered Ska to send scurriers with written instructions to the City of Pillars. The ratskins were sealed with Queek’s own claw-scratch seal, scratched in the blood of dwarf-thing slaves. He knew it wouldn’t stop a furtive reading of its contents by every paw it passed through, but he consoled himself that the dread of the Headtaker would cross their craven hearts as they did so. The orders were for the reinforcements he had cunningly left in the City of Pillars.

He would see the lair emptied before he would personally admit defeat. The Eight Peaks, Azul-Place, they were just places. Why could none but Queek see that? He was glad that Old-thing had been keeping out of sight. The half-dead half-wit would have thrown a fit, not that Queek cared a single mouse dropping for what he thought.

He carved a path through the quivering masses, clambering on all fours towards a high ridge. As he ascended the rise, the wind struck with even greater force. His trophies moaned in the wind, scraping and shuffling as they clung grimly to their stanchion. They had grown so annoying since Blacktooth had left them. The sooner Big-meat joined their number, the happier he would be. Queek hissed a warning in their direction and pawed water from his eyes, turning his gaze back to the subterranean passages that still gushed clanrat warriors like brackish water from a broken pipe. The skaven emerged blinking from the shafts and into the downpour with a lamentable surfeit of indifference. Ska Bloodtail and a retinue of his stormvermin elite, paw-picked for their cruelty, patrolled the tunnel mouth, rewarding malingerers with broken snouts.

Ska himself stood a head taller than even his mightiest litter-brothers, rain pattering from his paw-beaten pauldrons and coursing in dark spirals along the chains that held the massive armoured suit around his barrel chest. The imposing fangleader sped the horde on its way, hoisting unwary laggards by the scruff of their necks and tossing them out into the rain. The skaven missiles shrieked after the tails of their hurrying kin, landing in crashing tumbles of rusted gear on rain-slickened rock. Some found their footpaws and hurried after their clanmates, others did not. Either way, Queek did not care.

A scrap of white fur emerged from the tunnels. Ska raised his axe to hustle the grey seer on his way as he had every other worthless rat before him. The sorcerer’s indignant squeal as he was dragged through the mud and into the rain was music to Queek’s ears. He squealed down at the drenched and seething horde, waving to indicate that the grey seer should join him.

Content in the conviction that a skaven would rather eat its own liver than disobey Queek’s orders, he turned his back and scrambled up the slippery rock to the very edge of the bluff. A sudden gust grabbed his shoulders, as if the elements sought to wrestle him from the precipice. He gripped more tightly to the ridge and snickered at their puny efforts, gazing out over the gloomy titans of the Worlds Edge Mountains.

Seldom in his short life had Queek had occasion to feel small, but being surrounded by such potent embodiments of nature’s might gave him the tiniest inkling of how that might feel. Nothing he had ever witnessed had prepared him for such a vista, and he was struck by a sudden appreciation of scale. The world was larger than he had given it credit for. A lesser skaven might have been humbled.

‘You summoned me, great warlord?’ The grey seer was forced to shout to contend with the gale that blasted across the peaks. He spoke words of flattery, but their blatant insincerity grated on Queek’s nerves.

Queek tore his gaze from the dominion that would be his and turned it grudgingly towards the sorcerer. Razzel’s white robes were splattered with mud and his accursed chimes clanked flat sodden notes in spiritual harmony with the seer’s general misery. The rain had mottled his white fur to grey and even the crooked three-barred brand of the Horned One on his cheek seemed lacking in fervour. Looking at his annoying lackey and then back out across the whispering gulf that opened out before him, Queek was struck by a sudden, near overwhelming temptation to grab hold of the grey seer and hurl him off the edge. The voices in the rain called to him, they begged for the white-furred soul. His paws twitched.

‘Do you serve faithfully the mighty Queek, White-fur?’

‘Always,’ asserted Razzel. ‘Who is this humble vessel to question the Horned One’s will?’

Queek snickered cruelly, the immediate impulse to slay subsiding into whatever shallow lair it had burrowed within his black heart. ‘It takes a great leader to squeak such flagrant lies. And White-fur is no great leader.’

Razzel bristled but the downpour had dampened even his zealous fire and the gesture was half-hearted at best. Thunder pealed and the grey seer squeaked fright, glancing fearfully into the blinding rain. ‘Why must we scurry under open skies?’ The sorcerer trembled, icy chills and cold dread permeating his skinny hide.

‘White-fur is troubled?’ Queek murmured, enjoying the irritant’s discomfort.

The grey seer didn’t even attempt a riposte. He crouched low, as if to tremble as far as feasible from that troubled sky. ‘I trust-gift my life into the Horned Rat’s keeping,’ he whimpered. Queek wondered if the seer convinced himself. ‘I merely fear-worry for the morale of Queek’s unworthy soldiers.’

There was something about the seer’s abject meekness that Queek found deeply trying. If he ceased to be entertaining, what was the point in keeping him around?

‘Queek can see that White-fur shivers only for warmth, but is faster this way. Faster is better.’

‘If Queek desires faster then there is another way, most open-minded of warlords. There are tunnels. Secret ways that the dwarf-things hid and sealed long ago. Tunnels that run all the way from Azul-Place into Black Crag. Quick and dry, hmmm?’

In a sudden flash of insight, Queek imagined tunnels, the deceptive comfort of their darkness. Dwarf-things did not simply leave such ways abandoned. He saw orc-thing corpses, sunken and decayed. They jutted from cold stone walls, hanging by their ribcages from great iron spikes. Others still living rotted within deep pits, their animalistic wails unheeded by any creature with life or mind to care as their green flesh became food for giant rats that grew ever more hungry and ever more bold. Their red eyes twinkled, murderous in the dark. He saw Old-thing and White-fur looking down from the lip of a pit, revelling in his mouldering corpse.

Traps, Krug hissed urgently. The tunnels were secret once. But dwarfs will not be stung twice.

This grey seer creep-sneak always, Ikit concurred.

‘Tunnels…’ Queek mused. ‘They rhyme with… treachery.’

Queek could feel the heat that radiated from the grey seer’s frightened body, waves of dread and awe and unwilling supplication that struck him as most appeasing. Razzel flicked his claws at his horn chimes. It was a nervous tic that Queek was becoming increasingly familiar with – and irritated by. The seer seemed oblivious to the lifeless notes his efforts produced.

‘How long before reaching Black Crag?’ Queek asked.

‘That… um… that depends.’

‘Tell Queek that White-fur at least knows the way.’

‘He does!’ Razzel squeaked. ‘I mean, I do. More or less. Is just… I just…’

‘For certain, Old-thing will know. Where is he?’

‘I do not know, greatest of great of warlords. He never did wish-want to leave Azul-Place. Maybe he abandons his rightful leader to claim Deadclaw for himself. He always smelt ill-favoured to this humble servant. Traitorous.’

Queek snarled, the explicit threat not lost on his jabbering underling who swiftly clamped his running jaw shut. The seer’s lies had grown no more accomplished during the course of their conversation. ‘Do not try Queek. Go fetch-find, or Queek shows him up close the face of his god.’

Razzel nodded weakly, fully and rightfully anticipating his imperious warlord’s wrath. He glanced up, his eyes affixing on something just over Queek’s shoulder.

Queek shook his muzzle disappointedly. That was the oldest trick in the book.

‘Master,’ Ska shouted from below, ‘look-see.’

Queek considered for a moment that this might all be an elaborate ploy Ska and White-fur had cooked up to stab him in the back and toss him off a mountain, but swiftly rejected it. His faithful fangleader held him in sufficient awe to prefer a knife in the chest to the risk of his disfavour. Conspiring with the likes of White-fur was the last thing he would do. He turned and flung up his paws impatiently. ‘Look-see what? Can idiot-Ska fool-meat not see Queek is busy?’

Ska cringed and pointed, across the bowed heads of the chittering hordes and over the ridgeline to the pinnacle of another, even higher peak beyond. Silhouetted against the black sky in the clouded light of the moon was a feral shape, four-legged and powerful with a long snout that Queek’s imagination unhurriedly peopled with long razor-sharp fangs. The shadow shortened its stance, raised its muzzle to the sky and howled. It had a power, that otherworldly wail, a potency that had Razzel quivering at his footpaws like a newly bonded slave in the front rank of a skaven horde. It lingered overlong, echoing between ground and sky as though the clouds themselves held it in the grip of primordial dread. The beast shifted position to look his way. He saw a smaller shape seated upon it, skinny with what looked like a spear or possibly a bow in its spindly arms.

‘Wolf-riders,’ hissed Razzel from his position on the ground, head buried beneath his paws.

‘Queek wants one.’

‘They are scouts for green-thing armies. Very-very fast-quick. We never catch it, even if we knew this land as well as it must. It may be prudent to return to Deadclaw. Gorfang will know we come before our full army is on the surface.’

Queek snickered cruelly. He was beginning to like the surface world. It was filled with so many exciting new things. He watched as the beast turned and loped from view to bear word of Queek’s glorious coming.

‘Good-good. See it followed.’

Sharpwit hobbled through the eerily quiet lair of Burnstash. It made Deadclaw look like the slave markets of Skavenblight. All but the most destitute still shunned the fierce womb of fire that the great dragon had once called home. It struck him as poignant that even skaven society could have something even lower: escaped slaves, the maimed and the diseased, the heretical and the mad, the dregs that gnawed on its roots, subsisting off its cast-off things.

Mouldering lean-tos were scattered across the cavern floor, little more than scraps of rag clinging to stakes, fluttering silently in the hellish breeze that emanated from the deep earth like flakes of char from a fire. Encircling them like some noisome moat, semi-solid skaven waste gurgled turgidly through ancient gouged channels, piling into stinking mounds as the heat gradually dried it out. He hurried on, dizzy in the heat, disoriented by the silence, the imprint of the god-lizard’s scales on the close ceiling sneering down on the passage of lesser beings. He hunched closer. Quiet was one thing, but the place was deserted.

The dragon had not nested here by accident. There was no stronghold of skaven, dwarf, orc or – such as they were in this part of the world – men, within fifty leagues that could not be breached from these tunnels. Intolerable as they were, in the right paws these tunnels were a more formidable tool than any weapon fashioned in a Clan Skryre workshop, or any pox bred in the vats of Clan Pestilens. If a skaven knew how to use it, of course.

He crossed a creaking length of clapboard that had been laid across the stinking moat like a bridge. It took his weight with an ominous groan, his crutches clattering loudly in the silence. The sticky flow beneath his footpaws slurped with unnerving gaiety, like the runtish survivor of a cave-in, able to squeak to his heart’s content. He looked around nervously. Wood too rotten even for Deadclaw lay in uneven stacks steaming with their absent owners’ scent markings, bones picked bare and left for the malnourished rats that regarded him with idle hunger, rags strewn between the lazily wafting door-flaps, scattered as though by footpaws in a hurry. And not a single skaven in sight. Nor a single weapon.

Anxiously, he moistened his lips. He had the dreadful feeling that his long-treasured luck was about to run out.

Grimnir’s shrine was dark and quiet, a place where the prayers of the dishonoured might be heard. In burnished copper and bronze, the ancestor god of battle stood slightly greater than life size, glaring balefully down upon his spartan shrine. Or perhaps Grimnir truly had been that large. Muscles mounded from his naked torso like the heights of the Karaz Ankor, every square inch rippling testament to martial pride. Here stood Grimnir the peerless warrior who had marched alone into the madness of Chaos to do battle with the Great Powers themselves and whose deeds, seven thousand years past, remained unmatched for glory and for sheer dwarfish bloody-mindedness. His beard was full and proud. Tattoos scored his godlike frame in glittering tracks of powdered zinc. His expression was judgemental, aggrieved by the fall of the dwarfs, angered by their squandering of his sacrifice.

Handrik found it impossible to meet his eyes. He’d become an Ironbreaker to defend his home, but aside from a handful of skirmishes with half-starved thaggoraki in the pitch dark of the Underdeep what had he achieved? It seemed he was doomed to sit out the greatest battles, one way or another to let others suffer in his stead. Well, not this time.

The sprightly splash of water filtered through the oak doors from the fountain in the outer courtyard, twinned like life and death to the hypnotic crack and slide rhythm of a whetstone dragged across the blade of an axe. Handrik turned through the lingering trace of incense. An ugly and horrifically scarred dwarf sat with whetstone in hand and a battleaxe across his lap, according it the same doting attention a spendthrift longbeard might bestow upon his last gold coin. The Slayer sat on a stone bench, a mural depicting Grimnir on his legendary quest prominent behind his broad shoulders. His powerful chest was bare but for spidery knots of scar-white tissue and a pair of spiked leather braces. Blue tattoos crawled up the Slayer’s arms to his waxed head. His scalp gleamed in the chequered light of incense burners. His dishonour was further consecrated with the mutilation of his beard, rendered into a sharp orange wedge that thrust down between his knees. He offered a curt nod to Handrik before returning at once to his blade, the scrape of stone on metal an angels’ chorus to the warrior Grimnir.

‘Is Gunngeir still about?’ Handrik asked.

If the Slayer heard or understood, he gave no clear indication, continuing to work with a steady unbroken pace on his already keen blade. Handrik wondered if the dwarf was damaged in more ways than the physical. Everyone had heard tales of dwarfs whose dishonour was so great as to leave them broken in mind.

‘Where are you from, Slayer? What’s your name?’ He waited a moment, but the dwarf still offered nothing. ‘You don’t say much, do you?’

The whetstone paused partway around the rim of the blade. The Slayer cracked a smirk and tilted his chin to better display his savaged throat.

‘Aye, I understand. Here’s hoping the next blow strikes harder.’

The anonymous Slayer nodded his thanks, crossing his arms over the butt of his axe blade and leaning on its haft. He jabbed a thumb back at his scarred visage before uncurling a finger to point at Handrik.

And you as well.

Handrik answered with a stiff nod, his hand reaching without thinking to the poisonous wound over his heart. To think that it must come to this, to become like this, to defy his oaths of fealty and render himself unto dishonour. But it was necessary. Kazador had practically handed the keys of Karak Azul to a skaven flunkey. What would the truth do to a dwarf who many, the king himself most of all, already considered the accursed king of Azul? Instead of Handrik, it might be Kazador on his knees pledging his life to Grimnir. What price did he set on his own honour in comparison? What would he not give to spare his beloved king that shame? He took a deep breath and marshalled his pride. He would do anything. Even betray him.

‘I had not expected to see you here.’

The voice gave Handrik a start, but centuries of training wouldn’t let him show it.

A tanned and weather-worn dwarf in black robes emerged from the shadowed wings of the shrine. The priest of Grimnir scratched his unkempt beard and eyed him thoughtfully. ‘Handrik,’ the priest welcomed with a wide grin. ‘What could one so proud have done to warrant a journey down Grimnir’s path?’

Handrik scowled. Gunngeir was a notorious gossip. ‘None of your business.’

‘I suppose not,’ Gunngeir sighed.

Handrik felt little sympathy for the homeless wanderer and his lonely service to the lord of death. His heart was already bled dry.

‘There is only one reason that dwarfs attend the shrine of Grimnir.’ Gunngeir said, his manner taking on a deadly seriousness. ‘You are here to swear the oath of the Slayer?’

‘I am.’

‘To forswear your home, your family, your name?’

Handrik glanced back at the silent Slayer. He had paused in his work and watched the exchange with interest. Handrik looked away with a scowl. He didn’t care to do this for an audience. ‘Aye.’

‘Do you know the oath?’

‘Of course,’ Handrik grumbled. ‘Everybody does.’

‘Then recite it.’

‘I am a dwarf,’ Handrik snarled, dropping stiffly to his knees before the statue of Grimnir. ‘My honour is my life and without it I am nothing. I shall become a Slayer.’ His voice caught over the rest, as if his throat refused to admit the words. He looked deep within himself for the strength to proceed, realising even as he did so that on some level he wanted this, had always wanted this. For his fallen nephew Hallar, for his old friend Logan, for Kazrik’s shame, for supping ale in the Underdeep while savages ransacked his home, for kneeling here nursing his own disgrace while youngsters like Thordun and Lothgrim bled at his behest.

‘And the rest,’ Gunngeir whispered softly.

‘I’ll do it in my own good time,’ Handrik snapped back. He took a deep breath and went on. ‘I shall seek redemption in the eyes of my ancestors. I shall become as death to my enemies. Until I face him that takes my life. And my shame.’

Handrik’s fingers felt for the golden beads braided into his beard. All four hundred and one of them. The first had been a gift from his grandfather on the passing of his first year and he had received sixty-seven more before the old dwarf had journeyed to the Ancestors’ Hall. His father had taken that same road just the year before, an urk bludgeon to the shoulder striking a loose link of his own mail into his heart. He recalled the face of the armourer’s apprentice who had sewn the shirt. As if it were yesterday. The boy had been no older than Thordun, same golden hair, same smooth skin, that selfsame intent to do right without the earned wisdom to know how. The lad had shorn his head and pledged the Slayer Oath right there. With a surprising stab of regret he realised he had no idea what had become of that dwarf. Couldn’t even remember his name. He sincerely hoped he had found a worthy doom. He would seek him out when he joined him in the Ancestors’ Hall. Share a pint or three and reminisce on the mightiness of their ends.

He removed the clasps one by one, placing them reverently into a glittering pile at Grimnir’s feet. He felt an overwhelming giddiness, his honour gone, his wealth gone, all his years reduced to this pile of gold. There was nothing left but his axe and a bitter scrap of pride. It was as if he floated, such was the sudden easing of his burden. It was not an altogether ill feeling. Gunngeir bade him remove his shirt and he did so. The priest gasped at the lurid wound above his heart. Some warpstone foulness kept it from closing, partially clotted blood oozing unceasingly from the ruptured flesh, the surrounding tissue crusted and black like that of an ancient corpse. Handrik spread his beard to obscure it, pointedly inviting no inquiry.

Gunngeir’s face dropped in disappointment and, grumbling, he disappeared into the darkened recesses of the shrine, reappearing with a cracked leather case and a bucket of orange lime. Handrik noticed the priest had donned an apron and an orange-stained leather gauntlet in which he held a grobi-bone comb, the teeth gummed together by thick lime. Handrik’s face twisted into a grimace, nose hairs shrivelling before the overpowering citrus reek.

‘Is there anyone I should pass these to?’ Gunngeir asked, indicating the jumbled heap of gold.

‘I’ve no family, the urk saw to that.’

‘A friend then?’

‘I’m old, priest. I’ve outlasted most of those I called friend. After today, I’ll have fewer still.’

‘A more distant relative perhaps?’

Handrik thought on that as the priest knelt before him, comb burrowing for his chin. His head yanked up and down as Gunngeir dragged the comb through his beard, the proud grey reduced streak by streak to a vivid orange. He grunted stoically at the needling pain. It was nothing. ‘See them given to Thordun Locksplitter.’

‘Thordun?’ the priest asked, surprised. ‘I hadn’t realised the two of you were close.’

‘Nor had I.’

‘I hear the boy is recently departed for the Black Crag.’

‘Gossip travels swiftly, I see.’

The priest produced a thin smile. Finishing with Handrik’s beard, he rose and circled to take up position at his back. Handrik felt the sticky teeth bite into his scalp as the comb tugged his thick mane of granite-grey hair.

‘You aren’t the first of the dishonoured I’ve tended today. I’ve not seen so many of one clan so close in succession since the year Snorri Stoutgirth lost the last brewery on the old Silverspear Road.’ The priest looked wistful, as though reminiscing over lost love. ‘The Hammerhands bear their share of Thane Hrathgar’s disgrace. They were already set on journeying together to Karak Eight Peaks and apparently Thordun offered an alternative that appealed to their new calling.’

Handrik snorted. ‘So much for secrecy. The boy worries too much.’

Gunngeir chuckled knowingly. ‘Regardless, perhaps you’d be advised to choose another heir for your wealth.’

‘No. Thordun will do just fine. I’ll just have to ensure he makes it back.’

‘So you’ll be accompanying the youngling on his errand?’ Handrik felt the priest nod approvingly. ‘There’ll be danger enough to share, I daresay.’

‘My thanks.’

‘We were heading that way ourselves,’ Gunngeir added conversationally, indicating the silent Slayer with a tilt of his head. ‘You need no special gift to see the dark wind blowing so many to their doom.’

‘We go to our ends. You’ll find few in need of your services in Karak Drazh.’

‘Perhaps, but where he goes I go.’

Handrik’s eyes swivelled in their sockets to take in the massive Slayer, his attention now riveted once again to sharpening his axe. ‘Who is he?’

‘Just a dwarf,’ Gunngeir shrugged. ‘I’ve followed him for many years now, since a chance encounter in the ruins of Karak Azgal–’

‘Karak Izril.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Her founders named her Izril, for the gold that shone like stars from her rocks. A few grobi can’t dim the brilliance of her stones, and a true dawi shouldn’t let the memory fade.’

‘Karak Izril then,’ Gunngeir smiled. He looked across at the anonymous Slayer. The dwarf did not look back. ‘I still don’t know his name, but his deeds are worthy of remembrance. Perhaps I can record your doom as well, Handrik, if I should be fortunate enough to survive it?’

‘Don’t get your hopes too high. Fortune’s in short supply of late.’ His eyes rolled up to follow the priest’s progress. ‘Could you work any slower? I’ve places to be, thaggoraki in need of my axe.’

‘A dwarf becomes a Slayer the moment he chooses to be,’ Gunngeir said with the faintest whisper of a smile. ‘If you were in such a damned rush, why come to me at all?’

‘There’s a right way and a wrong way for everything, priest,’ Handrik muttered. ‘Particularly now.’

Gunngeir chuckled, patting Handrik’s shoulder to indicate that he might rise.

Handrik’s beard was a vibrant orange, the lime paste crusting it into jagged points as though some sorcerer had employed a shard of crystal to capture a flame. His head was similarly dyed but unfinished, the lurid colouring broken by shocks of grey. His arms and bare chest were swollen hard with old muscle. Gunngeir regarded him, well satisfied. He bent to lay down the comb and opened the leather case that he had set upon the ground, withdrawing a long slender-bladed knife. The dagger’s hilt was shaped into a semblance of bones, the blade etched with black runes like the engravings on a tomb. The priest raised the weapon. Blue ink dripped from its razor tip.

‘Are you ready?’

Handrik nodded solemnly. ‘Aye.’

Sharpwit’s ears twitched to a half-heard sound. He stopped to listen. It was coming from the northbound tunnel to Black Crag on the far side of the shanty, a distant and growing growl. For a split second of irrational horror he feared a dragon had returned to its lair, but the rumble soon distinguished itself into something more mundane: the pounding of many pairs of paws, the panicked chittering of hundreds of fleeing skaven. The relief he felt was short-lived.

They were fleeing right towards him.

Sharpwit vented the musk of fear and cast about for something solid to hide behind but could see nothing sturdier than the hide wall of the nearest shack. Beggars not being choosers, he ducked behind it, his lone eye tightly closed, a murmured prayer that the Horned Rat spare his humble minion on his lips.

It seemed the Great Schemer heeded the prayers of cripples this day.

The cavern shook to the force of an explosion, a geyser of grey ash blasting from the tunnel mouth and scorching across the desolate town like a marauding dragon. Sharpwit buried his muzzle in his paws and whimpered as hot ash pummelled his pathetic shelter. The scrap of hide rippled under the onslaught, burning dust howling through the deserted streets to either side like looters, kicking open door-flaps, and claiming everything unrestrained.

As suddenly as it had erupted into life, the blast settled. The latent scent of dust tickled the back of his throat. He coughed sharply, struggling to suppress the fit that came snapping on its tail like a starving rat after a mouse, sleeve pressed tight to his snout. He scuttled from hiding on all fours. The explosion’s aftermath left a ringing silence. He strained until his ears throbbed with imagined perils, but there was nothing to hear but the groaning movement of rock and the occasional patter of loose rubble. The skaven had been cut off or killed. Sharpwit wheezed a sigh of relief. He pulled away his sleeve and sniffed at the air. The sulphurous bite of gunpowder was a lingering trace, as familiar as the bitterness of his own musk. His heart skipped a beat, racing into a frantic pace as though compensating for the lost effort. The strain on the aging muscle made him feel faint.

Divide and destroy. Classic dwarfish tactics when assaulting a more numerous foe. That could mean only one thing. The dwarfs were coming.

No. Worse. The dwarfs were here.

His gaze snapped towards one of the southbound tunnels, the one that had borne Queek’s army to Karak Azul. Vibrations passed through the rock in solid and unbroken rhythm, its tremors exciting his already skittish paws, urging them to flight only to find his limbs frozen. He sank back, deeper into his hiding place, his flushed glands straining in vain to emit fresh musk.

As he watched, the first Ironbreaker emerged from the darkness of the tunnel. Others followed, immensely armoured bodies in ranks of four that manoeuvred smoothly to become ranks of eight, broad shields locking remorselessly into an unbroken wall of gromril, hand-axes glinting in the glimstone torches some of the dwarfs carried affixed to their helms. Rather than move to avoid the ramshackle skaven dwellings as they came upon them, the lead dwarf simply put his gromril boot through the sidewall of a rotten shed-like building. The twice-scavenged plywood construct collapsed like a house of feathers without causing the dwarf to slow. He barged through the debris as though he felt nothing. And perhaps he did not. His face was sealed beneath a fearsome helm, even his beard sheathed in starmetal scales.

Sharpwit jerked into life as the ranks of dwarfs followed their leader, the far end of the cavern suddenly erupting in an explosion of wood splinters and cave rot spores. Even if they didn’t spot him, their blundering feet would surely crush him.

He spun away, overcome by a sudden longing to be in Deadclaw, surrounded by a host of his beloved brother skaven.

Thordun closed his eyes and kissed his hammer’s glowing blue rune. The act had become habit, and he persisted even though the hammer was not his. The Locksplitter heirloom would remain safe in Karak Azul, even if he could not.

He shrugged off the maudlin ritual, trying instead to concentrate on the map being unfurled against the wall by a fiercely crested Slayer. Somewhere beneath the bright orange mohawk and freshly scabrous tattoos, he recognised the craggy face of Thane Hrathgar’s icon bearer, Rorrick Hammerhand. Thordun studied the parchment until his vision blurred. It made no sense whatsoever, lines bisecting one another seemingly at random, triangles forming from nowhere, and the whole thing scattered with illegible runes. He would’ve happily cursed Handrik to eternity if not for the happy chance that Rorrick and his brethren were familiar with its coded markings. He glanced over his shoulder to where two more Slayers stood sullenly among his men. They had barely spoken to him before their disgrace, and they seemed to like him still less now.

Rorrick traced a fat finger along one of the lines. ‘Here’s the passage to Black Crag. It cuts down, joins in with others here.’ He tapped at an intersection. ‘Then it runs true all the way north.’ He picked out a number of cross symbols along the way. ‘These are where the Engineers’ Guild set traps after the last attack. They keep the blasted urk in their place, but we should get by no bother.’ The finger started moving again. ‘Then we climb steadily up, right to the Third Deep, out by the Throne Hall. Or what’s left of it. We’ll need to cross the Mordrekk Bridge. Could be tricky, that. I’d have it guarded, if I were a sensible orc.’

‘You think it will be?’

‘You ever met a sensible orc?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Well there you are then. We’ll either walk it or have to fight for it. No way to know until we get there really, is there?’

‘How can you be certain this is where Kazador’s kinsdwarfs will be?’

‘Can’t be totally sure. But Gorfang would want his prisoners near his own wretched throne, and it’s where old Yorri Borkodin was convinced they’d be.’

‘Who?’

‘For shame, beardling.’ Rorrick shook his head disappointedly. ‘He was a dwarf of the Eight Peaks and a friend. He claimed descent from the Karak Drazh Borkodins, and had many maps of the hold’s interior thought long lost. He was the last honoured soul to make the journey from Black Crag to the Ancestors’ Hall. I’d pay more heed to my own history, were I in your place.’

Thordun bit his tongue and said instead, ‘Tell me about this bridge.’

‘Karak Drazh is split by the same fault that runs under Karak Azul. The Mordrekk is its Third Deep crossing. Very defensible, as I say, but a beautiful piece of stone-craft.’ A mournful look crossed the dwarf’s fearsome visage. ‘It’d be an honour to go to my doom on it.’ He smiled in grim anticipation and dragged his finger back across the chart, settling it over a black square. ‘And this is where the squatter king entered Karak Azul last time.’

‘Right here?’ Thordun asked.

Rorrick pulled down the map, folded it messily, and shoved it under his belt as they all looked at the unpropitious stretch of grey wall.

‘Right here.’

Thordun stepped forward, hands held palm open over the stones, almost fearful, as if to touch them would be to somehow share in the horrors they’d been party to.

‘To think your folk forgot this door was here,’ Rorrick snorted.

Thordun made no answer, though he felt sure the fallen glory of Karak Eight Peaks was by now a mad adder’s nest of forgotten ways and half-dug tunnels.

‘I hope someone took the Slayer Oath over this,’ Rorrick went on, grouchily ignorant that he was being ignored.

‘I’m sure they did,’ Thordun snapped, feeling a growing dislike for the judgemental Slayer, so like his late kinsdwarf. ‘And I believe it none of your business either way.’

Rorrick cleared his throat and looked down his beard, chastened.

From behind him, Bernard’s gruff chuckle came to further grate his nerves.

‘Told him, eh?’

‘You shut up too,’ he growled. The man looked drawn and swayed as though still drunk. Thordun felt nothing but contempt for him. He didn’t know why he had pressed Handrik for leniency when the longbeard had barged into their quarters ready to tear the man limb from limb. The old dwarf’s very graphic threats had done the trick though, and it would take just one word from Thordun to see those threats carried out. He glanced over at Rorrick and the other Slayers. He doubted that any of those three would be so accepting of the thagi in their midst. Suppressing the temptation, he looked up at the ceiling and pressed the hammer to his chest, hoping to draw from its strength.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be returning that?’ Bernard drawled, not taking the hint, without even the decency to sound ashamed of himself.

Thordun studied again the weapon he held, the hammer of Hrathgar Hammerhand. He had salvaged it from the thane’s body after the battle, having witnessed its potency from afar. It had seemed a shame to let it just lie there. ‘I will, as soon as we’re done.’

‘You can try Splitter, but you’ll never change. Once a thief, always a thief.’

‘I said I’ll return it,’ Thordun barked. ‘We’re just taking the long way around.’

‘Sure we are. As if you, me or that bloody hammer will see sunshine again.’

‘Come on, umgelski,’ Rorrick growled. Thordun hardened his face to the taunt. Man-lover. The Slayer glared at them, impatiently turning the spike atop his hammer to scratch the scabs from his cheek. ‘We have to beat the scourge of the Eight Peaks to his prize, am I right?’ The other Slayers nodded agreement. Even some of Thordun’s own seemed eager to be off, somehow touched by the dwarfs’ mania.

Thordun pressed his face against the wall. Sounds filtered through the stonework, a rumble reminiscent of the dawn carts on the cobbles of Nuln, imbued by his imagination with the thunder of battle, the clamour of skaven steel on sturdy dwarfish shields. The battle was being fought many miles deep, far too great a distance, but it was being fought nonetheless, whether he heard it or not.

‘More haste, youngling,’ Rorrick pressed. ‘Others march to their doom and I’d like to find mine.’

Fastening the warhammer to his back, Thordun drew its much smaller cousin from his tool belt. His nails probed for cracks in the mortar between the stones.

‘Then let’s get this girl open.’

Sharpwit squealed and ducked beneath a falling stanchion. Deadclaw was coming apart around his ears. There were screams coming from everywhere, bodies darting between the supporting joists, the musky scent of terror all his nose would report. He snatched at the relative solidity of a bleached beam, risking a backward glance, and moaned in fright. Lame as he was, he could still outrun a dwarf, but the long traverse to Deadclaw had tired him. And the dwarfs were relentless. He scrambled along the beam, landing in a heap of weary bones, paws clasped to his racing heart. He gasped for breath. His chest felt filled with acid.

A series of cracks rent the air, amplified and magnified by the enclosed cavern into a thunder that Sharpwit felt convinced must bring the whole cavern down. He watched fearfully from his hiding place. Skaven swarmed the rat-runs that criss-crossed Deadclaw’s leaning towers. Some bore warplock jezzails, bulky barrels rested on crooked handrails or window ledges, maddened bodies jostling them, fangs clenched in concentration as they opened fire on the dwarfs below. Sharpwit’s heart beat against his back teeth. He counted the muzzle flashes, arriving at twice thirteen. An auspicious number. He shuffled around, wrapped his claws over the pathetic wooden barrier and drew himself up so his one working eye poked over its gnawed frame just as another volley rang out from above. The dwarfs advanced through the hail of warpstone shells as though it were merely that. Hail. The pinnacle of skaven weapons-craft bouncing harmlessly off impervious gromril hides.

The respite had not eased the tightening pain in his chest. In fact the sight of those murderous metal suits clanking ever closer did him little good at all. They were now so close that the terrified wails of his worthless brother skaven were drowned under the metallic pounding of their boots. Deciding that Deadclaw would probably manage just fine without him, he steadied himself against the support of the diagonal beam, tail looping to gather his crutches and deposit them in his paws.

He started from cover just as an axe bit into the tower at his back. Skaven wailed in terror as the ground lurched beneath them. Like ambitious ratkin, the giant platforms fell on the weakness of those below. The whole construct appeared to collapse in stages, tearing down the maze of gantries and rat-runs, shedding screeching bodies like black seed to the wind as they fell.

Sharpwit ran from the falling giant, glancing over his shoulder as the thing came down only for a furry corpse, malicious even in death, to catch his footpaw and send him sprawling. He hugged the body to his, rolling beneath it as a swarm of splinters cast out from the tower’s crushed foundations buzzed through the air, shredding the hide from the body right down to Sharpwit’s trembling paws. The whole world seemed enveloped by its howling, as though obliterated by a ravenous swarm of daemonic hornets. He coughed, his throat irritated by the dust, dreading to think what a mess it would make of his lungs. He gave a bloody cackle. As if it weren’t already too late for that. The dwarfs crunched through it all, undaunted by the warped wood crashing over their sealed helms.

Coughing blood, Sharpwit cast off the lacerated corpse. At least some skaven were now fighting back, but it was the last spiteful act of cornered beasts. The wretches went down under the axes of the dwarfs with the most pitiful of screams. Others battled for the dubious safety of the towers while those already in the surviving towers struggled desperately to get down.

A unit of spear-rats shuffled unwilling into the fray, goaded forward by a warlock engineer holding a pair of warplock pistols at their backs. The dwarfs tore into the reluctant ranks like the fist of vengeance. Rusted spear points sundered on starmetal plates, skaven throwing themselves on the dwarfs’ axes with knives and claws and a ferocity born of terror. They didn’t make a scratch. Fangs sprayed from a skaven jaw as it bit down on a gromril coif just as a wayward pistol shot blasted the clanrat’s brains over his unflustered victim. Squealing in panic, the engineer hurled his warplock into the melee and scampered for whatever dark hole he hoped to find before death could pursue.

The mass of rats had at least slowed the dwarfs down.

Good, Sharpwit thought, they bought him some time. Frantically he tried to think. It was no good simply running deeper into Deadclaw. That was exactly where the dwarfs would follow. He cast about for something familiar. The place was riddled with bolt-holes and forgotten tunnels. Could it really be that he couldn’t find one now, precisely when he needed one most?

Think!

He scurried through the mat of trampled skaven bodies to a confluence of alleyways. Furry bodies littered the crumbling streets, forcing Sharpwit to slow to keep from tripping again. Three towers loomed over him, swarming with terrified clanrats. The shrill note of their terror was only marginally more comforting than that of their kin dying beneath dwarfish axes. He recognised this place. He struggled to quell the urgency of flight and forced his brain to work. There was a way out here. Quickly, he scanned the three towers. One of them was constructed of old larch wood at the base. Red paint peeled off in the heat. It looked like it might have come from a boat, though the Horned Rat alone knew how it had come to rot so far beneath the Worlds Edge Mountains. That was it. He dived inside.

The interior was packed with musky skaven bodies, many of them in the copper plate and red robes of Clan Skryre. Within the anxious crowd, two score sweating clanrats were working, without great success, to force a large wooden crate into a tunnel. Those not directly involved in the work cast longing glances at the tunnel mouth that seduced with its promise of salvation. Sharpwit wondered who could be so obsessed with the contents of a box that they would risk their hide beneath the stampeding footpaws of their own minions.

‘Sharpwit!’ squeaked a shrill voice.

He scanned the crowded darkness. Every face looked alike to his dim sight, even scent rendered homogeneous by the cloud of fear. Movement caught his eye and he focused on it. A skaven hopped up and down on the roof of the crate, a whirring copper helm cupped around his ears, a gigantic warplock cradled in his paws. ‘Fizqwik,’ he called back. ‘It is great-good to find you.’ And he meant it. The more bodies between himself and those dwarfs the better.

Sharpwit struggled deeper into the press of bodies, taking small solace in the frightened warmth and familiar scents, but even the nervous chittering couldn’t deafen him to the crunch of splintered wood, the plaintive squeals of the trapped and the dying, the remorseless thump of dwarfish boots coming nearer, nearer.

Fizqwik screamed at his lackeys to hurry, aiming his warplock to make a bloody brain-blasted example of one. The clanrat cowered and redoubled his efforts. Sharpwit was glad, not that he overly cared for the Skryre clanrats, but there were few enough left as it was and, more pertinently, the dwarfs might have heard the shot. Queek had known this would happen, Sharpwit realised. Why else leave a rival with his power base intact? He couldn’t help but feel admiration for the base cunning. Mad he may be, but Queek was not stupid, there was no longer any doubt of that.

‘Dig around the edges, stupid-meat.’ This last was directed at the sweating clanrats, followed by a furious tirade of threats and abuse.

‘Nothing could be so precious, if you forgive this Old-thing. Think of the loss-harm to Skavendom if the great Fizqwik were killed in this unworthy place.’

Fizqwik spun around mid-expletive. His lips pulled up into a snarl and his paw slowly rose to his muzzle to adjust the dial on his green-lensed ocular. ‘You will see when it is ready,’ was the engineer’s cryptic response. Sharpwit shrank before the unyielding stare as the wheel clicked around. He wondered what it did. He fervently hoped it did nothing.

His mayfly mind distracted by more pressing concerns, Fizqwik spun around to lambast his lazy minions, bashing one tawny-furred clanrat between the ears with his weapon stock as it tried to dig. Realising that the warlock probably would rather they all perish than sacrifice his damnable box, Sharpwit limped to the wall. Lifting one crutch in both paws, he half thrust, half fell against it, levering it violently up and down to shake loose a clod of earth. As he did so, he imagined it was Fizqwik’s head coming off his shoulders, but he kept his head down just in case the warlock’s strange eye really could capture his murderous thoughts.

A moan of anguish passed through the gathered dwarfs as a familiar figure crunched over the wreckage of the Underdeep. Familiar, but now so very different, chest bare but for fresh tattoos, grey hair streaked with orange. They lowered their axes from their butcher’s work, and all eyes followed the path of the Slayer and those few that followed in his footsteps.

‘Dreng tromm,’ they cried, tearing off their helms and tugging savagely at their beards as they wept. ‘Dreng tromm.’

Handrik spared none of them a glance as he strode between them. He didn’t trust his composure that far. These were dwarfs he had known all their lives, taught them as youngsters to wield axe and shield, watched them grow into proud longbeards he was honoured to fight alongside. Even the sight of a skaven lair reduced to so much matchwood failed to lift his spirits. Shattered kindling lay in mountainous piles throughout the cavern, controlled fires blazing wherever the rotten heaps rose highest. A pair of miners, visible by their dark silhouette against the flames, shovelled skaven corpses onto a growing fire. The scent of roasted meat reached Handrik’s nostrils and he inhaled deeply, turning to face the dwarfs just as their captain burst through his grieving soldiers.

Lothgrim ripped free his helmet, hurling it down before he too followed it to the ground. ‘Why, Handrik? I’d hoped I heard wrong. This wasn’t necessary.’

‘Aye, it was. And I should’ve had the guts to do it long ago.’

‘Then we will fight with you!’ Lothgrim shouted, and the dwarfs chorused their approval. Ironbreakers, miners and engineers, dawi all, united in courage and honour.

Handrik waved down their appeals and turned to share a glance with those dwarfs that had followed him from the light of Karak Azul into this fallen place. The hermit, Gunngeir, offered an irreverent wink, uncaring for Handrik’s scowl, while the anonymous Slayer, a grim slab of grudgement by his side, afforded a grave nod. He craned his neck over the other shoulder to where Keldur and Narfi flanked a third dwarf, head down, cloaked and hooded in black robes of similar cut to Grimnir’s priest. But this dwarf was a fighter; that much alone was plain in his bearing, if nothing else. The two Hammerers stuck to him like wasps in mead and, though Handrik had been unable to pry the stranger’s name from their lips, he’d been assured that their friend had a greater grudge against the squatter king than any dwarf still living. That had been enough for Handrik.

Handrik bent painfully to offer Lothgrim his hand. The captain took it at the wrist and Handrik hauled him to his feet. ‘I’ll take any that volunteer,’ he barked, whipping up a finger to stifle Lothgrim’s immediate offer. ‘But none of your lot, lad. You’ve a duty down here, and I’ll not see the lot of you following me to Grimnir’s shrine.’

Lothgrim scowled but didn’t argue.

‘Who here remembers what happened fifteen years ago?’ Handrik roared.

There was a grumbled chorus of ‘Ayes’ from the gathered dwarfs. A few of the Ironbreakers shuffled and cursed.

‘Who here feels vengeance has waited far too long?’

The dwarfs growled, remembering blood-soaked halls, looted treasures, absent kinsdwarfs.

‘Who here wants a queen restored to her throne and to her king?’

‘Aye, I do!’ shouted a bleak-faced miner, face and beard choked in soot from feeding the funeral pyres. His expression remained one of rigid disgruntlement, even as his neighbours roared him on, slapping his back with approval.

‘With me then, lads!’ Handrik bellowed. ‘For the honour of Azul! And the tearing of a few shades of green off the squatter king!’ He thrust his axe high above his head, reflected flames finding their mirror in the hearts of the watching dwarfs, fuelling their hunger to inflict the same and more on their enemies. ‘Khazuk!’ he screamed, the ancient battle-cry of the dwarfs.

The throng erupted with the anger of the karag, fists and voices raised as one, braceleted wrists and eager blades ignited with shared fire. Their cries joined with his, shouting themselves hoarse with the long-resisted urge to vengeance.

‘Khazuk!’

They were few.

‘Khazuk!’

But they were dwarfs. Numbers had seldom been their friend.

‘Khazuk!’

Handrik felt their determination lift him, pain a bleak memory. It could be done. It would be done.

The dwarfs were coming.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Skiblit grinned broadly, dagger teeth pale white in the light of the single torch, and threw down his cards. Curses and groans passed round the circle of goblin faces as he reached forward to draw in the pile of beans and pebbles.

A sound like a coming storm filtered through the thick granite walls of the old stuntie watchtower. Even down here in the cellar, with its grey walls and warped barrels slimy with pale fungus, the big boss’s war band was impossible to avoid. He frowned, trying not to think about it. Safer all round that way really. He doubted anyone would miss him and his crew and he was perfectly happy keeping his head down and letting the whole thing blow over. There’d be plenty more than beans and pebbles lying around for the picking when the Red Fang tribe were through bashing heads.

‘It’s not fair,’ complained Leekey, crossing his knobbly arms about his chest in a huff. ‘You win every time.’

A loud clank sounded from the sewer grating behind Leekey’s back. Apart from Skiblit, who spared an annoyed looked over the cross-legged circle of his crew, nobody paid it any mind.

‘That’s ’coz I’m the chief.’

‘Yeah but–’

‘Are you sayin’ I’m cheatin’?’

‘No!’

Skiblit eyed the scrawny goblin, unconvinced. ‘Well, alright then. Another hand?’ He was answered by an unenthusiastic mumbling of assent. ‘Good.’ He snatched the cards from the others’ hands and shuffled them into the deck. The game was simpler when only one player was cheating.

‘Do you reckon they’re done fightin’ yet?’ asked Codgrub as a pile of cards appeared beneath his long nose. He swept them up and studied them nearsightedly, his nose hooking over the top as though hiding from his fish-faced ugliness.

‘Dunno,’ Skiblit muttered through gritted teeth, continuing to dole out cards with a particularly vicious toss in Codgrub’s direction.

‘I hear the big boss has everybody out,’ Codgrub persisted, as ever unable to let a thing go.

‘Shut up and play,’ said Skiblit.

‘Wakgob said he saw ratties, thousands of ’em. Said he saw the banner of…’ He paused, his audience captivated. Even Skiblit leant forward, mentally kicking himself all the same. ‘The Headtaker.’

A murmur of fear passed from mouth to mouth. Leekey trembled like an orphaned nutcracker chick, suddenly screaming his lumpy little face off as Codgrub stabbed his fingers under his armpits, shouted ‘Boo!’ and fell about laughing. Gumrot and Thiknut cackled in delight, singing ‘Headtaker’ and lobbing their precious beans.

‘Shut it, the lot o’ you, ’fore someone ’ears.’ Skiblit snarled. Judging from the smell, Leekey had just pissed himself. The name was earned. ‘Nuthin’ to worry about, Leekey.’ He shifted about to the sour-faced goblin that stood sentry on the heavy oak door. ‘No one’s comin’ lookin’ for us, ain’t that right, Gumrot?’

Gumrot gave the bolt a disinterested rattle. It didn’t budge. ‘Prob’ly.’

Skiblit shot him an annoyed glare. That was likely as good as it got. ‘See,’ he said, turning back to Leekey.

‘I bet this Headtaker int all that anyway.’

‘Shut yer gob, Thiknut. Ain’t nobody asked you.’

‘Yeah,’ Codgrub nodded, as though Skiblit had just waved the red flag to pipe up. ‘Remember what he did to Boss Blacktooth? And after? Shoulda seen the state o’ the place when the ratties got shoved out. I was moppin’ that floor for a month.’

‘Heads,’ Leekey whimpered. ‘Heads everywhere. Starin’ at me…’

Skiblit leant forward and cuffed Codgrub across the ear. The smaller goblin yelped in surprise, rubbing the side of his head with a resentful look at his boss.

‘See what yer did? Yer set ’im off again. Ain’t our problem now is it? Besides, it ain’t Morglum Blacktooth he’s up against this time. Nah, he’s riled up the big boss ’isself. Let’s ’ang tough and see what Gorfang makes o’ the Headtaker, eh?’

‘Headtaker…’ Leekey murmured, rocking on his haunches.

Ignoring his cracked subordinate, Skiblit looked down at his cards, just as another deep clank sounded from the old iron grille. He looked up again, more than annoyed this time. The corroded bars sat within the walls like rotten teeth in a stumproot addict’s mouth, brown flecks peeling off the gums. The bang came again, a solid smash, tolling once and then shuddering to quiet like a struck shield.

How was a goblin supposed to concentrate with this racket?

‘It’s still goin’ on,’ Skiblit hinted, shoving at the arch of Leekey’s foot with his toes

‘Aww, chief.’

‘Just sort it out, ’fore I sort you out.’

‘Yes chief,’ Leekey moaned, shuffling to his feet, Codgrub and Thiknut breaking into a squabble to peek at his abandoned cards. ‘Its nuffin’, chief.’

‘You ain’t even lookin’’ Skiblit returned, without bothering to look up.

Grumbling, Leekey tiptoed closer to the grille, as nervous as Skiblit about things that lurked in the dark.

The grille gave one more crash that had Leakey screaming and the rest of them in giggles. The mirth choked when, with one last calamitous note, the grille crashed inward. The flagstones split under the weight, only Leekey’s nervous reflexes sparing him a busted toe. The goblin hopped back and stared down at his feet, counting his blessings one to ten in the wriggling digits a snotling’s fart from a quarter ton of ancient metal. Rank air washed up from whatever dank hole that grating had fed. It stank of dead water and old sweaty rock, it smelt like wet rat.

‘Oh, crud!’

Leekey was still staring, struggling somewhere between five and six, most likely, when his upper body exploded, plastering the gaping goblins with sticky red gore. The blast was so loud it seemed to physically shake the walls. Leekey, living up to his name even in death, finally stopped spurting and toppled over. Skiblit vomited his breakfast onto the flagstones. The opening spewed green smoke like that from a shaman’s pipe, dancing devils shaping into snarling red-coloured ratties. Codgrub and Thiknut were down in a blink, still trying to draw their own steel as rusted blades carved them up faster than his eyes could follow. More were coming through. He caught the wink of copper in firelight, a black and white furred thing with a whirring hat. It noticed him notice it and flashed its teeth, brilliant white against the shadow like a shaman’s bones cast into a fire’s embers to prophesy blood. It sighted him down a monstrous gun barrel and he looked back, mesmerised by the weird green eye that spun of its own will in its copper socket.

He drew his gut-sticker, for all the good it was going to do. ‘What’re you waitin’ for?’ He turned to Gumrot, terror ratcheting his voice to an astonishing pitch. ‘Open that door!’

‘This does not look-smell like the City of Pillars.’

Sharpwit smirked. In his infinite wisdom, Fizqwik had entrusted Sharpwit to lead him to the safety of the Clan Mors stronghold. After his original guide had clumsily tripped, fallen and tragically impaled himself through the throat on Sharpwit’s crutch of course. ‘We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere,’ he replied straight-facedly.

‘If you are lost-lost, I will have-take you for weapon practice.’

‘Not lost,’ Sharpwit bowed. They had surfaced in an old ale cellar, though it might now quite easily be mistaken for one of the feeding pens of Hell Pit. Meat and gristle clung to the walls like ticks to a skaven’s fur, broken spears indistinguishable from severed arms, such was the indiscriminate lashing of blood. One of the goblins still lived, that much was apparent from its screams, although Sharpwit doubted it was overly thankful for that. Spindly green arms thrashed, its body hidden behind a pair of clanrat warriors, their muzzles ripping into its warm flesh, only spurred to greater heights of feeding frenzy by its tortured howls.

He limped through the green-tinged smog and coughed. He had explicitly told Fizqwik not to fire his weapon down here, but could the fool resist? No, no he could not. He took a deep, shuddering breath, euphoria rushing into his blood with the warpstone-tainted air. He felt young again, powerful. His claws clenched around his crutches, as if he could crush them with his bare paws, cast them down and walk. He gritted his fangs and fought the dulling effect of the warpstone fumes. The wave ebbed and he sagged against his crutches with the return of every momentarily forgotten ache. He groaned, hip audibly cracking as he attempted a forward step. Some of the trappings of age he had no need to exaggerate. Perhaps a little addlement would be no bad thing.

The goblin had stopped screaming. The last echoes of its death tingled in Sharpwit’s ears, clinging to life, to memory, to that last record of its pitiful, soon forgotten, existence. What was its name? What actions had it taken that had left the world changed? Did any still live that would remember? Or was every poor wretch that could have answered accounted for in this miasma of viscera? Life was so transient, so fragile.

He waved his paw through the cloying fumes and looked for Fizqwik, locating the engineer by the whirring sound of his helmet. ‘This is an old-lost dwarf-thing tower built-made to watch Death Pass. Many millennia old, but dwarf-things, they build to stay.’ He turned slowly around, getting his bearings, pointing an arm due east. ‘That way is the City of Pillars, and that way…’ He pointed in the opposite direction, coincidentally the position of a heavy oak door. He hobbled slowly towards it. ‘That way is Black Crag.’

Fizqwik snarled, but it was a belated cover. Sharpwit read the scent of his fear all too well. ‘How close-near is Black Crag?’

‘Close enough.’

‘Can you guide us back?’

Sharpwit shrugged. A corpse lay in the open doorway where it had tried to flee, the back of its head burst open like an egg. The skull was a mess of sticky black tendrils and indistinct pink mush. He could tell it was the back only because of the orientation of its arms and legs. He stepped over the body and out onto a staircase that spiralled upward, lichen sprouting tentatively from cracks in the ancient stonework. He drew a breath of cool uncorrupted air before the warpstone haze drifted out to claim that too. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Fizqwik amidst a milling crowd of his warriors. All of them were watching him, hanging on his next breath, the weak ever craving the paw of the strong, a natural law as inviolate as death. And what did the strong crave? He smiled grimly, pain crippling his chest as if the weight of years was a vice over his ribs. The clanrats cowered from the misinterpreted display of glowing fangs.

They wished to stay strong.

‘I can,’ he hissed. ‘But I won’t.’

Fizqwik stepped forward. ‘You take us away-back or I–’

‘Or what?’ Sharpwit snickered. ‘You think you find your own way back? Then go run-crawl. Maybe you distract the dwarf-things coming after us.’

‘I hear-scent no dwarf-things,’ said Fizqwik sulkily. ‘I think you lie.’

‘Of course they follow-chase,’ Sharpwit snapped. It was unlikely, but too much honesty was a poor trait in a leader. He had been careful, doubling back and leading them several times down side tunnels, ostensibly to throw off any pursuers but with the not inconsiderable dual benefit of ensuring Fizqwik and his lackeys were now thoroughly lost. After all, there was no such thing as being overly cautious. ‘Do as you are told and maybe you will come away safe-well.’

Fizqwik looked back into the sewer, anxiously nibbling his lower lip, his blurry outline hunched, defeated. ‘What do you want?’

Sharpwit snarled, warplight writhing through the poisonous cloud.

What did the strong want?

‘I want songs sung of my deeds. I want my name whispered with dread and loathing for a thousand years.’ Sharpwit coughed chestily, lungs coming apart like the hide of an ancient mummy. It had been a long trek from Karak Azul and his body trembled from the effort. He glared at the vermin of Clan Skryre, praying they couldn’t see it. ‘But that will not happen, will it? I must settle for glory for Skavendom and perhaps, centuries from now, when the immortal Council of Thirteen recalls the fall of Azul-Place, one may remember the name Sharpwit.’ He turned away, limping tiredly for the stairwell. ‘Come-come,’ he squeaked over his shoulder. ‘We go up-top. I want-need your eyes.’

The stairwell was a ruin, the crumbling masonry layered and re-layered with crude greenskin glyphs depicting claws, fists, skulls, whichever tribe enjoyed temporary dominance over the rest. For now, that was definitely Gorfang Rotgut’s Red Fangs, their symbol daubed in all sizes over every stretch of wall. Sharpwit moved slowly, his crutches seeking out unbroken ground with which to haul his frame painfully upwards. Mentally, he berated himself for not sending Fizqwik or one of his clanrats up first. Whether through weariness or the idiot engineer’s warp-fumes he’d neglected to consider that a greenskin or two might have escaped the massacre down below. It would be just like Fizqwik. If a goblin were to stab him now, the warlock would probably even protest it an accident. He was tempted to insist Fizqwik take the front, but the pebble-strewn staircase was too treacherous underfoot to manoeuvre one skaven past another – not without affording the warlock ample opportunity to engineer another ‘accident’. That left nothing for it but to press on and pretend he’d meant to take the lead all along.

After a few dozen turns, the stairs reached a once-grand threshold, the way framed by a pair of stern ancestors long surrendered to the weeds. Hardy nettles sprouted around their ankles; purple mosses crusted their lips and their eyes; roots opened fissures that ran their granite cheeks like tears. For the first time since departing Skavenblight, Sharpwit stepped out beneath an open sky. It felt oddly reassuring. The sky was the colour of charcoal and an aggressive wind struggled with his fur. The stones were damp, discoloured grey, holding close the scent of yesterday’s rain.

He limped to the ramparts of the dwarfish watchtower, permitting the ancient stone to share his footpaws’ burden with his blessing. The wind was cold and forceful as it swept down from the encircling peaks. Sharpwit shivered in its icy claws and gripped the ledge more tightly. Every instinct squealed at him to scurry back to the stairwell and hide. He felt as though some stone giant had him by the tail, dangling him over the howling immensity of the glacially carved valley of Death Pass. The great spire of Black Crag dominated the valley, standing alone as though shunned by nobler peaks of less black repute. Dark as shale, the orc stronghold rose, sinking its jagged fang into the roiling sky.

His stomach turned, and not through vertigo. The stronghold’s gates, reinforced and patched together in inimitable orcish fashion, were thrown wide, rowdy brutish warriors spilling from its black pits. Their guttural chants carried on the wind like the threat of thunder. The massive orcs shoved each other, shouted insults, only too happy to fight each other were it not for the even more massive chieftains that spat, snarled and smacked their charges into order. Behind them, the steep escarpment of the opposing face of the valley swarmed with scrawny, black-cowled figures, goblin archers squabbling over the most favourable spots as deep banks of spears marched down to join their larger kin.

He peered into the bellicose mob. Being prepared for the crush of disappointment made its advent no less welcome. On the orcs’ side of the pass, a clear sliver of shallow water trickled down the foothills, past the gates of Black Crag from a high mountain lake. It had been warm and sunny when Sharpwit had last seen it, long-haired ponies grazing on the rough grass, he and his kin fresh from the City of Pillars to scout the hidden passages beneath Black Crag. He had been unused to the surface then. The lack of walls and the sky’s vastness had been oppressive, but he had still found what he looked for: an old dwarf drainage shaft, barely wide enough for a skaven to slither through. But he had been bigger then, black-furred, sleek, proud as he was arrogant. He had little doubt he could get in that way again – until he saw it. The stream sprouted goblin spears like poisonous toadstools.

Sharpwit tore his gaze from the greenskin masses, ears pricking at some fevered activity, tracking back to the gates of Black Crag as something huge stooped to pass beneath it. Sharpwit closed his eye, convinced it had finally succumbed to senility. Now, at the most inopportune time conceivable! Leaning out, he opened his eye for a second look. It was enormous! A monster, albeit man-shaped, and garbed in patchwork clothing. It was heavily bearded with a circlet of black hair around a balding pate and a dark mat of hair prickling from the V-shaped collar around its neck. Sinking meekly behind the rampart, Sharpwit watched the giant move eastward up the pass, long legs carrying it deceptively swiftly without a care for those fleeing its path, its footfalls driving tremors into the earth and rudely gesticulating goblins higher into the foothills. He shuffled nervously to soothe the ache spreading from his clenched glands, grateful for the wind that blew the musk of his fear south and away from green-thing noses.

A loud twang reverberated between the slopes as a strangely garbed goblin with a long spiked helm was catapulted from the battlements of Black Crag. It flung out its arms and flapped, unconvincing red wings stitched between arms and body. It rose higher as it caught the wind coming in off the Worlds Edge Mountains. Its plaintive wail faded as, despite its furious efforts, the gust bore it west to the sea. Sharpwit tracked its flight some way, catching a smudge as it rose above a distant eyrie. He stared at it for a long moment, willing it into focus. It was no use. This was a seeing world, scents ripped clean on the wind, sounds strengthened and distorted by the mountain peaks. He could not have been more out of place if the trees sprouted claws and fire rained from the sky.

He summoned Fizqwik, the engineer scuttling from the stairwell to join him at the ledge. He looked queasy, peering down into the belly of Death Pass, or perhaps it was the thousands of bloodthirsty greenskin savages that had upset the warlock’s stomach. Sharpwit pointed out the dark shape. It hovered over the mountaintops like a dark cloud or a vast flock of black-winged birds, but neither struck Sharpwit as particularly likely.

‘A dwarf-thing flying machine.’ The engineer was practically salivating, a distinct look of longing erasing his earlier unease. ‘It moves away from us.’

A gyrocopter. A wonder of dwarfish machine-craft. It made sense that many of the dwarfs’ ancient observation posts and relay stations should still be in service, secure in their unbreachable bastions of sheer rock. The smudge receded into the distance. Probably to bear news of this greenskin army to Karak Azul, or possibly to Barak Varr, his directional sense up here was hopeless.

Sharpwit strained through the fog of his own eye onto the vastness of Black Crag. ‘What do the green-things aim at? Do they see us?’

He felt a tugging on his sleeve and turned to see Fizqwik gazing away from the greenskin army and into the clustering, snow-blown peaks to the south. Shrill, chittering voices blew north with the wind, the stamp of bare claws on rock, the scent of musk, of fear, a tantalising breath on Sharpwit’s whiskers before it was snatched away on the wind. He felt Fizqwik’s grip on his arm tighten.

‘Headtaker.’

Queek stood within a natural bowl of rock, shielded from the wind that whistled overhead. Green-thing corpses lay in various states of dismemberment around a campfire over which a pot was starting to boil over. Water spat over its sides to drop hissing into the flames. Queek regarded the dead contemptuously. Most had died before Queek’s stormvermin had even caught up with him.

‘Where is Big-meat, green-thing?’

The Headtaker bared his fangs at the blanched goblin head jigging on the point of a spear at the whim of his left paw. ‘He hides, green-thing,’ he replied in a lisping falsetto, answering on behalf of a second listing head on his right, this one spit on a reddened shaft from throat to eye socket. ‘He filled with fear-horror of Headtaker.’ The heads smacked together, duelling for Queek’s favour, offering little more amusement in death than they had in their last instants of life. He discarded them with a snarl, staring reproachfully at the bleeding skirt of greenskin heads, sewn into his mail by their pointy ears. They rustled, they slapped, they bickered and fought, they whispered appreciative words: Queek is greatest, Queek is strongest. But on this one matter they were stubbornly silent.

‘Ska! Where is Big-meat?’

Ska’s bulk descended onto one knee with a rustle of metal, surrounded by corpses as though he sowed green-things in hopes of a bumper crop in later seasons. Queek pondered that. He wondered if it would work.

‘I do not know, most unbeatable Queek.’

‘Find Queek more green-things. This cannot be all.’

‘Queek is most insightful,’ Ska grovelled. ‘A foraging party. No more.’

Queek drew his sword, suddenly captivated by the green-thing blood as it dried. ‘What do you wait for?’ he snarled. ‘Find Queek more!’

‘Scout-sneaks squeak of more,’ Ska said, pointing out across the feverishly ploughed field of beheaded corpses to a craggy rise. Grass clung to the dark, rain-smitten rock in tufts, yanked every which way in the wind. ‘Big-big army masses in the valley. Scouts say maybe it outnumbers ours.’

Queek sneered. ‘Frail-meat sneaks. They exaggerate always. They hope Queek will cower and run from little green-things. Is that what Ska thinks Queek will do?’

‘I think they do not exaggerate this time,’ said Ska, diplomatically. ‘They showed me. I never see so many.’

Queek peered into the distance, into a half imagined realm of blood and screams, home to all the green-things he could kill. Ska would never suggest Queek run away, but it was obvious he was thinking it.

This is good news, whispered Krug. Only Gorfang could have brought so many warring tribes together. He will be leading them. His head will be yours.

‘Queek does want-want Big-meat’s head,’ he mused. He chivvied his underling from his servile pose with his bloodied sword.

‘Show Queek these green-things.’

The clanrats of Skryre had been busy. While Sharpwit and Fizqwik had been bearing witness to the paucity of the Horned One’s favour, they had somehow extricated the warlock’s belongings from the sewer and dragged them up onto the sodden grass beside the tower. The skaven scurried to and fro with the apparent purpose of assembling stacks of rusted iron sheets so another could shift it elsewhere. Sparks flew from sputtering warp-torches, the hilltop thick with enthusiastic banging and the scent of solder.

A dark, lumpen form was already taking shape. A squat machine brooded between the petals of the torn open crate, like a wind-up flower of a warlock’s dreams, rusted nails scattered like pollen, nestling in the grass in ambush for unwary footpaws. At the centre of that assembly, a pair of giant wheels rose, a chaotic amalgam of wood and metal that scratched and chittered with the thousands of warp-addled rats imprisoned within its mighty frame. Warplight leaked between crude joints, plates of scrap iron compelled by the blackest of techno-sorceries into unholy union with bronze and other, stranger alloys: gleaming surfaces that offered no reflection; materials that seemed one moment in one position only on second glance to have moulded a claws-length to the left; metals that glowed with shifting spectra that unsettled even Sharpwit’s colour-blind eye. Pincer-like warp lightning projectors stabbed from the hubs, connected by thick bundles of naked cabling to a generator seated behind a padded seat that bristled with levers and controls high above the two wheels.

He had seen a doomwheel before. His knowledge of the dwarfs had proven invaluable to the great Claw’s original invention, coming as it did from a patchwork of dwarfish materials and experimental designs. But entropy was the essence of the skaven condition, its innovation was never static, and this device bore scant resemblance to its predecessor. A pressure release valve here, a great copper rod of mystifying purpose jutting like a flagpole from the generator there, a pair of oak barrels lashed together and crudely wedged between the pilot’s foot-pedals and the wheels. Sharpwit recognised the klinkarhun markings on the old wood. The stolen barrels of dwarfish ale. From drilled holes in the barrels’ flanks, transparent tubing fed the amber liquid down into the wheels. He doubted the dwarfs would approve. Their precious ale, brewed with care to ancient recipes and stored untouched for centuries, now just feed for rats.

The fate of us all, come the end.

Fizqwik scurried through the working clanrats and pressed himself to the wide frontage of the wheel, a loving sigh escaping his lips as he caressed its spiked surface.

‘This is… marvellous,’ said Sharpwit, desperately contriving a scheme to extract some credit for its creation. It seemed the engineer did know a thing or two after all. Hardly Sharpwit’s fault for missing it, not when he acted like such an idiot.

The engineer snickered and took hold of the wheel studs, using them as a ladder to scramble to the control chair. So enthroned, the warlock sank into the leather with a squeal of delight, immediately setting about pulling levers and twisting knobs like a whelp at play.

Sharpwit took a wary step from the warp lightning projector. Just in case.

‘Old-thing!’

Sharpwit yelped in fright, spinning around and planting his back to the hull of the Doomwheel as Queek Headtaker strode up the slope towards him, severed goblin heads smacking wetly at his thighs. Sharpwit stared at them, transfixed. Every time he thought he’d adjusted, Queek found a new level of horror to ascend…

‘Old-thing is alive. How sad.’ Queek glared past the wheel, roundly untouched by its genius. ‘And Tinker-rat too.’ The warlord looked furious, tiny white flecks darting across his blood-mad eyes. ‘What is this, Tinker-rat? Is this where Queek’s weapons go?’

The warlock laughed, a terribly false sense of security granted by his lordship over such an engine of power. Not much use when it wasn’t on yet, Sharpwit thought.

‘This is more useful-better than warpfire throwers and ratling guns. You are blessed-lucky. You get to be first to watch-see the Kwikwheel.’ The warlock laughed again, bouncing excitedly in his seat as he mashed another button on his control board.

Queek glared at the blissfully oblivious warlock, before turning the full force of his hatred upon Sharpwit. ‘Do you see the green-things? Or has age taken that sense from you?’

‘I see them,’ Sharpwit replied.

Queek licked his lips. ‘And does Old-thing hear them?’

Sharpwit listened, hearing nothing but guttural cries above the constant hammering.

‘You hear it? How bad-much they wish to die-die?’

‘Yes-yes,’ Sharpwit agreed carefully. He had learned something from Ska Bloodtail. ‘But there are lots-many.’

‘Queek also has lots-many. And he has Queek.’

Sharpwit looked out from their high vantage point. He took in the greenskin hordes, the drain that was his pass into Black Crag, the beginnings of a scheme to turn all of this to his needs creeping cautiously into his mind. All he needed was something mad enough to draw away a few thousand battle hungry orcs. He bobbed obsequiously. How fortunate…

‘I would advise a strike-charge from the east. That way,’ he added, pointing up the valley away from Black Crag. ‘Their numbers cannot then be turned all at once.’

Queek studied the layout of the opposing force. ‘A good plan, Old-thing.’ He turned back, mad face split by a hyena grin. ‘So many good plans. Be sure your head does not grow too full. It might come off.’

Sharpwit gulped. ‘Many thanks, most grateful one. Perhaps you lead the first charge from the east? A second force then waits to catch-trap their flank as they turn to you.’ Leaving the western approach empty for me to slink by and leave you to die, he almost yearned to add.

Queek looked east. His gaze tarried overlong on the giant. His expression remained neutral as his scent, but Sharpwit was convinced the mad warlord was feeling something a saner rat might recognise as fear.

‘White-fur will attack from the east,’ Queek said, slightly hoarser than usual. Sharpwit found the warlord’s natural trepidation reassuring. He was just another skaven after all. ‘I take flank charge. I take it where best-most fighting will be.’

‘As Queek says,’ Sharpwit replied.

‘And Old-thing will hold the tower.’

‘I will?’

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek said, menacing with every fang. ‘Queek not trust the new-meat of Clan Rictus. Fresh from City of Pillars and smelling all shiny. Queek holds them back with Old-thing. Old-thing likes Rictus-meat, yes-yes?’

Sharpwit cringed, seeing in Queek’s cunning smirk the pulped corpse of a Clan Rictus assassin. Why had he ever taken the blame for that? Razzel had hardly been worth it.

‘You look-watch from up high,’ said Queek. ‘When Queek says go you go, yes-yes?’

Sharpwit bowed low. Queek looked over his prostrate form to the tower top, his muzzle cocked to one side with an absent grin. Fascinated by wind on ivy or a shade of nothing it seemed, as usual.

‘Is windy up there, Old-thing. Be sure-safe you do not fall.’

Damp, snarling ratmen crowded the ridgeline. The filthy swarm bristled with swords, blunt spears and rusty implements of dubious utility, all intermingled with only a passing nod to any concept of order. Some bore shields, mouldered wood bossed with sigils of Clan Mors and the Great Horned Rat. Those few unfortunates were badgered to the front to face the greenskins charging up the slope towards them like a wave. The nervous chittering of the skaven warriors was overwhelmed by the roar of the oncoming greenskins.

Ska Bloodtail shoved his way through the back ranks, eyes firmly ahead on Queek’s banner, which was held, naturally, by Queek himself. A blood-smeared pole was locked in place on his back-plate, a scrap of dwarf-hide snapping at the mountain wind. The smell of the opposing army made him feel ill. He was many things, but fearless was not one of them, and neither was he stupid. A frontal assault in a pitched battle offended every sense he had. But he would sooner wrestle a daemon with his bare paws than disobey Warlord Queek.

‘Do you have it?’ Queek asked as he came near. The warlord was surrounded by a jostle of clawleaders, the lesser skaven moving respectfully aside as Ska joined their number.

‘Yes,’ he replied, handing over the odd metallic device in his paw. It was a flat rectangle, patterned with something akin to silver, tufts of wiring frayed from each end where he had torn it loose.

‘Did Tinker-rat see you take-snatch?’

‘No.’ He spread his paws to indicate his self-made armour. ‘I find my own way around a workbench.’

‘Good-good.’ Queek gripped the object in his gauntlet, turning to look up at the old bald-fur in his tower, the shadow of a smile playing over his lips. ‘Queek has had enough of these small rats and their scheming. Is time they learn why Queek is warlord.’ He spirited the object into the dark blood-soaked recesses beneath his warpshard breastplate. ‘Tell Tinker-rat attack at once.’

‘Yes-yes, mighty Queek.’

‘And Ska.’

‘Yes-yes?’

‘When Tinker-rat is away, join White-fur’s diversion. Make sure he does not run.’

‘I will,’ he said, pleased.

‘And Ska.’

‘Your will, most thorough one.’

‘Make sure he dies too.’

This time it was Ska’s chance to bare his fangs. ‘With pleasure.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The valley was a crucible of thunder, filled to overflowing with cracked, raucous cries, the beat of drums, of feet, of steel. The heavens had parted and rain streamed down, slapping at hard edges and harder skulls. The scene was deadened beyond that grey veil, as though something preferred that Sharpwit not see. But he heard all. He felt almost godlike high up in his tower, the valley and all its creatures laid out for his pleasure. He had merely to raise one paw and watch his puppets dance.

At the far eastern end of the line skaven rushed down the hill like a flood. The tower trembled at the shock of so many paws scrambling by, the rustling of their squalid rags audible even at its top, their chittering rising to a crescendo of challenging squeals. Razzel and his albino guardian led from the rear, obvious as white lilies in a muddy field. The grey seer squeaked orders and encouragements, brandishing his staff and urging the sinning vermin to greater glory before the Horned Rat. The orcs, rather than awaiting the charge as a dwarf line would have, started to barrel forward themselves, racing up the slope to meet the skaven as quickly as their ape-like legs could carry them. Sharpwit shook the moisture from his fur, smiling as he watched.

Orcs. So delightfully simple.

Their mouths were wide, great pits of hate filled with jagged fangs, barbaric war-cries tearing from their throats, the whole din swallowed into one furious mess of screams and scampering claws. It might all have led a lesser schemer to miss the subtle shift of movement at his back, little but a shadow in the otherwise evenly pattering rain. Not turning, he snarled down through the rain. Queek was a speck of scarlet armour packed into a block of stormvermin. If Queek wanted him dead he should have seen to it himself. But then Sharpwit had always striven to be underestimated.

‘How long have you been there?’ For what felt like a long time there was no answer. He strained his ears. No breath, no heartbeat but his own, no unconscious rustle of fur on rag to betray an amateur out of their depth. Just that patter of cold rain on cold flesh.

‘Since you squeak-talk with Queek,’ came the answer at last, cold as death on the mountains. Sharpwit smiled grimly and slowly turned. He knew that voice.

The assassin, Fang Dao, stood with weapons drawn. A semicircular blade wept poison in each paw. His black cloak glistened wet, swept over his right shoulder to free his favoured left.

‘If it helps,’ Dao whispered in that same cold tone, ‘you were much-much better warlord than Queek.’

Sharpwit sidestepped from the battlement as the assassin came closer. He circled warily, crutches skittering loosely on the rain-slicked stone. The shrieks and thunder of battle faded, his world shrinking to this circle of rocks and weeds. ‘How does that help?’ he spat. ‘If you think that, do something about it.’

Dao cocked his head in a shrug. ‘Queek does not pay Clan Eshin to think.’

Sharpwit hissed at the killer. He had had enough. Enough of grovelling and playing the grateful weakling to these runtish waifs and mad-thing strays that would have been ill-deserving of a chain in his slave chattels when he had been young.

Fang Dao advanced with deadly assurance. He thought he scented a defenceless old-thing, the easiest warptokens he would ever earn his masters.

Fang Dao was wrong.

The assassin leapt, pouncing from a standing start like a striking adder. Weeping blades flashed through the rain for his chest. Sharpwit slid aside, a shard of black sweeping by. The assassin dropped into a roll, springing onto his forepaws and vaulting into the air. His tail whipped beneath his twisting body as it hung for a split second. A twinkle of gold. Sharpwit ducked as a throwing star whistled by his ear, just as Dao landed on all fours, blades clattering against stone, weeds shrivelling and turning black at the touch of Clan Eshin poison. Dao lingered for a whisker before driving to his feet and charging once again.

Weeping metal came in a blur of silver and black, a storm of death from every direction and none. Steel gouged splintered chunks from Sharpwit’s crutches as he fought to match the assassin blow for blow. He may have lost the speed and the strength of old but the years had, if anything, only added to a skill at arms that was already formidable. He fought with a precise economy of motion, wasting no more energy than was needed to ensure that he was simply never where his opponent’s swords fell. But he knew that it would still be him who tired first. Spotting the glimmer of an opening, he stabbed out instinctively, only for the assassin to jink aside at the last moment.

The assassin seemed to bend around the weapon, as if Sharpwit fought a shadow. The assassin hurdled his swinging crutch, body twisting mid-flight, black robes snapping like death’s jaws. Sharpwit saw the kick just as it flashed before his eyes. It smashed dead into his jaw, sending him flying with a broken squeal, blood spraying like a contrail. He crashed over the parapet, neck snapping into empty space, body careening after it only to be arrested at the very last by the reflexive looping of his tail between the crenellations. He slammed to a standstill, knocking the air from his lungs. His bloodied gums opened silently, miming pain, the protest of a freshly animated corpse. He watched, head hung upside down, left crutch pinwheeling down into the aptly named Valley of Death.

The rain had stopped.

His eyes widened in sudden horror at the black-clad shape that filled his sky.

Cloak ruffling in the wind, the assassin dropped.

Ska Bloodtail had never witnessed such brutality.

Clanrats beyond counting surged down the mountainside into the waiting, eager jaws of the orcs. They had wanted to stop. That much had been plain. Screams had torn across the line, the grim paw of realisation settling onto their shoulders as cunning, craven eyes saw up close the horror they charged into. They had dug in their claws, squealing for deliverance as the weight of bodies bore them to oblivion. The orcs roared with laughter as the skaven rushed them, laughing still as they hacked into their furry hides, laughing all the harder as they went down beneath a tide of claws, fighting until the last drop of blood fled their brutish bodies.

Ska stuck devoutly to the rearmost ranks – he had been instructed to keep close to Grey Seer Razzel, after all – but all concept of neat ranks and clever schemes had been obliterated in that first bloody instant of carnage. An orc thumped through the press, green hide beaded with rain, bellowing a war-cry in its animal tongue. Ska parried its cleaver on his rune-axe, its wild lunge leaving it unbalanced, and spun it around with a shove towards the grey seer. A halberd appeared between its shoulder blades as if conjured by the power of the Horned Rat. It grunted, powerfully muscled arms grasping forward for its killer before it finally acceded to death and fell. Ska snarled at the albino stormvermin, the strange-looking warrior withdrawing its blade and immediately casting about for fresh threats to its wellbeing.

Razzel peeked around the albino’s arm at the twitching corpse. ‘Kill-stab again. Better safe than dead-dead.’

The sorcerer extended a paw and unleashed a gout of warpflame over orcs and skaven both. Orcs screamed and beat at their chests as the flames devoured their unfeeling hides, their agonies a blessed gift to the Horned One.

And much appreciated as well by His humble servant, Ska Bloodtail. He backed away from the slaughter with all the courage the skaven of Clan Mors had the right to expect in their leaders. He would have given anything to be back in the City of Pillars. Compared to this madness, he’d take Skarsnik’s twisted little mind any time. The goblin warlord always struck where he was least expected and, given Queek’s hunger for that head over all others, that invariably meant someplace Ska Bloodtail was not.

A tremor passed beneath his footpaws, beaten gromril plates rattling at their chains. He looked up as the ground shook again. Louder. Closer. Razzel lowered his staff, gawping slack-jawed over his shoulder, face drawn with a horror that could not be faked. Ska turned, neck tilting back, further back, jaw hanging empty to the rain. He tried to shout a warning, managed a high-pitched whine that was quickly choked as if his own throat sought to do him a mercy.

Rain swirled around a massive form like seabirds at a cliff face, orcs squalling at its feet, rising so high into the grey that the phantom shape at its heights could only be inferred as shoulders and head. Ska swayed for balance as a foot came crashing down. The orcs slapped the massive foot with their weapon flats and jeered. Skaven slunk back, clinging on all fours to the mud as though expecting it to be snatched from under them. Trembling eyes darted from the screaming orcs to the oncoming behemoth, a creature in such defiance of logical scale that the thought hadn’t yet occurred to flee. But that was only a matter of time.

‘Run-flee and die!’ Ska squeaked, for his own benefit as much as the wavering clanrats. It was hardly inspiring. The mighty Bloodtail certainly didn’t look, or feel, nearly so fearsome now. ‘Razzel!’ he shouted. The sorcerer didn’t answer, stunned to insensibility. Ska summoned him back with a morale-boosting slap across the muzzle. ‘Grey Seer,’ he said again as the skaven nursed his jaw, eyes locked immovably on the coming giant.

‘We must flee,’ Razzel whimpered. He clutched at his staff as though hoping to hide behind it, tail laid flaccidly behind like a drugged worm.

‘Queek says you fight.’

‘Lunacy!’ Razzel hissed, something of the old self-assurance flickering in his eyes. ‘The Horned Rat commends his children for their cunning and guile. Forget the mad-thing. We find another way.’

‘Queek says kill-kill,’ he squealed, panic lending his snarl a manic pitch. ‘Kill-kill!’ He grabbed hold of the seer’s staff. The pair of them struggled over it like rats over a bone, wilfully ignorant of the circling polecat.

‘Let go,’ Razzel snarled, horn chimes jangling as he tried to shake loose Ska’s paws.

‘Use that magic and kill-kill!’

Both skaven froze, paws entwined, as orcs came bellowing through the rain, flooding out between the giant’s feet. Their war-cries came first, disembodied shrieks lancing through the mist as clanrats were torn apart, rangy bodies falling bloodlessly in the streaming grey, trampled under brawny, ill-defined shapes. Ska felt the mood about him shift as ghostly forms refined into muscular solidity, blood-spotted, soaking, uncaring, ploughing through the trembling skaven with howls of animal delight.

Razzel’s eyes roved, captive in their sockets, finally settling back on Ska and the staff in his paws. He let go, leaving it to Ska, holding up his paws as he backed away. ‘You kill-kill!’

Ska shoved him into the arms of his minion with a snarl and threw down the staff almost as an afterthought. Grimacing, Ska hefted his axe. Skaven were being hacked down all around, orcs battering their way through the brittle line like living rams. An axe took a clanrat in the jaw, arms splayed as it fell, blood spraying, body rolling to rest not a spear’s throw from where Ska dreamt of escape. Skaven squealed in panic, the fight almost beaten out of them, a heartbeat from the brink.

He didn’t want to do this, but there was nothing for it. There were things more bloodthirsty than orcs in this world; monsters more dreadful than giants. And the Headtaker was watching. Muttering a prayer that enough of his warriors would be dumb enough to follow, Ska dropped his shoulder and charged.

Fizqwik bounced in his seat, wind whipping his whiskers, pebbles dashing against his goggles as the doomwheel sped down the mountain side. The landscape blurred into a continuous smear of grey, the uneven ground pulverised beneath the monstrous weight of his machine. The doomwheel smashed through a rocky outcropping, sailing for a bowel-spinning moment through empty air before crashing back to earth and slamming Fizqwik into his seat.

The warlock grinned madly, spinning a handle on his right-paw control panel to initiate the warp-power generator, sliding forward a lever on his left to spike the rats, ale-feed with stimulants from a gurgling vat bolted between the barrels. The last thing he wanted was for the weak link in his creation to tire. The machine trembled, tossing him about in his chair, and he glanced up from his controls to notice he had smashed through the orc lines. Thick-headed brutes turned, axes chipping wood from the wheels as they disappeared under the machine. Scores of ugly, misshapen beings homogenised into a state more befitting such lowly creatures. He swivelled in his seat and smirked back at the bloody smear of devastation. Axe blades, shafts splintered into oblivion, spun out, glittering flakes in his dust trail.

The machine jerked again as a particularly large brute went down under the wheels. Fizqwik frowned as he was tossed about. Perhaps some kind of suspension was in order? Something for the new model. He really should write that down. Taking his paws from the controls, he scratched about under his seat. He came up clutching a sheaf of folded parchment tied together with string. He flicked through them, scribbling something onto the final page, before looking up, confused. The tenor of crushed and terrified insignificants had shifted to a higher, noticeably squishier, register. He raised himself off his seat and peered down, noting as one might a misaligned shelf that he had strayed into skaven ranks. Perhaps some kind of steering lock as well. He added that to his earlier scrawl before stuffing the notes back under his seat and returning his paws to the controls.

He broke into a fit of giggles as the immense form of a giant coalesced out of the rain. It towered many times over him, even in his high throne, and grew more massive by the moment as he hurtled towards it. Orcs burst from beneath its colossal stride, Skaven charging forward to meet them. The very definition of an exercise in futility. He would show them. A light on his panel switched from black to green. Minimum potential achieved. He grinned, reflected warp lightning flaring in the lens of his goggles. The triumph of skaven intellect over the most monstrous foes. The true face of the skaven future. His future.

He reached forward. Paws gripped a large black lever. And pulled.

Queek basked in the cold violence of the explosion. He watched with deep satisfaction as hissing sheets of blackened metal rained from the sky. Even here, close to a mile from the wreck, steaming bits of it clattered off skaven helms. Tendrils of warp lightning arced out from the stricken engine, searing great rents in the clouds, blasting molten furrows through rock and flesh without distinction. The black glare faded as the dying machine bled itself dry. Queek watched it sputter, a final satisfying act of death and pain for him to savour. In its fitful shadow, the giant swayed, legs charred black and releasing great torrents of steam at the touch of rain. To watch a thing so large fall was an unexpected bonus. It tumbled backwards in what seemed like slow motion, but apparently not nearly slow enough for those caught beneath. Its impact blew a hole in the greenskin horde, the hundreds hurled from their feet added to the scores crushed under its back. Even high up on the mountain, Queek felt it. His trophy rack creaked as the tremors passed through his body.

Well done, Ikit congratulated him. Clan Skryre devices always go wrong-bad. None will ever blame Queek.

‘Pity,’ Queek muttered, but he was in too good a mood to let the loss of Tinker-rat’s final instant of terror get him down. He scanned the shivering skaven survivors delicately pulling themselves to their footpaws. It looked like the blast might even have accounted for White-fur. Ska too, but no scheme was ever perfect. He sighed contentedly. He truly was the most vicious, cunning and deceitful of all skaven.

And the giant slain also. Ikit added, almost as an afterthought. Inspired, great one.

Queek probed under his vambrace to extract the odd little tile of fibres and wiring that Ska had stolen. It smelt of unnatural elements and, very faintly, of warpstone. He gave it a last wary sniff and tossed it into the grass. He wouldn’t need that any more.

A scream sounded from the top of the tower. He focused on a pair of struggling shapes lost in the rain haze. His grin widened further. Tinker-rat, White-fur and soon Old-thing.

It has been a good day.

‘All days good-good for Queek.’

As you squeak-say.

Queek looked down into the valley. Watching the orcs regroup, Queek felt a terrible longing to sink his fangs into their flesh, to tear those squat, lumpen heads from their necks and ram them still blinking onto stakes ranked a thousand deep. His claws clicked around the grip of Dwarf Gouger in anticipation. His orc-things would hang on his every utterance. They would clamour to praise him as their last, greatest, most terrifying foe. He loved killing dwarfs as dearly as putting down uppity underlings, but he wouldn’t want to do either every day.

‘Variety,’ Queek mused, eyeing the raucous hordes as a chieftain from a far-flung warren might regard a clanlord’s repast. ‘Truly, it is the secret to less boring lives, yes-yes.’

You are a mad-thing, Queek.

‘Yes-yes,’ Queek grinned. ‘But not for reasons others squeak-say.’

Go home. Your rivals are slain. The City of Pillars is second to Skavenblight only. The whole mountain could be yours if you want-try. Be content with that.

Queek snickered. His gaze swept his warriors, his finest, trained by his own paw. They stood to disciplined attention, paws tight to their halberds, rain beading in the joins of their thick red armour like blood.

‘And why does Queek want-seek your advice? You are a dead-thing, dead by Queek’s paw.’

Did it occur that I know-smell things you cannot?

‘No.’

More fool-fool you.

Queek smirked, raising his sword so his warriors could see it bleed. Metal scraped in answer, tension spreading to black-furred thighs, corded muscles readying for the downhill sprint and the murder to follow. Keeping his sword high, he glanced up at the tower once more. A length of wood fell from the sky, clattering once on the stone walls before spinning away and plunging into the thin soil at the tower’s base. It quivered slightly, as though in the grip of some invisible, dying paw.

‘Die-die painfully, Old-thing,’ he whispered, leaving the skaven to his bloody fate so he could enjoy his.

Yes. It was good to be Queek.

Sharpwit screamed as the weeping blade flashed for his throat, the impact shuddering down his wiry arms as the blade thudded into the gnarled wood of his surviving crutch. The assassin snarled over him, saliva dripping between his blackened fangs, poison oozing from the porous metal of his blade. Fang Dao struggled with his trapped blade, slashing for Sharpwit’s head with the other. Sharpwit writhed, pinned under the assassin’s weight, straining to twist his crutch to throw the assassin’s aim.

Exasperated, the assassin let his off-blade drop from the tower and wrapped both paws over the one embedded in Sharpwit’s crutch. He set his footpaws to the fractured wood and heaved, the weapon coming free in a spray of splinters. He spilled into a backward roll and came up hard, tail slapped rigidly against the stone, shadowed features bathed in the blue light emanating from the tear in Sharpwit’s crutch.

Sharpwit swallowed blood and spat out a black tooth worth more than the assassin’s life. He slithered from the battlement on his back like a worm, depositing himself on shaking paws. His crutch splintered further as it took his weight, more of the same eerie blue light streaming through the cracks traversing its length, like some hellish chrysalis about to rupture under the power of its maturing occupant. Sharpwit dashed the stave against the battlements. More wood went flying. A shape emerged from its cocoon, a blade, engraved with dwarfish runes of power, emblazoned at its hilt with the proud rune of Azul. The assassin took a step back, still watchful. He lowered gracefully into a crouch, blade-paw drifting to his snout so he sighted past the flat of the curved edge.

‘Whelp!’ Sharpwit shrilled, shaking the last splinters of wood from his sword. ‘Runt!’ he screamed, walking on unaided legs, empowered only by the fury that boiled beneath his fur. ‘Are you so stupid-blind you think yourself the first assassin I have killed-slain?’

Fang Dao bared his fangs in warning, backing off as Sharpwit came closer.

‘I had many rivals once. I remember their jealous, scheming faces. Their screams for clemency help me sleep through the days when I am troubled by all that was taken from me.’

The blade licked out for the assassin’s gut. Dao’s body curved around it, but the weapon shimmered and faded, projecting into a dozen ghostly mirages, each blurring back into a single dazzling edge as it returned to guard. Blue light burned through to sickly purple, blood dribbling from its tip. Dao clutched the torn silk at his belly, disbelieving.

‘Do you know how I found this sword?’ Sharpwit asked, surprised by how much the certainty of his assailant’s ignorance enraged him. ‘If skaven knew the value of history, you would. All would.’ He sighed, the blade again splitting like the barbed heads of a hydra to send the assassin sprawling. ‘I found it within Azul-Place. Long ago by our own terms. I protected it from jealous rivals and, when I was strong enough, used its power to kill-slay Warlord Rask and take the City of Pillars for my own.’ He laughed, throat crackling. ‘None remember Rask now. And none should. He was a fool. But Warlord Sleek Sharpwit.’ He spread his paws as if the gesture could encapsulate the scale of his former grandeur. ‘I was the scourge of the Worlds Edge. From Hell Pit to Cripple Peak my name was dread. I was undefeated, feared, peerless in battle, renowned for my cunning. The world rested in my paws.’

Dao scrambled backward until the battlements checked his retreat. ‘I did not know, mighty Sharpwit.’

Sharpwit advanced, sword scraping a furrow between the stones. ‘History is written by victors, if it is written at all. I was Gnawdwell’s favourite, but unlike Queek I earned it. And who remembers now? Who cares? Ten years since I left to serve my master in Skavenblight. Three generations of brainless meat husks that never knew enough to dread the name Sleek!’ He raised his sword to strike.

Dao threw out his arm. Rain smacked against an open palm. ‘Please-please, fabled and wrongfully forgotten Sleek-Warlord. I will serve as you ask-say.’

Sharpwit suppressed the desire to preen. So much for the nobler, blacker hearts of the Eshin. Thoughtfully, he lowered his glowing sword and limped to the battlements.

The battle raged, like a green tide rising to confront the muddy brown flow of an endless river in flood. Who was winning, who was losing, it was impossible to know. Were he not blessed with foreknowledge, he would have struggled even to guess who was fighting. Screams haunted the rain, guttural chants melded into an abusive roar that wrestled with the wind’s howl like a pair of warrior elementals. Occasionally, a clang of metal on metal rose above the lesser din, straddling it like a hero, before succumbing to the endless churn.

‘Will you help the true warlord of Eight Peaks to flee this pointless pride-whelp battle of Queek’s and take-find the dwarf-things we came for?’

The assassin set his weeping blade on the flat stone between them. Sharpwit doubted it was the last weapon secreted about the assassin’s person, but the gesture wasn’t wholly unappreciated. ‘The Nightlord sends me to help-help destroy Azul-Place. I will help do this thing.’

Sharpwit studied him for a moment. He itched to make an example of him. An example to whom was another matter, but the urge was a strong one. With an effort, he lowered his blade. An assassin might prove useful, after all. ‘Do you see out there, a stream to the west?’

‘I see.’

‘Fetch-find Grey Seer Razzel and bring him there.’

‘Excuse this minion, but did you not smell-see the blast? There is no chance-hope the grey one survived.’

Sharpwit pulled a face. ‘We should be so lucky. However great-big the apocalypse, rats like Razzel always come-crawl free. He will be alive, and he still has uses.’

Dao bowed low before turning and scurrying for the stairwell. Sharpwit watched him leave. Finally free of scrutinous minions, he collapsed, exhausted, against the crenellations. He forced himself to breathe and his heart to beat. He had only to manage a little longer, but it was so hard, and he felt so very weak. He cursed himself with the bitter benefit of hindsight for not having Dao fetch him his lost crutch. Hopefully it would still be there when he got down. He wasn’t keen on making his lone way across Death Pass without it.

He looked down. His paw tingled, a welcome sensation of cool creeping through his arm. He had been right to hide the sword. A half-blind old-thing could never have kept such a treasure from covetous paws, but he had missed it. Oh, how he had missed it. ‘Please, Queek,’ he whispered, trying to pick out the warlord from among so many. ‘Please stand in my way one last time.’

The rat fought as it died. That was good. He liked it when they fought. Eyes bulging, it gasped for breath, claws scratching feebly at a wrist as dark and hard as old wood. Armour crunched beneath his grip, tortured metal screaming, the rat jerking as its steel gorget buckled and scythed into its own soft little neck. He squeezed a little tighter, the rat twitching a couple times more like someone had just trod on its tail and then was still.

The orc gave a soft growl of pleasure as the rat’s neck snapped and flopped bonelessly over his fist. He shook it, the head swaying, meat slapping against his knuckles. Laughing, he looked around to make sure his mates were watching too. They were. Good. Good they remember who’s the toughest orc round here.

‘Nice one, boss. Da red ones is da toughest, I fink.’

The orc gave it one more shake, drawing it close to his one working eye, the other bolted shut behind a rusted iron patch. ‘Scrawny little fings int dey. Like gobbos.’ He grunted and let the thing drop. Something had caught his eye. Something out there, where a fat wedge of the red rats were fighting their way through his mob towards his fort. One of the rats charged ahead of the rest, fearless like an orc, fighting with a fury that had his chest aching with the desire to mash up that pretty red armour with his club. He clanked around a half-circle, massive armour plates grinding out dust as the biggest orc in the Worlds Edge forced a ton of mismatched metal to move.

‘Dat’s ’im init. Big bad king o’ da ratties!’

He lugged his club from the ground, its mashing end fat with turf where it had sunk into the mud. It had been the leg of a stone stuntie once, but they’d just left it standing around in Black Crag. And that was dumb, even for stupid stunties, since it was so useful for bashing out stuntie brains with. He smashed it against his own skull and, feeling nothing, laughed again, shoving his way in pursuit of the rat-king. He turned round to make sure his mates were following. They were. That was good. He wouldn’t want to have to break their legs.

He shouted back, his broken growl heard easily over the clamour. ‘None of you’z forget now. Da Headtaker belongs to Gorfang.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Skiblit reached out, slender fingers curling around the double doors and pulling them to. He laid his palms against the varnished wood to ease it closed. He held his breath as it clicked shut. Eventually he overcame his terror sufficiently to shuffle the few inches back to the wall, hugging his knees to his chest as he slowly dried in breathless, terrified silence. The scramble through the stream hadn’t shifted the gore from his face, just made it sloppy and wet, set to quivering by his body’s shivers. He didn’t dare peel it off. He even tried to force his ribs to stop creaking with each breath as he just sat there with the scraps of Gumrot’s skull clinging to his forehead. He could still hear the boom as the gun had gone off, still see the colours as his lackey’s head exploded, still feel the blindness as his face was dashed with gore and he’d slipped, panicked, tumbling down the steps and out into the rain. He shivered.

His night vision fixed on the wafer of darkness between the two doors. It seemed to widen under the pressure of his stare, until it became impossible to imagine that the eyes of every creature in the Crag were not staring right back. He scrunched his eyes tight, shoving his fingers into his mouth to keep from screaming.

This was his special secret place.

The ratties would never find him here.

Thordun crept through the grim underbelly of the Black Crag. The hold reeked of ancient decay: dried dung daubed once proud murals, orc sweat so old it had manifested as a kind of misted foulness that lingered in the air. Crumbling statues flanked the hallway as it stretched on into the distant dark. He unbuckled his holster with exaggerated care as he turned, checking to ensure that the men still followed. He wouldn’t blame them for vanishing. The eviscerated remains of the orcs and goblins that had filled the passage from Karak Azul with their stench had tested even the Slayers’ stomachs. But where would they go? Thordun doubted whether even he could make it past the lethal traps that Rorrick had guided them through. His pistol slid free as a shudder passed through him. That stretch of the Ungdrin Road was one he’d not soon forget.

According to Rorrick’s map and those dwarfish markings left intact by orcish occupation, they had emerged into the Third Deep, exactly as the Eight Peaks dwarf had predicted they would. Giving his map a cursory glance, the Slayer had smugly determined that this passage would bear them to the Mordrekk Bridge, and then to the urk dungeons and treasuries on its far side. Thordun worried that they were putting great faith in a centuries-old map and a dwarf who had died following it, but the hour was far too late to be voicing such fears now. The Slayers had forged ahead, ostensibly to scout the bridge for greenskins, but more likely out of exasperation with Thordun’s caution and Bernard’s endless griping. Thordun could blame them for neither.

He tried to envisage the bustle that must once have reigned here alongside the dwarfs of old. Gilded emissaries from the breadth of the world, master craftsdwarfs carving works of enduring beauty, traders bearing goods from the greatest empire the world had known. Iron and masterwork weaponry from Karak Azul, exotic goods steamed up the Blood River from Barak Varr, wool and fresh produce from the human caravans that crossed the mountains at Death Pass. It would all have passed the halls of Karak Drazh. Looking at the grim faces of the statues that lined the walls, he wondered what forgotten ancestors these stones depicted. He wondered what they made of their eternal vigil, watching over the relic of what some, with admirable resilience to a fallen world, still referred as the Karaz Ankor: the Everlasting Realm.

His heart froze at what he swore was the patter of distant feet, an echo that, try as he might, could not be pinned on any of his own party. He forced himself to breathe and pressed on after the Slayers, consigning the scratching at the edge of hearing to the dungeons of his overworked imagination.

He felt a tug on his cloak and turned to meet Bernard’s worried face. The man looked pale, but perhaps it was simply a lie of the torchlight. He yanked his cloak irritably from the man’s grip and set his eyes forward. ‘What do you want?’ he whispered over his shoulder, not wishing to disturb the funereal atmosphere of these ancient ways.

‘Did you hear that?’ Bernard whispered, breath clammy on the nape of Thordun’s neck. ‘Footsteps. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that.’

‘You’re getting hysterical,’ Thordun murmured, not wanting to admit he’d heard it too, that dwarfish ears were keener than men’s.

Bernard gave a nervous laugh that was fooling no one. ‘Me? You know me.’

‘That I do,’ Thordun answered coldly.

‘It’s just…’ Bernard coughed. ‘You know none of us are getting out of here, right? I say we cut our losses and get out.’

‘You were keen enough when we left Nuln.’

‘That was different.’

Thordun turned back, letting the man bear the full measure of his disgust. ‘Can your heart really be as grubby as your hands? Don’t you fear the fate you’ve earned? What awaits after death?’

‘I’ve not thought about it.’

Thordun snorted. ‘Look around. I think it’s high time.’

‘I’m sure Ranald will commend my spirit to some afterlife or other.’

‘Perhaps he will,’ Thordun ventured with a frown. He too had paid occasional respects to the god of thieves. He wondered whether that would be enough to stake a claim to his share of whatever rewards awaited Bernard Servat after death. He shook his head. ‘For dwarfs it is different. Our crimes deny the Ancestors’ Hall not just to ourselves but to all our kin. They don’t deserve casting out on my account. I’ll see them back in their place of honour.’ His jaw set, eyes gazing beyond the Slayers into a blood-shrouded distance only he could see. ‘If it’s the last act of my life.’

‘You’re making me well up, Splitter.’

‘Go if you want to,’ Thordun snarled, shooing the man with his pistol. ‘I’ve not forced you to anything. You followed me from Nuln for the gold. As if you would ever retire.’

‘I might’ve, if you’d kept your word.’

‘If I kept my word!’ Thordun spluttered. ‘You expect me to apologise to you?’

Bernard didn’t answer. His hand closed over the hilt of his short sword. Thordun swung up his pistol, thinking the man intended to strike, but Bernard wasn’t looking at him. In fact he wasn’t looking at anything much at all, his eyes roving in their sockets like canaries in a cage. Thordun heard his own shout as it echoed down the hall. He hunched his shoulders, wincing each time the words returned to taunt him. As if the immortal stone of his ancestors spoke out in judgement of his carelessness.

‘Nice one, Splitter,’ Bernard muttered, pulling the blade free. ‘Tres bien.’

As though Bernard’s movement was a signal, the hall shivered to the draw of steel and suddenly Thordun was ringed by resigned looks and dully reflected torchlight. As though his company had always suspected it would end this way. He pinched his lips worriedly. Karak Azul had infected them all.

An echo reached them, bouncing from statue to statue around the pool of firelight. Bernard turned to his motley crew. One by one they offered token shrugs, shaken heads. He puffed out his cheeks and let out the air in a nervous whistle. ‘I think we’ve got–’

‘Grungni’s hairy back, what’s keeping you?’ Rorrick thundered from the darkness of the tunnel ahead, hammer in the grip of one scabrously tattooed fist. The Slayer waved his hammer back the way he had come. It caught the light strangely. Thordun suspected it had already tasted blood. ‘A handful of grobi on the bridge,’ Rorrick gasped, catching his breath before continuing. ‘But it’s ours now.’

‘That’s good,’ growled Bernard, a wary eye on the passage behind them. ‘Why the fuss?’

Rorrick pulled at his scabs, looking far more anxious than a Slayer should. ‘We might not keep it long.’

Sharpwit’s head rose above the lip of the chipped marble basin, lifting further to peer into the darkness. Fifteen years and it had barely changed, the same stillness, the same faint smell of garlic that should surely have expired centuries ago. It had been fifteen years. Lives had been lived, schemes borne fruit, rivals crushed, yet where was the evidence of that, right here where it all begun? He wriggled further out, coming up between a pair of copper ladles and a whisk that nuzzled against his snout like whelps welcoming their mother’s return. Just as they had before. A nauseating sense of déjà vu flushed his bowels. He gave his head a violent shake to clear it, sending the whisk clattering to the floor. Reaching back into the passage, he drew up his crutch and sword.

His eye shrank from the sudden illumination. The blade’s blue glow threw the ancient kitchen into spectral light. Shadows chased after shadows, fleeing over pebbled surfaces and dark oak cabinets, gathering in resentful huddles behind the utensils that hung untouched from brass pegs.

Grasping the marble in his claws, he hauled himself up and over the lip, flopping gracelessly down onto the lacquered tiles in an aching heap. With a grimace, he reached under his back and extracted the whisk from where it dug into his kidney. The thing seemed destined to haunt him.

Claws scraped over stone from the sink behind him. A clank of metal echoed softly from the depths, like a bell trying to ring only to be silenced at the last. He crawled back as the well of shadow cupped within the marble sprouted a pair of obsidian-black horns, then a white-furred muzzle and a pair of frightened red eyes, bulging wide as though terrified by the ghost of the Horned Rat that he appeared to be.

‘Razzel.’ Sharpwit creaked upright as the grey seer set his claws to the stonework and ingloriously wiggled his backside free. ‘I am pleased-glad you arrived safe-well.’

Razzel’s tail whipped angrily above his horned crown, depositing the brass-bound ash of his staff into an impatient paw. Filthy water puddled beneath him. ‘Is that so, hmmm?’ He pounced, horn chimes making a weary effort at the Horned One’s praises as his claws scratched the tiles. ‘No thanks to that tin-headed, cog-eyed, tinker-fool, I think. Look-see.’ Razzel spun, showing Sharpwit the streak of charred cotton and blackened fur running – on his back, naturally – from the nape of his neck to his tail. He swung back, tail thrashing in anger. ‘Clan Skryre will pay through their copper-glazed eyeballs for this when we are safe-back in Skavenblight!’

‘First there is a victory to win, most malfeasant of messiahs.’ Sharpwit bobbed low, circling away from the sorcerer’s prideful temper. Razzel’s eyes followed him, narrowing as they settled on the sword.

‘Where did you find that?’

Sharpwit angled himself so the sword fell between them. ‘Not important.’

Razzel’s eyes darkened, snout flaring as though his skull would burst. ‘I squeak-say what is important!’ He thrust out a paw. ‘Let me hold-smell. The Council places me in charge, not you.’

‘Not this time,’ Sharpwit hissed, emboldened by the faintest scrabbling of paws from the tunnel behind the grey seer’s back. ‘You are a blind prophet. You lead your children to the cliff face. This time you will listen and do as I squeak-say.’

Razzel gawped, too stunned to react, but that wouldn’t last. He extended a hellfire-blackened claw as though to skewer a bug. ‘You… you…’

Sharpwit’s paw tightened around his sword’s grip. What was taking Fang Dao so long?

‘You…’

Razzel’s mind was still grasping for exactly which of the Horned One’s hells Sharpwit had condemned himself to when the basin at his back emitted a long drawn-out screech before wrenching clear of its fixture. Razzel shrieked, leaping back as some great force heaved the marble bowl out onto the tiles, the limestone shattering under the massive weight. Ska Bloodtail panted in the sink’s blown-out ruin. Foam flecked his muzzle from the effort of hauling his bulk through the narrow channel, black fur and dented armour splattered evenly with grime. Struggling and failing to draw his leg from the hole, he kicked furiously at what remained of the granite fitting until the stone finally crumbled and the giant storm-vermin staggered free.

‘Ska? What are you doing here?’

The fangleader shuffled from the ruined opening, hunched shoulders scraping streams of grey dust from the ancient dwarfs’ ceiling. He gestured wearily at the grey seer before his arm dropped back to his waist, both paws quivering on his hips, snatching every breath as though each was more urgent than the last. ‘Eshin-sneak, he say… he say Razzel to come here.’

‘And Queek tells you, look after, Grey Seer Razzel, yes-yes?’

Ska regarded him with suspicion. ‘Yes.’

Sharpwit waved his sword paw with false modesty. ‘Queek keeps few secrets from me.’ Even if he might intend to. He turned back to Razzel as two more figures emerged from the now gaping tunnel. The mute albino stepped to his master’s side, dripping wet and miserable but at least silent, his bulky halberd strapped by a scrap of cloth to his back. Fang Dao, damn his tardy hide, flowed from the darkness like a physical extension of the albino’s shadow.

‘Razzel,’ Sharpwit said, waving a paw over the grim stones. ‘We are in Black Crag. Tell me how is our man-thing.’

‘What man-thing?’ Razzel returned with apparently genuine confusion.

‘The man-thing,’ Sharpwit repeated sharply. ‘The man-thing from Azul-Place who you were explicitly told to follow and make sure comes to no harm.’ His voice grew shrill as he limped forward. The seer backed away and stumbled into the footpaws of his own bodyguard. ‘The man-thing that is central to everything, the man-thing we cannot afford to lose, the man-thing you stole before leaving me to die!’

Razzel spread his paws innocently. ‘I left you in the paws of the Horned Rat.’ He nodded enthusiastically as though exhorting a congregation to acts of piety. ‘All praise the Great Hor–’

The sorcerer’s praises ended in a crack and a squeal as Sharpwit’s crutch splintered against his shin. Tears sprang from the seer’s eyes, like spring water from the deserts of Araby in response to some miracle, and he collapsed whimpering into the arms of his albino guard.

‘One more time, Razzel. Can the chosen count to one? Let me demonstrate.’ He sheathed his glowing sword beneath his belt and held up a fist, one clawed finger upheld. ‘One more time only, I will ask. Where is the man-thing?’

‘I lost him,’ Razzel squeaked.

‘You lost him?’

‘Yes-yes, he leaves. He leaves with other man-things, I don’t know where. Is hardly my fault if stupid man-things cannot do as they are told.’

‘You lost him.’

Calmly Sharpwit bunched his finger back into his fist and spun around, pulling free his sword.

Razzel wrapped both paws around the albino’s biceps and struggled to pull himself up onto his broken leg, succeeding only in scrabbling on the tiles like a wounded blindfish hauled out from the deep. ‘The Horned Rat provides,’ he squealed, desperately. ‘Have faith in him, Sharpwit, in his chosen!’

‘Ska,’ he said, setting his crutch between them like some demarcation of neutral ground upon which to hammer out a truce. Standing before Queek’s right paw, Sharpwit was struck by how truly massive he was. He reached only up to Ska’s collar. Ska’s pieced-together gromril breastplate distended his already monstrous frame to such a degree it was an astonishing testament to his strength that he could even walk. ‘That thing that Queek-Warlord tells you to do.’ He tilted his head back towards the still-raving sorcerer. ‘Do it now.’

Ska looked over Sharpwit’s shoulder, then back down at Sharpwit himself. Sharpwit sensed muscles pull against bone, the way one feels the subtle precursors to an earthquake.

‘Now?’

Sharpwit nodded.

Pushing Sharpwit forcibly aside, Ska strode towards the grey seer. The sorcerer’s gibbering upped in urgency and he shoved out his staff as if to ward off a fox. Ska froze, expecting the fires of damnation, but received nothing more terrible than the metallic kiss of brass on gromril. He batted the staff aside, vambrace cracking it in two at the middle. Razzel shrieked in renewed terror and the albino let him flop from his arms, diving for the fangleader with a whistled snarl.

The albino’s teeth gnashed for Ska’s face, snapping down only inches from his snout with Ska’s paw gripped tightly around its jaw. Claws blunted on gromril plate as the albino drooled helplessly from its pinioned maw. The albino’s eyes widened as Ska’s other paw took a firm hold between his legs. The pale warrior gasped as Ska heaved, driving him up, head crashing through the stone ceiling. Ska roared as though his voice itself was a bludgeon, powdered rock drenching his shoulders as the albino slammed over and over into the hard rock of the Third Deep until its pale legs stopped twitching. He tossed the dusted corpse aside, sending it thumping into the wall, rolling back onto the floor tiles amidst a clatter of brass-handled utensils.

‘Ska!’ Sharpwit squealed. Razzel was scrambling across the ruined floor. Brushing aside the layering of dust, his paw found his staff. Sharpwit cast for something to hide behind, finding nothing more suitable than the hulking stormvermin himself.

Razzel tittered madly, power coursing through his body, and started to rise. The grey seer suddenly squealed in agony, the beginnings of a sorcerous chant coming apart like the bones of his broken paw as Ska Bloodtail leapt forward and stamped down on his fingers. The sorcerer mewled, pawing lamely at his staff. Ska shrugged off the masonry that had fallen about his shoulders and reached down with one paw to haul up the broken wizard by his neck.

‘Help-help any time, Dao,’ Sharpwit hissed.

The assassin materialised at his back. Sharpwit jumped and bit his tongue.

‘You seemed fine,’ the assassin whispered coldly.

Letting an angry snarl express his displeasure, he turned to Ska. ‘Bring-bring the great prophet-seer.’

Ska dragged the grey seer through the rubble, letting him dangle at Sharpwit’s level like a white-furred doll, footpaws hanging free, bleeding slowly out.

‘Grey Seer Razzel, most pretentious of prophets. Bland-fur, blank-mind, whatever is to be done with you?

The sorcerer whispered, his devotions beyond hearing, but then Sharpwit doubted they were meant for mortal ears.

‘I asked once whether you can be useful.’ The seer didn’t respond, didn’t let up in his prayers. ‘Do you remember what you squeak-said?’ Still nothing, unless one counted a feeble paw scratching at the arm about his throat. ‘Yes-yes, you said.’ He leant forward until his eye was almost touching Razzel’s. ‘Call me fool-fool, but I think you are still useful. Am I wrong?’

Razzel suddenly snapped back to life. ‘No-no! Not wrong, wisest and most forgiving of old ones.’

Sharpwit grinned nastily. ‘Queek never did like grey seers.’ He gestured to Ska who happily unburdened himself of his load, the unsupported sorcerer practically collapsing in upon himself at Sharpwit’s feet. He planted his crutch between the fingers of the seer’s crushed hand, levelling his sword to his nasal bridge, watching the seer’s eyes roll together to meet at its glowing point.

‘If you guess how long I have looked forward to this, I promise to make it fast-quick.’

Thordun’s lungs burned, legs pumping through the dark like pistons in a steam engine. Bernard and the other men raced ahead with the torchlight, shadow stick figures in the distance of the hall. It sounded like they ran to a fight, dwarfish war-cries and high-pitched screams reaching down the hall on a hot, sulphurous breeze. Compared to the howls from behind that had grown louder and louder until they practically snapped at his heels, it sounded almost welcoming. He huffed in a mouthful of rotten-egg air, trying to coax more speed from his legs.

The hall widened with painful slowness until, without warning, the walls fell away. Thordun’s eyes struggled to take in the awesome vista that opened out before him. An immense cavern soared up towards the mountain’s peak where fading glimstones glittered almost like true stars. High arched windows and balconies studded the rock face all the way up to the First Deep. They resembled the windows of noble houses in Nuln, but on a scale that left such residences resembling play castles on the sands of Barak Varr. Buttresses like giants hewn in the likeness of guardian ancestors strove against the walls.

Emerging from the hallway, Thordun puffed through ruined streets. Stone buildings had been broken open and remade as greenskin squats, wide boulevards strewn with litter. The street ahead widened towards a white-paved plaza. Bernard and his men sprinted over the exposed square for its far side and the sweeping immensity of the Mordrekk Bridge.

The Mordrekk was a colossus of white stone half a mile across, its sides stamped every few hundred yards with ancestor icons and runes of endurance. It glittered silver, arcing over the yawning river of emptiness, defiant as no product of mortal hands had any right to be in the face of such an abyss. Viewed against such wonders, whether carved by nature’s might or by ancient masters, the two Slayers swinging their bloodied hammers beneath the arched ceiling of its bridgehouse looked minuscule. Their hammers left a dark legacy of shattered skulls among the goblins that scrambled to reach them. Black-robed corpses piled themselves into a makeshift barricade, almost as if the dwarfs had willed it so.

A shot rang out over the clamour of steel on steel, and a goblin pitched over the chasm’s edge, a hole smoking in its chest. Smoke rose from a discharged handgun, cloaking the sprinting men like an exorcised spirit. The men charged, each with his own cry, Rorrick’s frustrated shouts fading into their tail as his shorter stride lagged behind. The goblins squawked in fright, dashing back to the ruins of their city, and, for the moment at least, the bridge remained theirs.

Thordun steeled himself for the last few hundred yards. Black-feathered arrows zipped down from the balconies. Rorrick turned his way and urged him on. Bernard bellowed an order and three of the four men with guns got down on one knee and fired a volley into the ruins. Smoke shrouded the bridge obscuring the fourth man, still running while struggling to empty his barrel to reload. Thordun didn’t see anything hit, but the smoke at least made life harder for the archers.

He risked a backward glance, cracking his toe on a rock and stumbling as a mob of black-hooded shapes poured from the hallway. Most had short stabbing swords, waving them above their heads and screaming as they surged forward, but some had bows. The archers scrambled over walls onto broken rooftops, drawing back their strings and taking aim.

Thordun dived into a gaping doorway as shafts peppered the stonework. One spun inwards, ripping a tear in his trousers. He hissed and pressed a palm to his thigh. He dabbed it with his cloak. The blue wool came away clean and he released a relieved wheeze.

‘Rapide, Splitter!’

Grinding his teeth in frustration, he freed his second pistol and drew back against the door frame. ‘Easy for you to say,’ he muttered between breaths, sheltering under the eaves as arrows dropped like hellish rain. To his surprise, he found himself wishing for Handrik. A seemingly invincible longbeard, whatever his opinions on the fallibility of young beardlings, would have been a most welcome sight right now.

He’d go on three. ‘One. Two.’

A crackling volley of shots rang over the screaming goblins, punctuated by squawks of pain. An arm like a bear’s lunged through the doorway and dragged him out by the collar. ‘Dépêchez-vous, Splitter.’ Ducking as an arrow zipped overhead, Bernard ran almost bent double for the bridgehouse. Thordun sped after, turning briefly to fire a lead slug through the brain of a goblin with longer legs than most.

‘Thank you, beardling,’ Rorrick roared in greeting, cheeks flushed as if from too much ale. ‘It’s everything I’d hoped it would be.’

‘Back!’ yelled Bernard, as a hail of arrows fell through the choking cloud. The big man took the steps to the bridgehouse four at a time. One of his company, a sandy-haired lad barely out of his teens, grabbed his musket and ran, halting as he realised he’d forgotten his powder bag, and took an arrow through the throat. He gurgled something Thordun feared must be deeply profound and let the musket fall, grasping the air with clawed hands as though he drowned.

‘Now! Move!’

Thordun realised he hadn’t moved an inch, that he was just stood there like a scarecrow on a granite field beneath the deadliest of storms. He made a grab for the boy’s gun. Remembering the powder and leaving a hurried prayer in trade, he dashed for the steps. A stocky man in dark cloak and polished mail shoved past as he made the top, sighted down the barrel of his handgun, one eye tight, and squeezed off a speculative shot. The aftershock boomed through the captive space under the arches and Thordun closed his eyes, the sheer volume threatening to pop them from his face.

Rorrick merely laughed all the harder.

Bernard tore the musket from his hands, thrusting it into the surprised arms of a raven-haired woman. A long face partitioned by an infected scar made a cratered no-man’s-land by a battle with pox. What was her name, Thordun thought? What had that boy’s name been? Who were these people, these umgi that Bernard had gathered to die on his account? He cursed himself for never bothering to ask. He vowed to track down every one. Their families would know they fell as heroes.

‘You can’t hit a damn thing anyway,’ Bernard explained, misinterpreting his expression.

‘You-you saved my life,’ Thordun said. The sentiment fell woefully short. Head desperately trying to speed up, heart direfully needing to slow down, tongue all caught up in the middle.

Bernard stood with one hand on the upward curve of a decorative arch, hunching underneath to keep an eye on the goblins that their gunfire was only barely forcing behind their walls. ‘Yes, well,’ he shouted above the continuing barrage. ‘For a bit, maybe.’

‘Thank you, anyway.’

Bernard grunted and kept his lookout. Beside them, Rorrick bounced behind the line of sweating men like a child trapped indoors, forbidden to play in the rain.

‘We can make it, Rorrick. We can do this.’

‘I think not, beardling. It’s a long way over the bridge, and a fair run to the squatter king’s dungeons after that. If we try and move now, this lot’ll be over our backs like a rash.’

At that moment, the bridge shook to a tremendous force, stone screaming as something crashed against the bridgehouse roof. Thordun cried out as the bridgehouse bucked beneath them, the dark-haired woman thrown from the top step just as she was setting her aim. Screaming, she spilled back onto the plaza in a shower of rock splinters, set upon by a screeching mob before she could rise.

Thordun looked away, flinching as the shot fired from her musket like a departing soul. He’d thought the city dead, but dormant was perhaps more apt, and it was awake now, alive with pale green shapes. On one of the upper galleries, a pair of hunched figures cranked back the arm of a catapult for a fresh load. He wondered how much more punishment the bridge could withstand. The Mordrekk was a marvel, but the Karaz Ankor abounded with the ruins of fallen marvels.

‘Go,’ Rorrick bellowed, elbowing Thordun aside, as if to face down the greenskin hordes with passion and hatred alone. ‘Bring back Kazador’s kin. We’ll hold your way out.’ He shrugged and grinned wildly. ‘It’s only grobi, after all.’

Thordun offered a quick bow. ‘Don’t die too soon.’

‘Chance’d be a fine thing, youngling!’

A terrible screech rent the vast cavern, dark-robed greenskins flooding from the ruins like a black river. Shots fired. A handful of wiry bodies danced their last, but the charge didn’t waver. Thordun palmed sweat onto his cloak and took aim.

‘Forget it, Splitter. Time to move!’

Moisture dripped from the cracked surfaces like fluids leeching from a corpse. Queek stood amid the destruction, one thought alone holding together the ruin of his fractured mind. Retribution.

Somehow Old-thing had survived. Somehow he thought to flee Queek’s battle and claim his glory. He believed he could take White-fur and Ska with him and get away with it. The fleshless one was so painfully wrong that even Queek was struggling to devise a fitting punishment. He would make Black Crag a tomb, a monument in dead flesh to the cruelty of Queek and blessed by the blood of thousands. Every creature to be found in these worthless mountains would bleed until the valley was a lake of blood upon which he would walk and lesser vermin drown. Then he would tear his own monument to the ground and see it burn, a claw in the eye to all that built to outlast the coming of Queek.

One vile betrayer at least would not live to suffer that day.

A pair of sodden white-furred bodies lay partially interred beneath a tumble of masonry. Lumps of granite rolled aside for Queek’s passing, gravel crunching beneath his bare footpaws. His lip curled at the appearance of the grey seer. His legs had been shredded, as though by wild dogs, but otherwise he appeared almost serene, blanketed in a funeral shroud of grey dust, white robes stiffened with ruby smears. Queek crouched at his side, taking his powdery muzzle in one gauntlet. The seer’s eyes were lifeless, tongue hanging slack to his palate. Queek let the head drop with a sneer.

Gravel crunched. Queek swung his muzzle back towards the tunnel and hissed. The stormvermin, long fur sopping wet and smeared over its eyes, cringed back into the passage with a submissive mewl. Queek held his glare until the skaven was out of sight.

‘Where is Ska?’ he hissed to himself ‘Is this him? Does he kill-kill for Queek? Or does he stab-slay to take-steal Queek’s prize himself?’

He started at the sound of a cough. The grey seer’s head had rolled to one side and was staring directly at him.

‘You are… a mad-thing fool.’

‘That is not what Queek asks.’

He cocked his head to one side, intrigued by a glimmer of water between the rubble, a footprint, a jarring order within the madness. It was pebbled with dust and relatively fresh and not the work of a skaven. He followed the pattern of prints, occasionally lost under larger skaven paw scratches or buried under a sheet of rock, but leading inexorably towards a cupboard fitted beneath the granite surface. There were fingerprints partially concealed by dust, one of them set into the grain in blood.

A predatory grin emerged unbidden as he threw back the doors.

‘What has Queek found here?’

A lone goblin shivered, wrapped up in its own arms and legs as though it might shield itself from the Headtaker.

‘This is a lucky green-thing, Queek thinks. Queek leaves so many with sad faces in mud, what is one more let to run, if it helps?’

At the word ‘Queek’, the goblin noticeably paled. One arm jerkily detached from the knot of limbs to wipe blood from its forehead. It made a flat squeaking sound, the free hand whipping over its mouth to suppress the useless stream of white noise. It stared wide-eyed at the gnawed skulls at his shoulder.

Queek’s claw drifted lazily into the goblin’s line of vision, reeling it in like a baited fish and down towards his skirt of bruised and waxen goblin heads. He ran a soothing claw along their brows. ‘Do not look-hope to poor Ikit, green-thing. The Headtaker has his tongue.’

‘Wh-what d’you want?’ it stammered through its fingers.

‘Do you see what happens here?’

The goblin nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah I saw. A big black rattie, I mean… er… rat?’ It cringed, waiting to see if it had caused offence before babbling on. ‘A big black one, yeah. He puts ’em both down.’

Queek felt relief. He had always known Ska was loyal. But the goblin continued.

‘He does it at this old’un’s say-so.’

‘Old-thing?’ Queek hissed, snatching for his sword hilt. The sudden movement made the goblin squeal until a second set of fingers over its mouth killed the noise.

‘Yeah,’ the goblin said, voice muffled. ‘He finishes the job ’isself and takes the big-un to find the boss’s stuntie prisoners.’

Queek slowly rose. So Ska had been Old-thing’s puppet all along. That was why Old-thing had always been so interested in his underling, why the traitorous toad had allowed him to believe White-fur the true villain, even when Queek had always suspected him of being a mere smokescreen for Old-thing’s twisted plans. In fact, it would be boringly predictable to discern Gnawdwell’s jealous paw at work. Old-thing had always been slavishly loyal to the clanlord’s whims, even at the expense of Queek’s inevitable triumph. Azul-Place would be a pyre five miles high, fuelled by the copious fats of dwarf-things, were it not for Gnawdwell’s meddling. It was shameful, particularly from a rat like Old-thing who did so love to eulogise on the mutual profit of collusion. Well, Old-thing was about to collude with his own liver, and he’d toss in Ska’s for good measure. And Gnawdwell’s too? Why not? There were none mightier than Queek!

He looked up at Krug and snarled. ‘Did you know of this, dwarf-thing? Or you?’ He snapped round at Ikit Slash, the skeletal warlord spinning infuriatingly behind his back every time he tried to turn and face him.

‘You are nothing but a mad-thing.’ A wittering of laughter. ‘Bested by an old rat.’

Queek reached for his sword, upper lip rippling. ‘Queek tells you be quiet, White-fur. He not say again.’

Razzel coughed, bells clanking like the manacled paws of the damned, muzzle split by a death’s head grin.

Queek’s eyes narrowed. Something here was not right. ‘Do not think-think I not kill a dead-thing. You talk less with a fist in your mouth.’

To his surprise, the dead seer struggled into a sitting position, leaning against one of the waist-height oak cabinets and pulling a broken staff from the rubble. ‘You are madder than I think-dream. The Horned Rat, he tests me.’ The seer’s bells went quiet. ‘Stay back. I show you dead-dead, mad-thing.’

Queek grinned as though he’d been offered a gift. He spread his paws and took a slow step forward. Razzel waved the broken-off top of his staff as another paw slid through the rubble. Razzel squealed, digging under his robes as if an army were concealed there. Queek took another step.

‘White-fur want-wish to show Queek a thing?’

With a triumphant cry, the sorcerer pulled a thumb-sized nugget of warpstone from his robes. He took it between claw and forefinger, holding it threateningly over his open maw, staff outthrust like a torch to the dark.

‘No closer,’ he hissed. ‘One bite and Queek dead-gone. Not so arrogant when pasted to the walls, hmmm?

Queek dropped to his knees, the sorcerer’s warpstone-capped staff ringing off the underside of his helmet. ‘Do it,’ Queek grinned. ‘We see who is the big rat.’

Razzel’s paw twitched, jaw flexing, eyes rolling down as if willing his fingers to unclench and drop the glowing rock onto his tongue.

‘Queek always wonders why grey ones eat-chew the black-rock for magic. Is risky.’ His eyes drank in the stone’s throbbing warplight, offering nothing back. His voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Is White-fur not scared?’

Razzel pushed his staff harder into Queek’s throat, tongue snaking out as if making its own play for the prize but coming up short. ‘I’ll do it,’ he lisped.

‘Queek hears stories. Of grey-furs that eat too much. Yes-yes! Maybe black-rock instead eats White-fur from inside and makes him squishy-thing.’ His gauntlet closed around the seer’s paw, forcing it towards his mouth. The sorcerer resisted, but his arm was weak. Not like Queek. ‘Queek wants to see that. How much does god-thing love-favour, you think?’

‘Stop!’ Razzel squealed, twisting his head away. Queek grasped him by the cheeks and held firm. ‘Please! No! I do anything!’

‘Then open big-wide. And tell god-thing that Queek still waits!’

Razzel screamed, loud enough to announce his coming to the Underworld, as Queek sank his claws into the sorcerer’s palm and dug out the warpstone for himself. He shoved the seer onto his back and held up the warpstone between thumb and foreclaw, admiring its processed edges, the way light vanished into it as it struck.

‘Old-thing should have killed you,’ he murmured. ‘He ruins your legs but not your hands. He leaves your staff and precious black-rock.’ He tittered softly. ‘Always plots with that one, yes-yes. Always schemes. And thoughts, they fly from his mind and make nests.’

Razzel didn’t answer. He looked as though he might already have died again.

‘He knows Queek not like the grey ones and their whispering. He thinks Razzel maybe can kill-kill Queek, yes-yes?’ He looked down on the weakly gasping seer and tutted. ‘Silly Old-thing.’

He made a fist around the nugget of warpstone and shrieked back into the tunnel. ‘Why do you wait-hide? There are enemies of Queek to kill-slay.’ He spun on the open cupboard. The goblin squealed and buried its head between its knees. ‘Tell Queek where dwarf-things are kept and he promises not to eat-kill.’

‘What about… about me?’ Razzel asked. He flinched as soon as he spoke, as if he suspected the answer might yet be worse than the uncertainty.

Queek rapped the warpstone thoughtfully against his snout-piece. He knelt down. ‘Queek must be in a good mood. He lets you live too.’ He snickered, setting the pulsing rock back into the sorcerer’s palm. ‘If you escape-crawl from here, then maybe you are the chosen one.’

‘I see man-things.’

Sharpwit leant over the low rooftop wall and stared across the ruined city. There was a black smudge between two grey smudges. If he focused hard enough, he could almost imagine a slender wisp of grey running across the black smudge, perhaps even interpret the occasional darting shape as a figure involved in the battle he could hear all too well. He gave Fang Dao a prod with his crutch.

‘I want one special man-thing, blind-fool. He is big-tall, black-furred, do you see him?’

The assassin edged further along the rooftop, never a good indicator of positive news. ‘Is too far, most understanding one. All man-things look alike-same from distance.’

Ska Bloodtail nodded as though this were some well-established fact.

Fools. They were both of them fools.

‘It must be him,’ Sharpwit spoke to himself. ‘This is far-distant from man-thing places.’

‘What use is this man-thing?’ asked Ska.

‘He is crucial,’ Sharpwit spat, his voice a level hiss, careful even in anger not to attract any goblin attention. ‘Only he can claim the reward of Kazador. Without him we have nothing! Does that pass your thick skull?’

Fang Dao looked dubiously over the green-thing hordes that separated them from the bridge. His gaze settled on the bridge itself and the chasm it spanned, his sinking features fully anticipating the command that was coming. Perhaps Dao, at least, was not such an imbecile.

‘Follow those man-things to our prize, Dao. See no harm comes to the big black-fur.’

Dao snarled as though he’d just swallowed a bee, leaning over the low wall to size up the drop before vaulting over and skidding nimbly down.

‘What do we do here, Old-thing?’ Ska asked.

Sharpwit watched as Dao landed in a crouch, muzzle sweeping the alley left and right before scampering off in the direction of the bridge, his lithe figure fading into the darkness. ‘Queek wants the dwarf-things captured and that is what we do,’ said Sharpwit. He sat down, back to the wall, eye closed as he followed the battle, told to him in the crunch of bone and the shrieks of the maimed. He wasn’t accustomed to being lost, but he was lost now. There may have been a thousand and one ways over that bridge, but he knew none of them. He bared his fangs in agitation, his tail lashing as it was wont to do when he was anxious.

But he was a patient rat. He would wait until every last green-thing was dead. That should give him time to come up with something better.

The men sprinted full pelt for the far side of the bridge. Thordun struggled after, pounding up the rising arch, Bernard occasionally pausing to check he wasn’t lagging too far behind. Arrows fell in ones and twos, skittering off the stonework like the last hailstones of a storm or plummeting soundlessly into the chasm. He bared his teeth as Bernard looked his way again: he was a dwarf, he could run all day if he had to. But then he saw the man stagger, saw the black feathers sticking from his shoulder and the curse turned to dust in his mouth.

Bernard tried to keep on as if nothing had happened, face slack, legs going through the motions before giving way beneath him. His head smacked the stone, eliciting a howl of agony as the protruding arrowhead pulled against the muscle. Thordun’s legs found a level of speed they’d not previously been sharing, skidding to his knees by Bernard’s side. He dragged the man to the cover of the low parapet. His fingertips pincered the exit wound above his breast, sizing up the possibility of yanking the thing out. Bernard hissed.

‘Not on your… your bloody life.’

‘You’re not moving like this.’

Bernard offered a shrug that turned out more like a grimace and shuffled upright against the wall. ‘Then I guess I’m not moving.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Thordun, casting desperately around for someone to help carry him, but the other men hadn’t stopped running. ‘You’ve had worse.’

Bernard smirked, gums bloody. ‘You’re thinking of that mademoiselle in the Blind Pig?’ He started to chuckle, only to cease with a dull moan.

‘She never did like you,’ Thordun whispered, wrenching back a tear.

‘She was using you to get to me, Splitter. I’ll claim that to my… my…’ he broke into a chuckle again, this time gasping his way through the pain. ‘To my grave.’

Thordun looked back towards the bridgehouse. The Slayers battled shoulder to shoulder, refusing to yield a grudging inch, but they were overwhelmed. The enthusiastic living crowded out the dead, tipping them into the abyss for their own stab at the dwarfs. Still more crawled over the outer walls, spears needling through the windows, squabbling for the best handholds only to be dragged screaming down by the ankles so another could claim their place.

So much blood.

A snarling lump of purplish blubber thumped onto the bridge. The shock of landing rippled through its flesh. It snuffled at the mortar beneath its stubby feet, a creature seemingly all fangs and intense almond eyes. Its goblin rider twisted in its leather harness, jabbing its heels into the creature’s flanks to coax it round onto the dwarfs. The goblin plucked a javelin from a quiver on its back and hurled it hopefully into the fight. The missile whistled well clear, but one of the Slayers turned from his clansdwarfs and hefted his hammer, his hate-twisted visage a challenge made flesh. Thordun looked on, aghast, as the creature’s jaw distended, its rider yipping gleefully as it was lifted higher. The Slayer charged with a howl, the creature responded with a quiver of flesh and in a sudden rush of motion its fangs slammed together. Thordun blinked as though he’d just witnessed a trick. The dwarf was gone. His hammer struck ground, sliding onward alone until it finally came to rest some feet behind its intended target. The creature shuffled around to look at it. It released a self-satisfied belch, a rubbery pink tongue sweeping out to smear saliva from its fangs.

So much death.

Thordun took aim, his arm shaking so hard it was a miracle he could even pull the trigger. The bullet slammed through the creature’s flank and the monster shuddered as it deflated like a ruptured bladder. The goblin gagged on the foulness that whined from its mount.

What was it all for?

He looked down at Bernard. The man watched the squig’s death throes with a horrified fascination, wide eyes seemingly drinking in every last experience while they still could.

He’d not abandon his oldest friend to this.

He dropped to one knee and rolled the big man over his shoulders, grunting as he took the weight.

Bernard groaned. ‘Let go, you idiot. You can’t carry me.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

Thighs burning, he drove himself upward, staggering a pace before setting himself. He tried to ignore the screams from the bridgehouse, the arrows spitting down, the growls of the hoppers and their riders’ ecstatic cries, dozens more fleshy impacts shuddering through the stones beneath his feet. He kept on running, Bernard gasping with every footfall.

He crested the rise of the bridge. Halfway.

Almost there.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Thordun took the steps of the Mordrekk as fast as he dared. Blood dribbled worryingly down his shoulder. He mouthed a prayer to Valaya and Shallya both – ladies of healing of dwarfs and men – in thanks for the periodic moans that told him his friend still lived.

Space, it seemed, was precious on this side of the bridge. The steps led down onto a tiny courtyard, closed in by grandiose manors of granite and black basalt that butted directly onto the rock face of the cavern and blocked out much of the ceiling’s glimlight. In their panic, the men held there, shaking firearms trained onto the horde that screamed over the bridge after them. They ignored the twin boulevards at the far corners of the square that angled deeper into the stronghold, the approaches guarded by headless torsos of cracked stone.

‘Fire, you dullards,’ Bernard groaned, managing to sound caustic despite being draped over a dwarf’s shoulders. ‘Those weapons work, you know.’

‘No,’ Thordun yelled as he huffed past them, through the courtyard, then on between the vandalised figures to the leftward alleyway. ‘Keep running.’

One of the men discharged his weapon anyway, bathing them all in choking fumes and the smell of saltpetre, before breaking off with the others. They caught up with Thordun easily, but this time kept pace. A shred of loyalty in their mercenary hearts? The maturing cynic in him considered it more likely that they merely tired as his dwarfish muscles would not. They flew by more broken statues. Some were little more than a stump of calf. They lined their way like a moribund guard of honour. A wake for the undying realm.

Jibbers and howls shrieked down every branch in the street. Thordun ground his teeth and prayed that they were nothing but echoes. If it turned out they were surrounded…

‘There!’ he cried. The street led to a gaping mouth in the cavern wall that looked to be straining to swallow the entire district whole. ‘That way! Go!’

The last man made the passage into the rock face just as the first of the greenskins surged around the corner and onto the street they had just cleared. Slingshots whirred like cicadas, bullets ricocheting off the stone walls several paces short. The echoes sounded after them, as though plummeting together into some bottomless well. Thordun felt a burn start up in his belly and kept on running. Doorways stretched into the far distance to left and right, some wood, some iron, painted in bloody fluids with the red fang, others hanging on their hinges like entrails from a gutted sow

‘Which of these doors is it?’ he wheezed to himself.

‘Tell me you joke, Splitter,’ said Bernard, lips almost touching his ear.

‘Because I’m renowned throughout Nuln for my jokes. Rorrick was the one with the map.’

Thordun looked left and right, biting his lip with worry as they ran past one door after another. ‘It’s all right. I think I remember.’ He twisted around, running backwards without breaking stride. Howling greenskins bounded after them. It was as if they sprouted from the walls like fungus.

‘And then what?’ asked Bernard, unavoidably looking the same way.

Thordun started to laugh. Right then, the question was so absurd, it seemed the only logical response to it. Still laughing, he turned back around to keep running.

And then he saw the door.

He pointed it out and shouted. The men chased after him as he ran for it. The door was of panelled oak with a grille at a dwarf’s face height, otherwise unadorned but for an iron plate just beneath the grille inscribed with angular runes. They glittered in the light of their torch. He recognised the lettering from the map. It was the Third Deep gaol. This had been where Yorri Borkodin had thought to find Kazador’s kinsdwarfs, where Rorrick Hammerhand had died trying to lead them now. They had made it at least as far as any before them. Surely it could not all end in failure now.

Thordun tried the handle and the door swung open easily. He dashed under the lintel, depositing Bernard as gently as haste allowed while the surviving men ducked their heads and streamed in after him. The last slammed the door closed, hand fisting over a bolt that was no longer there. He gave vent to something between a gargle and a scream.

This was not how Thordun had imagined it would be. Kazador’s grateful kin rescued, the rapturous welcome on his return, perhaps catching the eye of some attractive young rinn handily distracted from his chequered past by spectacular wealth and valour. In some of his mind’s more fanciful wanderings he had slain the fearsome Gorfang in personal combat, sundering his thick skull with a single blow of his father’s hammer. And that would be the moment, he had thought, the instant when everything he had yearned for would come to be, when Gazul’s scales tipped his way. After such daydreams he would awake with a fluttering heart and a tingling in his fingertips, and had come to imagine that that would be how it would feel, the sensation a message from the beyond that betokened his ancestors finally crossing Gazul’s threshold. But he didn’t even have the hammer. He felt like tearing out his beard in despair.

‘Brace that door with something.’ Bernard’s voice. The big man slouched against the wall. He looked ashen.

The man with the torch stabbed it down into an empty sconce and, for the first time, Thordun got a good look at the room that would mark their ends. It looked like a guard room. The floor and walls were of simple, rugged stone and, above an empty fireplace on the wall to the right of the door, a collection of axes and hammers still hung from a rack. Against the wall directly opposite the door, wooden crates had been stacked almost up to the ceiling.

The former torch-bearer hurried to aid his companion in dragging one of those crates to the door. Each hugged an opposing corner and strained, as if the pair were engaged in a bizarre drinking game that had taken an unexpectedly deadly turn. Thordun looked past the men, past the loose stacks of boxes and barrels. Something wasn’t right here. The runes had promised a cell of some kind, and if this room was for the gaoler’s watch, then where was the gaol itself? Where were the inmates? He shivered, as though a wight had just reached through his hauberk and touched his heart. Hidden behind that pile was a second door. There had to be.

‘Help me,’ he shouted, shoving aside the first chest without waiting to see who answered.

‘Whoah…’ Bernard breathed. ‘I think I might’ve just died.’ The men had all stopped what they were doing and were staring rapaciously at the ground by Thordun’s feet.

He looked down. The chest had broken open, its glittering contents cascading across the limestone flags.

Gold.

Thordun’s eyes widened as he drank in the sight, feeling his heart pound the first rush of gold fever through his veins. In that moment he couldn’t have cared less for the goblins at the door, or the men that stood to die at his side. All he wanted was to scoop that gold into his hands and rub the metal into his cheeks, to inhale it into his blood. He shook his head with a wry smile, the urge fading if not disappearing altogether. He always had been an odd dwarf. Too much imagination, for one thing. The reward had always proven less satisfying than the earning or – more often – the stealing of it.

He stretched out for the thing that had quickened his pulse more than gold ever could. Moving the chest had revealed a second door, this one of dark iron. It gave a dull rattle as he tried to open it. Locked. He closed his eyes, teetering on the cusp of ecstasy. It would have been irresistible at the least of times. But this was it. He knew it in his heart.

He heaved over a second crate to reveal a grille on this door too. It was covered by a sliding hatch. He was able to push it back a couple of inches before it struck the angle of another box. He pressed his left eye to the opening he had fashioned. It was pitch dark, but he was almost certain that he could see pale shapes lying on the ground inside. His dark vision was just beginning to acclimatise when something determined smashed into the outer door. He pulled away from the hatch and shoved aside another box to clear the lock.

Behind him, Bernard rasped instructions. Men nervously readied swords and pressed their backs to the wall either side of the shuddering door. Musketeers crouched behind a zig-zagged second line of boxes just behind Thordun’s back.

‘How’s it going?’ Bernard asked.

‘Hmm?’ Thordun murmured, so lost in sizing up the door’s lock that he’d barely heard the question. ‘What?’

‘You think you can bust those dwarfs out?’

A sword clove between the outer door’s oak panels before he could answer. It wiggled up and down for a moment before evidently becoming stuck. A harsh voice cursed in a barbaric tongue and the door shuddered anew as though thumped by a troll. Thordun rolled his eyes. Grungni’s tears, he hoped not.

‘Well, can you?’

Thordun just shrugged. There was really nothing more to say. Because it had become less about getting anyone out than getting themselves in some time ago.

‘Quiet, fool-fool,’ Sharpwit hissed. ‘And sit down.’

He slapped at the giant stormvermin’s elbow until the oaf sank his head back below the rooftop wall. Sharpwit twisted about, snout poking over the low granite parapet. He rose a little higher, eye focusing on a pawful of blurred shapes as they scythed into the rear of the greenskin horde. Queek stood proud in his misty vision, as if he had wished to be allowed to perceive just one thing with clarity and the smirking djinn had chosen for that thing to be Queek. The warlord’s trophies swayed as though struggling to keep up, two score, perhaps three, of armoured warriors sprinting after him. He doubted that the ragtag rabble of goblins, too cowardly or too lazy to pursue the humans with the rest of their kind, were going to stop Queek reaching the bridge.

Wary of being spotted, he sank back down beside Ska. He gave Ska one last slap. The big rat probably didn’t feel it under all that armour, but it made him feel better. He should be thankful that the gnat-brained moron hadn’t simply cried out for his mad-thing master from the off. Very thankful indeed.

‘Queek crosses the bridge,’ Ska rumbled. If that was his best effort at keeping quiet, then Sharpwit took note to leave him behind next time. ‘We should help-help his capturing the dwarf-things.’

He rested a calming paw on Ska’s knee. He’d gone for the shoulder, but that was too high up to achieve while still looking dignified. ‘Brave-bold Ska, Queek knows you as his most loyal of servants. This is why he trusts only you to watch his rear.’

Ska visibly puffed out, even in his armour. Idiot.

‘We watch-wait. This is what Queek sends us to do. Make sure none other comes to surprise him while he find-claims the prize.’

Sharpwit gnawed on the handle of his remaining crutch, plotting how exactly he was going to extract the dwarf-things from Queek if he returned, worrying whether Dao could protect the man-thing, wondering how it was that Queek was able to ruin everything. He glanced over at the great lunk of muscle and metal that sat chuffed as cheese beside him. If only Ska could be convinced to do the sensible thing. It shouldn’t be too hard. Stabbing a superior in the back should come as naturally to skaven as cowering in dark holes. And Queek trusted Ska like no skaven should ever trust another.

He grinned, hiding the telltale warplight behind his paws.

And Sleek Sharpwit could be very persuasive.

‘What’s going on out there?’

Something had changed. And it wasn’t just the men that were nervous. The goblins’ excited howls had become screams, the dark iron portal a slender barrier between Thordun and a world of shuffling feet, hacking metal and muffled slaughter. The men jumped, the door shuddering under a meaty blow.

Thordun gave the lock on the second door a thump. It retaliated with a stubborn rattle. He needed more time. Never enough time.

‘Muskets in staggered pairs,’ Bernard rasped over the hammering on the door. ‘Anything comes through that door, green or not, you shoot it.’

The ancient portal screamed off its hinges with a tearing of dead metal, driven over Thordun’s head like driftwood on a wave of green-black fire. Thordun threw himself down as it crashed into the wall above his head. His exposed cheek puckered in the heat.

Thordun barely had time to pick himself up before a scarlet outline formed out of the warpfire haze, as though murder and madness had been granted life and form by chemical synthesis and that insane heat. He drew hammer and pistol but already four men lay dead. Their spilled blood had already dried in the scorched air. The musketeers fired. One shot caught the daemonic creature square in the breastplate in a welter of glowing green dust and it went down, squealing. The surviving swordsman fell back. More of the ratmen poured through the smog like nightmares turned solid.

And this was just like his nightmares. Trapped in a burning shop, chittering ratmen flooding the streets outside, waiting for the fires to die, flesh devoured, remains defiled, calling for the son that should have been there. Was never there.

Thordun howled and squeezed the trigger of his pistol. Flint struck sparks from roughened steel and propelled a bullet through a skaven warrior’s scarlet plate. Before he had a chance to steal another breath, two of the fleet-footed devils charged him down. The first, he caught with an instinctive swipe of his pistol butt. The weighted ivory crushed into the side of its helm and pulped the screaming rodent’s eye. The second caught him a glancing blow with its halberd, blood seeping from a cut to his biceps. He gasped at the moment’s pain and tried to spin away, but the serrated blade had snagged his cloak. The skaven snickered, the expression frozen on its long face as the Hammerhand Hammer struck like a thunderclap, blasting its incinerated remains above the fray to snap against the far wall.

One of the skaven weapon-rats scuttled through the murk. Its orange eyes focused on Thordun and it lifted a paw clad in a huge leather gauntlet. A pair of silver-grey nozzles flared from the back of the gauntlet, flexible tubing encircling its arm like a pair of serpents connected to a sloshing container on its back. It clenched its fist, depressing a trigger in its palm, and punched. Thordun clenched his eyes and waited for the agony. He opened them again with the realisation that he wasn’t dead. The skaven shrilled in its strange tongue, shaking its paw as if it had just set it in something sticky.

Thordun raised his hammer, but a scarlet blur charged into the corner of his eye. He swung around with a roar, hammer passing clean over the screeching weapon-rat’s head. The red-plated skaven ducked, but Thordun was ready for it, checking his momentum and shoving the pistol in his left hand deep into the creature’s throat. There was a thrill of recognition. Headtaker.

He pulled the trigger. The flintlock sparked. And then nothing. There had been no time to reload. The skaven grinned around the gun barrel. It wrenched the pistol from his hand to study it and, to his astonishment, spoke. Its voice was deep but soft, absent even, employing a careless brutalisation of Khazalid, Reikspiel and even a little Tilean.

‘This keeps happening also to Queek.’ The skaven turned to look at the weapon-rat and tittered. He turned back and leant in conspiratorially. ‘Never trust tinker-makers, dwarf-thing.’

Thordun stumbled back from the Headtaker’s grinning muzzle, tripping over the bodies of men whose names he had never cared to learn. He looked frantically for Bernard but couldn’t find him among the sprawled dead, or the ghoulish creatures that ripped their claws through their bellies and sank fangs into glistening organs. He scrambled back, palms slipping on loose coin until his back struck stone. He felt the need to retch.

Queek reached down, soothing noises dripping from his fangs like saliva, and ran his claws over his golden head. ‘Do not be sorry-sad, dwarf-thing. You go home.’

‘Home?’

‘Yes-yes. Dwarf-thing goes back to brood-kin Kazador.’ The rat sneered. ‘Is Queek not the nicest?’

‘But I’m not–’

Thordun’s eyes flashed scarlet and then went black. A bolt of lightning seared through his skull for one moment of agony. And then nothing.

‘Bind it, Little-tinker.’

Queek was in an exceptionally buoyant mood. White-fur was probably dead. Tinker-rat was deader than any rat had ever been. He had Old-thing’s treasure, if not yet his head, and with this dwarf-thing he had Kazador by the throat.

The skinny warlock scurried past with a length of chain, lashing the dwarf-thing’s wrists behind its back before moving on to its feet. Queek watched, taking a nibble of the dwarf-thing’s pistol before pulling it out with a frown and tossing it away. He cast an envious look at his feasting minions and felt his own stomach kick. But he was saving himself for something special. There had been no scent of Ska, or of Old-thing. If they had come this way, they had hidden themselves well. It didn’t sound impossible. If Queek sought to hide from himself, he would be sure to do it well too.

‘What about that one, most vicious of vanquishers?’

The little engineer pointed to a large black-furred man-thing. Queek looked at it, wondering how something so big had managed to avoid being eaten. He poked it with his claw to make sure it was real. It groaned and spat on his arm, hawking up a glob of blood. Queek raised his wrist to his mouth and sucked it clean. He didn’t question what the creature was doing here. He kept slaves, why shouldn’t dwarf-things?

‘Bring it to Azul-Place. In case Queek gets hungry.’

‘And this?’ The tinkerer waved his paw over the yellow-metal that bled from splintered chests like the spilled guts of shiny yellow men.

‘Leave it.’

‘All of it?’

Queek eyed the glittering floor and grimaced. ‘Take Queek’s word. You cannot eat it.’

Handrik laid the second dwarf face up, placing the hammer he had found into a cold grip and laying it on the dwarf’s tattooed chest. He gave the dwarf’s hands a squeeze. ‘Tell Gazul to let you pass. You atoned today.’

A handful of cursing greenskins loosed arrows from the ruined city, but they were few enough that Handrik was content to ignore them for now. Keldur joined him under the cover of the bridgehouse.

‘What happened here?’

Handrik got to his feet, refusing the Hammerer’s hand without acknowledgement. The bridgehouse was littered with greenskin corpses. They stretched out over the bridge itself, draped over the walls and hanging over the jaws of oblivion like some morbid upholstery. There were so many. Torn apart, savaged, flesh so brutally undone it was impossible to tell where one flayed body ended and another began. The stench of freshly opened meat was overpowering.

Only a fool would imagine this was the work of dwarfs.

He picked a short way across the bridge, axe ready, drawn by a patch of crimson among the green flesh and black blood. He toed a goblin out of the way to expose the undying snarl of a skaven warrior, scarlet armour dented and scratched, black fur knotted thick with blood. He spat on its corpse.

‘Thaggoraki.’ The word tasted bitter. Like spoiled ale.

‘We’re too late.’ Keldur looked crestfallen. He laid a consoling hand on Handrik’s shoulder only for the old Slayer to shake it loose.

‘No we’re not. Not yet.’ He drew back to the bridgehouse, tapping out the steps with his axe against his palm. ‘Clear some ground, lads. If the Headtaker plans on returning with his prize, he’ll have to come through us. And Narfi,’ he added, wincing slightly as his back twinged. He nodded to the nearly full kilderkin of grobkull that the young Hammerer was just now beaching between the supporting columns of the bridgehouse. ‘Be a good lad, and fill a longbeard’s tankard.’

‘Now what’s happening?’

Ska peered across the distant bridge. ‘Queek is back.’ He leant forward as if that would vastly improve his view. For a moment Sharpwit was tempted to shove him off the roof. But only for a moment. The fall was not a long one. ‘I think he brings dwarf-thing prisoners.’

Sharpwit rubbed his paws with glee. It was almost too good to be true. As fierce as Queek was, he wasn’t getting across that bridge, not while it was held by an almost equal number of dwarfs. It would be easier to pull the stones from beneath the dwarfs’ feet than remove the dwarfs themselves by force. Sharpwit knew that better than any, but he also knew Queek to be just the fool to try.

And after that, Sharpwit’s life was sure to become simpler.

‘Do you have a plan to help-help Queek cross?’

Sharpwit’s paws suddenly clenched. He’d forgotten about Ska.

‘We are watching Queek’s back, yes-yes?’ Ska asked with an edge of menace to his tone.

‘Of course,’ Sharpwit muttered, not at all convincingly. ‘Fine,’ he hissed, all out of excuses. ‘You first.’

‘Steady lads,’ Handrik growled. There was an almost imperceptible shuffling of feet as the Headtaker led his warriors onto the bridge. He wished he could’ve had a couple of sharp-eyed rangers on the bridgehouse roof with crossbows or handguns. But he didn’t, and there was little point weeping over that broken tankard now.

‘Do we charge?’ asked Keldur, cheeks taut from the effort of restraining the urge to vengeance.

‘Easy lad. Let the beggar stretch his legs before we put him down.’

The young Hammerer grumbled with the vehemence of an oft-wronged longbeard and settled his grip on his weapon.

By unspoken consent, Handrik stood front and centre, the giant Slayer a muscular presence by his side while Keldur and Narfi with their great hammers took what space remained on their flanks. Gunngeir and the Hammerers’ hooded companion stood behind them with the miners, cramped into tight ranks under the bridgehouse and sweating with grim anticipation. Handrik turned to the Slayer. The miners had dubbed him Dhunk, after a particularly surly breed of pit mule, and it had stuck. Not that the Slayer seemed to care.

‘Die well,’ Handrik offered.

The Slayer grunted without moving his head. Handrik followed his stare. Had a blade been affixed to it, it would have led him to the gutted corpse of the Headtaker. The rat-king ran on unflustered by the two Slayers’ hatred. If anything he seemed goaded by it, shrieking hatred, drawn closer like a rat into a trap. He tightened his grip on his axe. He’d not underestimate this vermin, not after his last encounter. Two dwarfs cut down faster than it took Handrik to open his eyes and see it done. He doubted he was a match.

But when had the near-certainty of failure ever discouraged a dwarf?

He turned back to Dhunk. ‘The Headtaker’s mine.’ This time the Slayer did shift, treating him to a grin of broken teeth. ‘Aye well, we’ll see who can swing his axe fastest.’

The grin broadened, massive fists throttling the haft of his axe like thaggoraki throats. Handrik took a sliding step forward, shoulder just brushing in front of Dhunk’s, shifting his own grip at the same time.

‘Keldur, Narfi, keep an eye out for Kazador’s kin. Get them out if you can.’

Narfi gave a nervous cough, half an eye on the charging skaven. ‘We’d rather not be the ones to head back if it’s all the same.’

‘No time to bicker over the plum jobs now, lads.’

The two brothers looked across to each other and nodded.

The skaven streamed over the halfway mark, the Headtaker a good stride ahead of his flea-ridden kin. After four hundred years, Handrik was still astonished by their speed. Already the rat-king was close enough to see the delirium burn in his red eyes, the rabid froth flaring from his muzzle. Perhaps if the mad rat pulled much further ahead, they could bring him down with weight of numbers. Honour would forgive this one.

‘Show them dawi steel and dawi stone! For Kazador!’ he roared, skin prickling as the packed miners made the cry their own. ‘For Karak Azul!’

The Headtaker was a hammer strike away, fangs glistening, maw wide in a challenging cry. This was it, now or never. He struck, Dhunk’s larger weapon a split second behind. The Headtaker was already shifting, veering between the careening blades like an elvish dancer. Keldur’s warhammer swung past his head but the skaven ducked beneath as though privy to a choreography no other had practised. With a speed that left the Hammerer rooted in stone, the Headtaker turned, driving his serrated blade up under Keldur’s swinging arm, through the opening in his mail, and deep into the youngling’s unguarded armpit. The Hammerer gargled and fell away. Handrik registered Narfi’s furious roar in his peripheral hearing. He leapt forward, axe sweeping a path for the Headtaker’s skull.

The skaven caught the blow on his angled blade the moment the following stormvermin thundered into the dwarfs in a squeal of metal and ratkin cries. Handrik’s axe slid the pitted length of his opponent’s sword. He pressed his body to the trapped blades, hoping to make an advantage of his greater strength. The skaven thrashed like a caged beast, covering him in bites and scratches and painful caustic burns wherever the creature’s fell armour rubbed against his bare flesh. He groaned, feeling his strength dwindle. The dark wound in his chest shrank from the nearness of warpstone like a fresh burn shrivelling before an open flame. He held on with all the stubbornness of his kind, if only to gift his kin a moment more. Queek snarled, finally succeeding in wriggling free and lashing his vicious maul inches from Handrik’s belly.

Handrik held his ground. Queek parried his axe with embarrassing ease, spinning round to smash his maul through his face but murdering nothing but air. Handrik nodded sweat from his brow as the Headtaker came at him again, weapons blurring into one implacable wall of metal. He countered as best he could. He was fighting harder than he ever had in his life with nothing to show but the blood that streamed from a dozen cuts. Landing a blow was like clutching at smoke, as though he were a babe in the crib fumbling for coloured objects suspended just out of reach.

Skaven flooded by, swirling like ghosts in frosted glass. Like ghosts they ignored him, and he ignored them. Queek dodged his latest effort. He gritted his teeth in prideful frustration. Queek returned with a stab that Handrik rolled, but not before suffering another long nick across the chin, sending orange strands fluttering to the bloody ground.

‘Queek thinks this a good one. He might keep it.’

Handrik wheezed, heart thrumming out of tune. ‘Handrik thinks you’re a bloody loon.’

Queek tittered, sending him ducking beneath a teasing swing of his maul. ‘Everyone, they concerned for Queek’s sanity. Perhaps you worry less for what is in Queek’s head, and more on keeping what is in yours.’

Handrik managed a shrug. ‘I can do two things at once.’

Queek lunged forward with a strangled snarl. ‘Die-die, dwarf-thing!’

Handrik stumbled from the sword, turning his axe to catch the maul as it descended like a comet. His ancient axe blade shattered into three with an almighty crash of metal. He fell back with a cry, his bloodied hand clutching a splintered stump of axe-handle.

Handrik shook his head clear. The Headtaker stood over him, armoured footpaws stepping either side of his prone body, maul held high. He didn’t fear death as it came for him. His eyes opened wide in welcome.

The slender bridge heaved with death. The orange-furs and the hammer-dwarf held their own as Queek’s stormvermin squeezed between to get at the miners behind. If they hoped for an easier time of it, they were to be disappointed. The miners cursed in snarling, salivating faces, inviting the vermin onto them if they so badly wished to pass. And the skaven did, heavy halberds slashing with frenzied blood-hunger at the stolid dwarfs. The miners retaliated with their heavy picks and equal ferocity. If not for the bridge, the dwarfs might all already be dead. But there was a bridge, and so long as no ratkin fancied the climb that meant meeting the dwarfs claw to fist, blade to blade, one to one. And it was going badly for them.

Ska scurried towards the bloodbath, darting from the cover of a tumbled corner wall and into a doorway that faced onto the chasm. The bridge stretched far into the shaded distance of his weak skaven eyes. Queek stood over a fallen dwarf in the very midst of the melee, heedless of the peril that raged around him. Queek was unbeatable. Ska had learned that harsh lesson well enough. But he was just one, one that cared little for the finer nuances of conducting a battle. That was why he would always need Ska Bloodtail.

He raised his snout for a cautious sniff. Unsurprisingly, the place was filled with greenskin spoor, but it was too pervasive to tell if any were close. He emitted a nervous snarl, fear of green-thing arrows in the back warring with fear of Queek.

He shortened his grip on the long-handled dwarfish axe, holding it closer to the blade, and scurried across the open plaza. It seemed to go on forever, and he half-expected every pawstep to reward him with an arrow for the effort. But none came, and with a muffled sigh of relief he made the bottom of the bridgehouse steps. He crouched low, shuffling on all fours. He could see the backs of the rearmost miners. He wiped saliva from his jaw. Nothing tantalised like an axe in an enemy’s back. He let the haft run out through his paw, marking the dwarf that would be the first to die: the one standing right between himself and Queek, so his warlord might see.

A shock passed through his tensed muscles at a metallic stamp from behind. It sounded like a rat ogre treading on a steel barrel. He twisted back the way he had come and almost dropped his axe. At the head of about a dozen large, muscular orcs stomped the largest orc he had ever seen. Its ponderous armour gave it a rolling gait. Even from across the plaza, Ska could tell that the orc was bigger than him – a lot bigger. The same could also be said of the massive stone club held effortlessly in one fist.

Ska felt his musk glands try to clench but he fought down the urge with a hissed breath and a shudder. He rose to his full height, feeling almost as massive in his gromril armour. He took the axe in two paws and stared down at the oncoming orc. The orc broke into a run, leaving the lesser green-things behind and driving tiny cracks into the long-suffering stones. Ska tried to ignore the vibrations trembling through his footpaws. He was Ska Bloodtail, Queek’s mightiest champion.

He would win.

Queek held Dwarf Gouger at the beginnings of its killing stroke. A mighty crash sounded from the bottom of the steps and a shape bearing an uncanny similarity to Ska Bloodtail sailed into view and slammed off the underside of the ceiling. The skaven bounced once before falling into a clattering roll that carried him out onto the bridge, coming to rest not far from where Queek stood. The skaven didn’t rise. A great dent was beaten into its breastplate.

There was a momentary peace as the skaven backed off, in case whatever fate had befallen their fangleader prove catching. The dwarfs took the opportunity to catch their breath. A murmur passed around those standing nearest the steps. Heads turned. Queek could smell their hatred, ratcheted to a degree that even he could not evoke in their simple hearts. He stepped over the old orange-fur’s body, eager to see for himself what it was they saw.

But he heard it first.

‘Waaaaaaaggh! Gorfang!’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The orc advanced, immense shoulders swaying as it climbed the steps to the bridgehouse. ‘Dis is my place, ratty.’ The hugely armoured giant held its granite bludgeon in one steel fist. ‘So what yoo reckon?’ Metal clanged hollowly off metal as it whacked its breastplate. ‘Fink you’ze ’ard enough for some o’ dis?’

Queek ran his tongue down the bloody lip of Dwarf Gouger. The orc towered over him, a dark squat head squeezing free from the jaws of a metallic carnivorous plant. ‘Big-meat. You came.’

The orc broke into a laugh, or the head did, somehow disconnected from that bulbous steel chest. ‘I heard you woz cracked, ratty.’ The laughter faded from its squished-up cheeks as it drew back its club. ‘I like dat.’

The orc roared and Queek leapt back. The club crashed like a felled oak, throwing up shards from the fractured tiles where Queek had been and gouging through into the soft mortar beneath. Queek felt the tremors as a tickling in his footpaws, bloodthirsty spirits drawing him back to the fray by his claws. The orc was still yanking at its buried club, leaving itself open. Queek leapt in. His shriek of triumph tingled on his tongue with the sweet taste of orc-meat. Dwarf Gouger slammed into its groin, the ensorcelled spike cleaving through the thick metal like a knife through hot blood. His black spirit rose on euphoric wings as the spike cut deep. The maul’s rounded head rang home against punctured steel.

The orc erupted with a volcanic rumble of laughter. It let slip its club and took an unexpected step forward, sending Queek scurrying to avoid being crushed. Dwarf Gouger still swayed between its legs. ‘I got da fickest armour around, ratty.’ The orc made a crude thrusting motion, guffawing as the maul’s handle jiggled across its thighs. ‘Need a longer spike, maybe.’

‘Queek shows him spikes. His head goes on the biggest spike!’

The orc looked nonplussed ‘You wot?’

Queek sprang forward with a snarl. He grabbed hold of his swinging haft and made to pull his weapon free, only to find himself pinned by a fist that closed over his ears like an avalanche. Queek twisted and spat, pulling Dwarf Gouger from its prison and smacking it in futile fury about the brute’s midriff. The orc laughed him down, spare hand sweeping like a pendulum to deliver a backhand that sent him careening. Like a bleeding scythe of warpstone and black visions, his body cut through the press of warriors until the sheer mass of living flesh slowed him. He rolled off the broken back of a stormvermin and swayed onto his own footpaws.

He glared back across his short path of destruction. Bloodied dwarfs and skaven lined the way like supplicants to the throne of Queek. The orc lumbered down the middle of it, hefting its club with ease. Fury hazed Queek’s vision. He had never wanted to kill anything so badly. It was the arrogance of the creature that inflamed his hatred. The simple-minded savage clearly had no idea that he sought to challenge the Headtaker!

He was visualising shoving a sword through that ludicrously confident smirk when he felt the touch of a hand on his shoulders. He spun around, ready to unleash a foaming tirade on the rodent idiotic enough to lower their neck to the Headtaker. His muzzle dropped in shock at the sight of a dwarf. It just stood there and looked at him, hand on his shoulder as though they were old friends. The hood of a black cloak had been thrown back to reveal a dark-furred specimen with no neck and a scarred face set deep into its broad shoulders. Its face was oddly devoid of fur but for scraps of stubble between a set of ugly, uneven scars.

For a blinding moment he felt that blood was about to boil from his eyes. The dwarf regarded him blankly, as though it didn’t see him or, Queek suspected, thought him beneath notice. Queek snarled and shoved back against the dwarf’s arm. The dwarf didn’t move, shoulders rolling with the clumsy strike. Its lips twitched at one corner and, in an explosion of motion, its body lunged into his.

Queek cried out in shock as he was hurled aside, slammed into the bridge wall with force enough to blow the wind from his chest. He struggled upright as the dead-eyed dwarf pulled a pair of gleaming axes from a hidden belt beneath his cloak. Something flickered in the orc’s eyes, something that, if Queek were to credit it with intelligence, he might have called recognition.

Queek’s temper raged, soon outpacing his wrathfully racing heart. His grip tightened around the handle of Dwarf Gouger as he cast about for a fresh sword to replace the one he seemed to have lost.

He’d show these over-muscled, mouse-brained, stupid-furred fools the price of turning their backs on the Headtaker.

Handrik pushed himself from his belly. He turned and tried to catch a glimpse of the Headtaker, but the rat-king had disappeared into the shifting forest of tensed, struggling legs. A hand descended from that violently swaying canopy to grab his in a firm grip. He let it haul him up and practically fell into Narfi’s arms. He swallowed down a wave of nausea and shook warpstone dust from his beard.

Narfi took him by both shoulders, studying his face for any sign of addlement. The young dwarf’s own face was a mess of skaven blood and grief. ‘Are you injured, longbeard?’ the lad asked, voice strained, as though desirous of nothing other than to rail against the old fool that had led his elder brother to this doom.

‘More than you could ever know. But I’m not dead.’

The miners had retreated into a semicircle around him and Narfi, backs to the abyss, only just fending off the huge orcs that came laughing and killing in the wake of their leader. The miners fought back with stout hearts, their heavy picks a wall of death that smote blood from orc and skaven with indiscriminate relish.

Handrik threw down his own ruined weapon with a curse. It seemed the nature of the Headtaker to ruin that which was ancient and fine. In so doing, he caught the shine of gold against the grey wall and he made for it. He traced the sign of Grungni’s hammer as the glimmer resolved into the rune of Karak Azul. A long-handled axe bearing the hammers, anvil and crown of his home lay clutched in the unconscious paws of a giant thaggoraki. He grasped it by the handle and pulled.

The skaven’s paws suddenly tightened, as though Handrik’s presence had lent them life. Its eyes snapped open, responding with a full-fanged snarl. Handrik’s fist smashed against its snout. ‘It doesn’t belong to you.’ He tore the axe from its paws and stood. ‘It belongs to Karak Azul.’

Narfi wiped blood from his brow and looked on a scene from the imaginings of laughing gods. Some of the greenskins had driven the dwarfs from the bridgehouse. Others had found space around the periphery of their living wall to tear into the confused press of skaven. It was impossible to imagine prising anything of worth from such an immiscible interface of mayhem and death.

‘It’s over,’ said Narfi, voicing those same thoughts. ‘What can we do against so many?’

‘What we came for, that’s what.’ He pointed out into the melee. ‘Our kinsdwarfs are out there somewhere. Take this lot and find them. Get them all home if you can.’

Narfi offered a breathless nod. ‘What about you?’

Handrik turned the other way, looking back across the bridge. ‘What I came for.’ He pointed across the swamp of battling figures, eyes focusing on an unexpected face as its wearer duelled with the hated Gorfang. The orc bellowed, as if in greeting, tearing its club through a crushing arc that swept the full width of the bridge and beyond. The dwarf ducked. A pair of ratkin trying to sneak past caught its full force and were thrown squealing into the abyss. The dwarf hurled himself onto the laughing brute with a furious shout, his twin axes beating deep scars into his enemy’s armour. His was a face that Handrik had not seen in fifteen years, a face carved from the same stone as his father’s. For a moment he was too stunned to talk, then came a flush of warmth, the resurgent spring of an emotion he recalled only dimly. He might have called it… hope.

He started laughing. ‘Now I see why you didn’t want to go back and face Kazador.’

His vision blurred and with a start he realised tears were streaming down his face. Holding his axe aloft, he charged through the screaming vermin for the squatter king. A name rushed from his lips at the same moment as it did from every other dwarf who saw. ‘Kazrik!’

Thordun woke with a toe in his belly.

‘Ungh. Bernard, what the–’

Memory forced its way in with the riot assaulting his ears. Instinctively, he tried to curl into a ball, bringing an angry rattle from the chains binding his wrists to his ankles. He wriggled nearer to Bernard.

‘How are you feeling?’

Bernard grinned feebly, blood smearing his teeth and gums. ‘How do I look?’

Thordun’s head flopped into the big man’s lap. He looked around, head craning as far as his bonds allowed. The weapon-rat he’d seen before lay crushed, as though it had been trodden on by a warhorse. A foul-smelling chemical leaked from the burst vessel on its shoulders, Thordun’s chains flattened under one still-twitching paw. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘Don’t ask, Splitter.’ Thordun felt the man shudder, and not with pain. ‘You’ll be happier for it.’

Thordun fidgeted, trying to work his fingers through the amateurishly bolted chains. He exhaled in an effort to loosen his bonds and his muscles, gazing absently upwards as he wriggled against the constraints. He almost failed to notice the night-black shape that clung from the rafter’s shadow like a bat. His mouth formed a ring of surprise. The cloaked skaven pressed a claw to its muzzle as if bidding a co-conspirator be silent. The gesture was so incongruous he actually shut his mouth again.

The skaven grinned and released its pawholds, cloak snapping like black wings as it fell.

Sharpwit almost bit his tongue clean through as a shadow shot across his line of vision. The assassin landed on the human’s shoulders, eliciting a scream as his weight bent the man over onto the shaft that spitted his chest. Sharpwit hunched reflexively, but nobody here was about to notice one scream out of place. He huddled under the lee of the arches that curved against the ceiling of the bridgehouse, blade wrapped in cloth lest its dull light draw notice.

Dao’s long snout sought his hidden corner and he beamed. ‘A dwarf-thing and a man-thing. As the warlord demands.’

Sharpwit’s nose darted over the swirling combatants. He tried to work himself deeper into the wall, as if he could burrow inside and wrap himself in shadow. It was all too much. Skaven, dwarfs and hulking orcs all grunted and fought, weapons flashing where space allowed, otherwise resorting to choking, biting, scratching. Somewhere in that variegated carnage Gorfang bellowed his battle-lust, and all the while that cry. As if all the horrors of that long ago night had been distilled into a single heartbeat of madness.

‘Kazrik!’

Who could have suspected that the simple act of releasing a few orcs into Karak Azul so he could steal dwarfish treasure could have had such consequences? Likely nobody had cared. And why should they? Of all the skaven involved that day, only he was still alive. And he hoped to stay that way.

Dao hopped down from the moaning human and knelt beside the dwarf.

‘Fast-quick,’ Sharpwit hissed, detaching himself with some effort from the safety of his alcove. ‘Get them to their feet. Faster if we not have to carry.’ Dao shook his muzzle, paws spooling through the thick chain between the dwarf’s ankles and wrists.

‘Can you free it?’

‘No time!’ said Dao, ducking in as a dwarf blundered by.

‘Damnable Queek,’ he snarled bitterly. ‘We will have to carry. Back to the stream, the way we came and away. Get the man-thing up, quick-quick!’

Sharpwit crouched over the prone dwarf. ‘Be quiet-still, dwarf-thing,’ he whispered in Khazalid. For an instant he thought he recognised this dwarf’s scent. It was difficult to be sure when surrounded by such a dazzling horror show of smells. He hadn’t the time to dwell on it either way. It was only a matter of time before they attracted notice.

The dwarf fought against his touch, barking something in the human tongue.

‘I have just two paws, wise warlord,’ the assassin snarled. ‘I cannot help-move both. Pick one.’

‘One is useless without the other. We may as well leave both.’ Sharpwit struggled with the mechanics. It would be cruelty unparalleled to be thwarted at the very last, simply for the lack of an underling of sufficient wit to see a dwarf from danger. Like a gift from the aether, inspiration struck. ‘Wait-wait,’ he snapped at Dao before limping into the melee.

He looked around, struggling to get his bearings. Bodies packed so tightly he could hardly breathe for their stench. A dwarf came charging through the press, a huge hammer held high in two strong hands. Sharpwit squealed and ducked behind a stormvermin that was looking the other way as he fought to wrest his halberd from the grip of an orc twice his size. Sharpwit scampered between them, stabbing the orc through the foot with his crutch just as the stormvermin’s eyes rolled back, as if pulled magnetically towards the warhammer freshly embedded in his skull. The orc barked in surprise as the dwarf blundered into it. The two enemies fell together. Sharpwit left them to it, springing clear without a second glance and emerging breathlessly on the other side of the bridgehouse.

He dropped down beside the body of Ska Bloodtail. He gave his armour a shake. ‘Ska. Wake up Ska. Queek needs you.’

He was rewarded with a slight shift of the head and a murmur of half-dreamt words.

‘Ska,’ he said again, sparing a nervous glance over his shoulder.

‘No,’ the giant murmured. ‘Is rubbish-poor axe. Ska not want.’

‘Come-come, brave Ska,’ Sharpwit soothed, heaving his wiry frame against the fangleader’s uncooperative bulk. He cast about for any sign of Queek, but found none. Perhaps the warlord was dead. He shook his head anxiously. Even he couldn’t get that lucky. ‘Come-come. Is time clever skaven flee to plot another day.’

Sing, sing, sing. Dwarf-things do so like to sing.

Queek’s lips curled over his glistening fangs as he shoved his way through the frightened crowd of his finest. The air smelt rich with their musk, lining the back of his throat like honeyed liquor. The dwarf-things chanted a name, over and over, like the forgetful, vacant-headed simpletons they were.

‘Kazrik,’ he hissed in time, eyes burning onto the dwarf-thing that was the subject of such attention. It swept around the big orc’s legs, hammering down blows with what might have been mushroom stalks for all the damage they caused. The orc, for its part, wielded its gigantic club in both hands, trying and failing to smash it through its tiny foe’s head.

‘Kazrik,’ he growled. The strength of the chant made his belly shake. Dwarf Gouger felt light in his paw. He would show this dwarf-thing who was best. Then they would chant his name.

Queek! Queek! Queek!

He soaked in the adulation.

The orc caught the dwarf with its shin, then reared up and brought its club crashing down. The dwarf rolled clear, but Queek felt the bridge shudder. Tiny fissures crept through the stonework. The orc howled, stamping after the wriggling dwarf one massively armoured boot after another. Queek could almost hear the slender stone isthmus suffer. He scurried aside as the dwarf rolled his way, titanic tormentor in hot pursuit. Both continued on, ignoring him completely. For once, it didn’t bother him. His heart lurched, paws grabbing for the wall as he felt the bridge shudder, stomach spinning upside down at his brief glimpse of the bottomless void below.

He threw a brief, longing look at the passage back to the stream and the way out. He was the mighty and unbeatable Queek. He knew that. He had nothing to prove. He glared at the nearest warrior, a scrappy black-furred creature, and dared him to disagree, but the stormvermin had the infuriatingly good sense to look away.

‘That’s right!’ he squeaked for everyone to hear. ‘Queek can beat anyone!’

A handful of dwarfs were heading his way, led by an orange-fur that bore a remarkable semblance to one he had just killed. But then all dwarf-things did look alike. He took a last look back. The dwarf had regained his feet and the fight continued. Maybe he’d come back for them. Yes. That was what he would do. He would–

The thought never fully emerged. His throat rumbled with newborn fury as he caught wind of a familiar scent. His nose tracked it to its source. That’s where he had smelt it, fleeing for the passage back to the stream and the way out. The craven, weasel-spleened cowards! Ska. And Old-thing.

Not even strong enough to run away with dignity, they helped keep each other upright, scampering from the bridge and into the city like a three-legged, two headed coward-worm of some weakling god’s craven hell. His eyes narrowed at the golden-furred body slung over Ska’s shoulders. They helped themselves to Queek’s prize too. Fresh outrage burned through already white-hot veins.

Orcs and dwarfs would keep.

He had an old head to take.

Handrik’s axe tore through the ribcage of a frothing skaven warrior. He put his boot against its belly and kicked it clear. The ratmen streamed from the coming orcs only to find their escape thrown back against the collateral damage of Kazrik and Gorfang’s duel. They swirled between the two forces like a storm, biting and scratching in unthinking panic. Handrik waded into the midst of them towards his prince. He kneecapped another with the haft of his axe, then messily beheaded it. Blood rinsed his tattooed forearms.

Closing with Gorfang had proven tougher than he’d imagined. But then thaggoraki were ever their most savage when cornered. He saw a miner go down, torn to pieces by a mob of snarling ratmen. A brave dawi by his side who bore what could only be a familial resemblance gave an anguished howl and threw himself onto his kinsdwarf’s slayers, only to succumb himself as another of the ratkin pounced onto his back and sank fangs into his neck.

There were few of them left now. Most of the miners had gone with Narfi as he’d hoped they would, but too many had been caught behind. By his side, Dhunk issued a strangled warble from his ruined throat and almost split a ratkin up the middle with a rising blow from his battleaxe. Handrik stepped in behind the other Slayer and turned so they were back to back, bringing his axe up to parry as a foul orc swung its cleaver for his comrade’s back.

Dhunk grunted acknowledgement. The two Slayers courted death from all sides as the orcs flowed round them to encounter the remaining skaven, the dwarfs a harsh island of perpetuity in a torrent of decay. Handrik struggled blade to blade against an orc’s strength, finding time to scowl at the sight of the Headtaker butchering his own path through the orcs to safety. He turned the blade and shoved the orc clear. There was no time to administer the finishing blow before another green-skinned brute came bellowing for more.

He had failed. The Headtaker had escaped and he hadn’t seen so much as a scrap of beard of Thordun or of Kazador’s kinsdwarfs. Nor did he put great trust in the hope that Narfi might have found them and got them out. Fortune seldom favoured the doomed. And yet he was content. He could help earn a prince his vengeance, the grandson of his sentimental old heart; and the fall of Gorfang Rotgut would provide Handrik with a worthy doom indeed. The orc he faced went down from a meaty blow to the kidney. He mastered his surprise to deliver the killing stroke, axe severing its thick neck.

‘Priest,’ he grunted, as the follower of Grimnir spun about to set his own back to Handrik’s and Dhunk’s, a bloodied mace held at the ready. ‘You’re a welcome sight, I don’t mind saying.’

‘A fine doom you’ve found yourself, longbeard. A shame nobody will hear of it.’

‘We’ll tell them when they join us in the Ancestors’ Hall.’

The priest smiled his little smile. ‘Everybody will, eventually.’

‘Aye,’ he agreed, sending an orc to his maker in a dark spray of gore.

‘Shall we sing a song?’ Gunngeir suggested.

Handrik’s heart pounded, as though it had never truly worked before this moment. He was exhausted, but still the orcs came. He resolved to defy his doom until Gorfang was dead and Kazrik avenged. Only then would he permit himself to fall. He stood tall, realising that for the first time in days he felt no pain.

‘Aye. One of victory.’

Rain worried at Sharpwit’s snout as it emerged from his secret passage. The sky had darkened, a settling cloud lending the rocky slope a ghostly shade as day wore on into dusk. The clamour of battle from the valley below had grown fiercer as he had scurried through the tunnel. Now, standing here on the mountainside, peering down and blinded by whispering damp, even those violent sounds had become too disordered to pick apart. Like a single mist-shrouded beast almost close enough to reach out and bite.

‘Hurry-hurry,’ Dao urged behind him, voice muffled within the tunnel.

Queek was coming.

Sharpwit tried to remember how many of the bulky orc-things Queek had torn through, all the while screaming that appellation he so despised: Old-thing. He decided that he didn’t want to remember. It was making his knees shake, and he didn’t doubt that Dao would leave him behind if he slowed them any more than he already was. With a stab of panic he realised how much the assassin knew. Dao could accomplish everything without him if he wanted to.

Perhaps he was getting too old. Time could only be fended off for so long. And he was so very tired.

He tried to move faster, but he was finding it difficult to breathe. His exertions were beginning to tell. He reached up for the grassy overhang and swung his legs from the tunnel mouth. He landed in the fast-flowing shallows, his crutch scraping the hard stone bed for a purchase. He shivered as the stream splashed cold over his legs. Not bothering to help the assassin out, he drew his sword and worked his way across the stream.

With footpaws on firm ground he turned with an impatient tapping of his crutch on naked rock. ‘Fast-quick,’ Sharpwit murmured to himself, not even realising that he did it. Part of him – a big part – wanted nothing more than to be away. He could easily lose himself in these hills. And the rain would be a boon. Even the scent of ten thousand terrified ratkin in the valley below fell dead on his nose.

Dao crawled from the opening like a spider, scuttling onto the lip of the rocky outcropping that reached over the stream. His black cloak clung wetly to his lithe frame as he reached down to draw their human prisoner into the fresh air.

The human reached for the swaying arm but never caught it. He flew out into the sodden sky as though fired from a gun. He crashed face first into the stream with a moan of agony. He rolled onto his back and blinked up at the sky. Ska Bloodtail leapt after him, the golden-furred dwarf draped across one shoulder. Black water fled the impact of his footpaws and he reached with an impatient snarl to haul the human to his feet. The man gnashed his teeth in pain, working to cosset the already blackening wound in his chest while Ska uncaringly yanked him upright.

‘Leave him be,’ Sharpwit ordered. The man looked as near to death as Sharpwit felt, but it would help if he didn’t know it until after he had performed his role. ‘Come-come, Ska. Hurry-scurry, quick-quick.’

On the far side of the stream, half-hidden in mist, Dao rose and leapt. The assassin cleared the stream in a single bound, landing on all fours with a muddy squelch by Sharpwit’s side. His muzzle swept the fog for hidden dangers. He looked anxious to be away and he wasn’t the only one. Without another word spoken, they scurried away over the barren rocks. Sharpwit had good reason to fear. A reason he daren’t speak aloud, at least not while Ska was in range. Queek was coming.

‘Quick-quick, Old-thing,’ Dao hissed, giving his back a shove that almost put him on his snout.

‘Worry… about… yourself,’ he panted. His limbs felt heavy, his head light, his chest an iron band around his aching heart.

Dao suddenly had a knife in his paw. Sharpwit blinked. Now he knew his senses were failing. He would have sworn the assassin hadn’t so much as twitched. ‘I think you should wait here. We run-scurry much faster without you.’

The assassin took one step forward and then froze. His muzzle snapped as if on some reflex and angled down to the serrated blade that had burst through his chest. He gasped and dropped his knife, pawing the bloody puncture as though not believing it could be true until he saw red stain his own paws.

A pair of burning eyes drifted from the fog, settling on the assassin’s shoulder like embers onto a thatched roof. ‘Queek thinks you all should wait-rest here.’ Bone crunched in a spray of blood as he twisted the sword around its length, but Dao made no sound. He was already dead. Queek took hold of the assassin’s long snout and ripped the corpse from his blade. Sharpwit watched the body tumble into the mists, forgotten, filled with a terrible sense of premonition.

‘Queek waits for this, Old-thing. Queek burns for it.’ He licked blood from his sword as he advanced. ‘Traitor-meat has the sweetest taste.’ He grinned evilly. ‘Like honey.’

Ska moaned like a man-thing whelp terrified by the moon. The shackled dwarf-thing hit the ground with a meaty thud as Ska sank to his knees. ‘Ska is not traitor-meat. Ska is loyal-meat. I only pretended to follow. To learn his evil-rotten schemes and bring them to my great warlord.’

‘Lies!’ Sharpwit hissed, grasping desperately at his last hope, the most important ploy he’d ever had in his life. Queek had just fought an army single-handed and Ska was strong. Very strong. ‘Ska lies to you. He has always lied to you.’

‘No lies. No lies,’ Ska whimpered, scratching the warlord’s greaves in pathetic capitulation. ‘He lies.’

‘You are a mad-thing fool-fool,’ Sharpwit said, heart fluttering as his tongue finally shaped the words he had longed to utter. ‘You are incompetent and I betrayed you. For the glory of Skavendom.’ He pointed a paw towards the grovelling giant. ‘And he agreed with me. He helped me. I promised him great-great things. I promised him the Eight Peaks and kind whispers in the clanlord’s ears.’

‘Not true,’ Ska sobbed. ‘I would never betray my most fearsome, most terrible, most–’

‘Enough!’ Queek glared at them both. Sharpwit shuffled back. His heart raced away from him, like a stone dropped into a deep well. His paw bunched into a fist over his chest. He couldn’t help but wonder just how much life he’d bought himself. The warlord turned his sword on Ska. ‘Up-up, idiot-meat.’

Ska obeyed without question, wiping tears from his black fur with one massive fist. He loomed over his warlord, sniffling in the rain. ‘I didn’t–’

Queek whipped up a claw to seal the skaven’s babbling lips, uttering a soothing purr. ‘Queek knows.’

‘What?’ Sharpwit snapped. No skaven could be so forgiving. No spawn of the Horned Rat could be such a fool! ‘He is traitor-meat, you half-witted, soft-spleened excuse for a warlord. Kill-Kill!’

‘Queek does not listen to old-things.’

‘Fool! I was twice the warlord you were.’

The warlord turned to face him and Sharpwit shuffled further back, chasing pebbles from the heels of his footpaws.

‘Queek does not care.’

‘You would let this fool-rat live? Whether he meant it or not, he did betray you. The stupid do not deserve to survive.’

Queek lifted his sword and Sharpwit pulled up his own shimmering blue steel. The two points sang in unearthly greeting.

‘Stupid, you say? Stupid like plotting against the Headtaker?’

Sharpwit drove a darting feint past Queek’s ear, the blade beginning to split only to snap into one as he pulled it back. The blade felt heavy. Even breathing had become a trial by fire. His vision wavered and darkened, his heart thrumming with a distant, painful rhythm. Somehow he managed not to fall. ‘You think… you think any beyond your own scrap of hill knows or cares who you are? You think in fifty years any will remember?’

Queek nonchalantly nudged aside the magical blade on his own mundane steel. Dwarf Gouger spun menacingly through the fingers of his off-paw. ‘All fear Queek,’ he returned with conviction. ‘All will forever fear Queek.’

‘You are impossible, mad-thing,’ he screamed. ‘You do not know the meaning of forever. Look at me! I am still alive and already forgotten!’

Leading with Dwarf Gouger, Queek leapt forward. Sharpwit batted the maul aside, but his parry held no strength and the warlord barged through it, swinging an elbow that struck him under the jaw. His muzzle snapped up. He felt a tooth loosen and he staggered back, stabbing his crutch into the moist earth to steady himself. Swaying, but unbeaten, he wearily levelled his sword to guard once again.

Queek circled through the downpour. The warlord was in no hurry, intent on savouring every last moment of pain.

Snarling blood, Sharpwit’s tongue probed his broken tooth. Saliva fizzed like boiling sugar at the touch of warpstone. He had exhausted every avenue but the most desperate. Did he dare? Even now he doubted whether the risk was worth it. There were worse things in life than death.

Queek feinted left. Sharpwit shuffled back and snapped his jaw to ward him off, the fang loosening still further. He coughed, chest heaving, and made a tired lunge of his own that Queek rolled and beat aside on his vambrace with a carefree smirk.

Sharpwit snarled, mind suddenly made up. He would tempt any fate to wipe the smirk off that arrogant whelp’s face. He hastened back, enticing Queek to come after him, all the while sealing his lips tight and sucking hard. The tooth popped free and fell onto the back of his tongue. He bared his remaining fangs and snickered, rolling the refined lump of warpstone between his back teeth.

He would have a few minutes of strength at best, but he had been the fiercest warrior in Skavendom in his prime, and perhaps those few minutes would be enough.

‘You always were the trusting fool, Queek. You always underestimated me. Well no more.’

He bit down.

The warpstone cracked in his mouth. It scalded his tongue, and he had to force himself to swallow. Agony prised open his throat and forced its way into his belly. He closed his eyes, clenched his paws, stumbled blind, but he could feel the strength as it pumped through his veins. His heart raced. His gut roared like a warpstone furnace. This must be how the grey seers felt. No wonder some became addicted. His one eye snapped open to show him Queek truly for the first time. Colours long forgotten stormed into the eye that the dark magic had temporarily restored. The red of the warlord’s armour, the black of his fur, the white of his fangs; each the most vivid colour he could ever recall and each as stark against the grey sky as they were against each other. Sharpwit was still marvelling at this when he noticed he had dropped his crutch. His legs thrummed with willing strength. He flexed his paws as he looked down at it, then laughed, swinging his muzzle back to the bemused warlord.

‘No more.’

Queek lunged with a rising snarl and this time Sharpwit met it full on. Their blades clashed. For a split second they grappled, arms entwined, long enough for Sharpwit to enjoy the shock on Queek’s face before shoving the warlord back with a shriek of unshackled fury.

Queek took no time to settle, hurling himself back into battle with an outraged squeal. Sharpwit ducked, parried, retaliated, Queek’s twin weapons an impossible blur of speed and skill as he somehow kept the shifting blue blades at bay. To his annoyance, Queek started to snicker. It sounded genuine too; the mad creature was actually enjoying this.

Sharpwit threw himself onto the warlord’s weapons. Whether the fury he had waited so long to unleash had overcome him or whether it was simply the warpstone in his blood, at that moment he couldn’t care whether he lived. So long as Queek died. Perhaps this was the final distillation of the skaven condition, for a good skaven always made sure another went first.

He battered through the warlord’s defence, his own blade taking the worst of the damage, though not before Dwarf Gouger had opened a great rip down his biceps. Queek fell under him and he howled, stabbing at the warlord’s back before he could rise. He threw his strength into it, made it count, blade flaring blue as it responded to his murder-lust. The blade split, each shimmering point thrust into the joint between the plates guarding back and shoulder. The impact as ensorcelled blades met warpstone steel shuddered through his arm, seven blades vibrating as one. The weapons screamed together, giving off a dense vapour as green-black dust from Queek’s armour gnawed at its length, and he fell back. A mote landed on his paw and began to sizzle. He hissed in pain, but didn’t allow himself to let go. He wanted to scream at the unfairness.

Queek rolled to his feet, shaken but angry. He reached a paw around his back to feel the trench that Sharpwit’s weapon had gouged into his back-plate. The paw came back with glittering warpstone hissing at his claw. With a snarl, he started forward, sword sweeping up into a strike intended to split Sharpwit up the middle. Sharpwit moved to counter, only to find the flesh of his paw melted to the handle of his sword. He screamed, and Queek screamed with him, as the warlord’s blade sheared through his wrist. He fell back with a cry, his treasured weapon spinning clear with his paw still attached.

Queek snickered. Blood spattered his muzzle.

His blood, Sharpwit realised with a giddiness that could only be a consequence of the fluids streaming from the stump of his right arm. He clutched what was left of it to his chest, feeling his body empty, suddenly desperate to cling on to every last scrap of life. His legs were asleep. He slipped in a pool of his own blood and onto his back, not even feeling the punch of solid rock that greeted his fall. His head spun. Like an offering to the gods, his sword lay beside him. Strange that he should see so many blurring blades now that it lay still.

‘You are not… not nearly so good as you think, mad-thing.’

‘Does the dead-thing talk?’ asked Queek, twisting to display his ghastly trophies. The desiccated human hands strung from the trophy rack waved once in farewell. Or in welcome. ‘Squeak to fellow dead-things. Ask them how good is Queek.’

‘You have achieved nothing. Do you not see? Nothing. We scurry through time, like the rats in Fizqwik’s wheel. Over and over the same mistakes. I am glad to be done. I am sick of it.’

‘What was that, dead-thing? Queek was somewhere else. Somewhere interesting.’

‘We steal so much from the dwarf-things, more than any care to admit, but never that. Respect for what is past. I think the Horned Rat prefers his children blind or we would surely have the world now. And he knows we would betray even him if we could.’

‘You admire the dwarf-things.’

Sharpwit gave a shuddering sigh. ‘It would be nice… to be remembered.’

Queek knelt on the sparse earth and bent to gather Sharpwit’s sword. The warlord levelled it to his neck. Sharpwit held his breath, not daring to swallow, as Queek leant in close enough for their eyeballs to touch.

‘Queek will always remember you.’

Thunder rumbled.

Then again, many times magnified, a sequence of booming reports that raced through the hanging cloud like baying hounds. Fire bloomed dimly in the murky distance, and an instant later there was a shuddering beneath his footpaws as a series of titanic impacts punished the great walls of Black Crag. Queek looked up and through the fog that hung over Death Pass.

It was murky and indistinct, but Queek could always smell a dwarf. Ranks of deep blue and iron crested the rise where Queek would have sworn the reserves of his own army were supposed to be. He could see the stone tower where Sharpwit was meant to have died. The ground around it was studded with bronze icons and damp blue banners that snapped stiffly in the wind. Heart pumping with excitement, Queek tore Sharpwit’s head from his body. A swift claw scythed through its last glistening tether as he brought it to share this new spectacle. His trophies swaying and chattering in excitement, he ran to the lip of a natural embankment.

A pair of cannonballs sailed overhead and crashed through the huge iron gate of Black Crag. Splinters of red-painted metal sheared off the massive edifice like blood from a severed limb. More pummelled the green-thing positions on the battlements. Screams carried through the fog, of things living and things not. A steel ball punched through the swinging arm of a stone-thrower. The machine spat splinters high into the air as its payload tumbled back onto the heads of its crew.

Queek snickered at the sight of such carnage.

‘Ska! Get up here, lazy-meat. Fetch-bring Queek’s dwarf-thing.’

Ska lowered his muzzle submissively. He looked acutely worried. Queek took in the lengths of chain and the sprung lock in his underling’s paw and smothered a laugh. ‘Clever dwarf-thing. The man-thing?’

Ska gave a glum shake of the head.

‘Hah! No matter.’

‘No?’ Ska asked, not quite believing his luck. ‘What of the destruction of Azul-Place?’

More explosions came in swift succession. Fire rippled the length of the pass like a burning taper to unleash fresh pain on the Black Crag.

Queek ducked as a wall of noise descended from above. Misshapen eddies drove into the surrounding fog, rippling his lips, pulling at his fur, drowning out even the thunder of the guns. His muzzle swung to follow a squadron of dwarf-thing flying machines, his fur tugged in all directions by the ferocious downwash as they swooped overhead. On reaching the valley floor, they veered westwards, keeping in formation and trailing spumes of fire and ragged screams as they released their explosive payloads onto the hapless orcs and skaven beneath.

It was incandescently beautiful.

‘The Thirteen want no weapons from Azul-Place in Eight Peaks. Queek thinks there will be no more. It looks like they will need them for themselves.’

He looked down at the roughly severed head in his paw. Its eyes were wide, as though marvelling at Queek’s brilliance. Queek gave it a loving stroke, bringing its waxen lips to his ears with an occasional nod at its words. Pitching forward slightly, the head clasped gently between both paws, he reached up to ease Sleek Sharpwit onto Morglum Blacktooth’s spike. Blood dribbled down the spar, slowly congealing into gory stalactites where it dripped to his shoulders.

He sighed contentedly. Not only had he struck a blow against Belegar, dwarf-king of the Eight Peaks, by robbing him of the weapons of Azul, but he had hurt the green-thing, Skarsnik, too. So long as Kazador and Gorfang fought towards their hopefully mutual destruction, Skarsnik and Belegar would both find the Eight Peaks a far lonelier place. He couldn’t wait to return. If only to see the looks on their faces.

He spread his arms to the fires that engulfed the Valley of Death, a paternal embrace offered to the carnage he had sired. It was almost as if he had planned it.

Almost.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘On this day does Kazador, king of Karak Azul, declare himself grudgesworn against Handrik, son of Hannar, Hallgakrin.’

Loremaster Boric continued with his recitation, the words dull beneath the continual crump and thunder of dwarfish artillery. His stylus trailed blood-red runes across the page of the great book in time with his speech. A short-bearded dwarf in the green robes of a junior lorekeeper stood over him with a shield upturned. Rain tapped against its ancestor boss, streaming from its rim and away from those precious pages.

‘The king being rightly aggrieved by the misappropriation of the subjects of Karak Azul and for the leading of his son and heir into peril most grave.’

The king stood unflinching atop the shield borne aloft by his bearers, wrathful as a winter storm, black clouds hooding his grey, hurt-filled eyes. Beads of dew clung to his beard and glistened on the wings of his magnificent helm like dark jewels.

The loremaster read on. ‘Keldur… Narfi… Lothgrim.’

More names that Thordun didn’t recognise. Good names. Good dwarfs. He hardened his spirit to the roll call of the dishonoured. Better dwarfs again denied the Ancestors’ Hall while he, the lowest of them all, still lived. This truly was a blighted time, when the likes of Bernard Servat were permitted to endure what Handrik Hallgakrin could not. He knelt on the damp earth and awaited his turn.

‘Recompense for this grave wrong begins at a thousand thaggoraki tails and fifty urk heads, but this debt shall remain forever unresolved until the vile heads of the squatter king of Black Crag and the rat-king of the Eight Peaks, are presented in full ignobility before the Iron Throne.’

Loremaster Boric took a deep breath and set down his stylus, grimly rolling out stiff fingers in the meat of his other palm.

Only a handful of thanes had gathered for the recording of these grudges, most being busy elsewhere with the prosecution of battle. There was no comfort there. Their faces were stony, their eyes as cold as the fog that greyed them. Even Boric, who had recorded Thordun’s brave deeds after the battle of the Ninth Deep, now regarded him as an unwelcome stranger.

‘Thordun Locksplitter,’ the king spoke at last. ‘What became of the Hammerhand Hammer?’ Thordun could only offer a shrug. At best it lay abandoned to the vaults of Black Crag. At worst it graced a ratkin’s paws. ‘You were honoured with the duty of delivering it to Karak Eight Peaks. Instead…’ The king’s shoulders tensed. Thordun imagined fists grinding behind his back. ‘Instead, you joined Handrik on this… this… absurdity.’

Thordun said nothing. This was not a trial. He made no protestations of innocence. He lowered his face to the bleak ground.

‘I welcomed you into the hall of your forefathers, received you with full honour.’ Somehow, the king’s face darkened still further. ‘And you repay my kindness with betrayal.’

This time Thordun did speak up. ‘Your majesty, with respect.’

‘Respect?’ Kazador retorted, turning to the loremaster as though seeking an explanation of a poor joke. ‘Did you show respect when you made a liar of me by stealing the heirloom of an ally? Or when you connived with my most trusted friend to abscond with a score of Karak Azul’s bravest? To abduct my son. To follow them on this fool’s errand, to leave their remains to the blackness of the Crag and achieve nothing.’

‘Yes, majesty,’ Thordun answered softly. ‘Nothing but.’

Kazador growled and dismissed the sentiment out of hand. He gestured that Thordun rise, and he did so, clearing his throat nervously.

‘Thordun Locksplitter,’ the king said again, this time in a voice like thunder. ‘You are banished from Karak Azul. You will find no welcome in the lands of the Karaz Ankor until these debts laid against you are repaid.’

Thordun felt his eyes begin to burn and he closed them tight to spare himself that final disgrace. All his hopes, all his dreams, naught but ash in the wind.

‘The Headtaker is a destroyer of dreams,’ said Kazador, as if reading his thoughts. But perhaps the king understood despair like weaponmasters knew metal. ‘He casts them down and burns them as surely as he does lives, dynasties. Whole kingdoms erased, if not for our own memories that defy him and his kind.’ The king’s face shifted, a momentary effort at a smile before the muscles at the corners of his lips abandoned the effort. He turned and gestured another dwarf forward. Thordun looked up as one of the king’s Hammerers approached with Thordun’s hammer. The dwarf offered it. He took it.

‘I told you that ours was an unkind world, youngling. I told you that you would learn this for yourself in time.’

‘You did,’ Thordun said, breath hot in his mouth. His fingers tightened around the haft of his father’s hammer. ‘And I have.’

Kazador nodded, offering the same to the loremaster to indicate that he record what came next. Thordun forced himself to hold the king’s gaze, but the wrathfulness of his expression was a sight to induce tremors even in those accustomed to horror. ‘The debt against you shall be considered repaid when the Hammerhand Hammer is duly returned to King Belegar and the head of the Headtaker adorns the Throne Hall of Karak Azul. May it stand there for all time as punishment for its crimes.’

Thordun rose, hammer in hand. He turned in the direction of Black Crag, the despoiled hold invisible but for sporadic eruptions of fire that revealed nothing but mist and shadow. He had a goal, a purpose, and he would see it done. He had nothing left to lose.

‘I will see it done.’

This time Kazador did smile, so strange and genuine a gesture Thordun was taken aback by it.

‘But first.’ Kazador’s voice swept the anarchy that roared its throes within the Valley of Death. ‘First we recover my son. Living or dead, my hope lies there. Find yours where you may, youngling, for now the Iron Peak will have its vengeance.’

EPILOGUE

The white-furred emissary quivered. He lay flat on the wooden flooring of this powerful being’s tower and grovelled, closing his eyes and waiting for the ancient to respond. His mind sorted his excuses, like clanrats ready to be thrown to their deaths to spare their master’s fur.

But nothing.

Just the continuing, casual, stroke of skewer and blade onto a wooden board, the occasional snap and swallow as something slippery disappeared down the ancient one’s throat. He opened one eye.

The ancient skaven regarded him impassively from behind a sturdy dwarf-made table laden with glistening seafood and pickled spawn. Black-furred and barrel-chested, his coat flecked with iron grey, there was an aura to him that age had enhanced rather than diminished. His paws stopped, partway through sawing at a brawny length of tentacle. They were paws that remembered how to hold a blade. They were killer’s paws.

The emissary gulped, then remembered how to speak. ‘Most ageless and eternal of great lords, if there is no more that the great Gnawdwell requires of this unworthy emissary–’

The clanlord held up a paw for silence, and the emissary’s jaw slammed shut. ‘You say that Sleek Sharpwit is dead.’ Gnawdwell’s sonorous voice creaked like ancient leather, but there was no mistaking the power that had defied the toll of years. ‘That is… regretful.’

‘Yes-yes, most omniscient of clanlords. It was Queek that–’

Another raised paw preceded another instantaneous silence. The clanlord smirked and resumed his knifework. ‘Sleek was a rare asset, but no good thing lasts forever. My spies in the City of Pillars tell me that Queek has won many victories since his return there. They say the dwarf-things are ready to buckle.’

‘But, Azul-Place–’

This time the emissary was able to stop himself from speaking just as the clanlord’s brow began to arch. Gnawdwell grinned viciously, a skewered tentacle halfway to his lips.

‘Fool-fool,’ Gnawdwell growled. He snapped at the tentacle, gulping it down whole and ramming the silver skewer into his wooden platter. ‘Do not think you could ever sense the world as I do, pale one. It is a long war we wage, three thousand years and still unfinished.’ He thumped his chest, the veneer of civilised self-discipline fracturing like ice over a black mere. ‘My clan struck first blood in Karak Eight Peaks. It will be mine that ends it. My clan. My glory.’ The clanlord clenched his jaw and sat back, wooden chair groaning under his bulk. He yanked his skewer free and brought the forked rod thrumming to his muzzle.

‘Do you care much for fish, Grey Seer?’

The emissary’s jaw flapped, startled by the sudden tangential shift. The thought arose that perhaps all of Clan Mors carried the same affliction of madness, but it floundered and drowned under Clanlord Gnawdwell’s red stare. The ancient seemed unsurprised by his guest’s silence and continued, paw spread to what was laid out on his table.

‘I see the slaves that go wading into the Blighted Marshes with spears for these creatures.’ He shrugged and tossed a live whelk from a bowl of saltwater into his mouth. It crunched as it went down. ‘Long ago, before I claimed Clan Mors’ place among the Thirteen, I witnessed the dwarf-thing way, hunting fish with blackpowder.’ He grinned coldly. ‘Queek is blackpowder. Sometimes you just have to throw him in.’ He mimicked the gesture, then grinned. ‘And see what bodies fall.’

He gestured with his long black snout and a pair of albino warriors hauled the grey seer up by the arms and started to drag his useless legs back towards the stairs.

‘B-b-but, great one,’ the grey seer stammered. He struggled against the firm grips around both wrists. His bells tinkled softly off his horns as he jerked to no avail. ‘Sharpwit did this to my legs. To me, precious prophet of the Horned One. And fool-Queek left me to die. The seerlord demands an example be made.’

The clanlord didn’t rise. ‘You are an irksome tick. Aren’t you, Razzel?’

‘I am the Horned One’s favoured. My survival proves it. Vengeance on the impious is only what is just, noblest and most fair of dark lords.’

Gnawdwell tittered quietly, evidently finding something of great amusement. ‘I have seen the Horned Rat with my own eyes, you petty creature, and he does not suffer favourites. So go tell Seerlord Kritislik.’ He laughed harder, black barrel chest rippling with mirth as his albino guards tossed the crippled seer down the stairs. Gnawdwell raised his voice so it would carry after him. ‘Tell him that if he so greatly wishes for an example, then he is most welcome to summon Queek to Skavenblight… and exact it himself.’

THORGRIM

David Guymer

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 spokesdwarfsof 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

THE KARAG DURAK GRUDGE

David Guymer

Let it be known that on this day a great grudge is laid upon the vile rat-kin of Karak Eight Peaks – Grungni curse their debasing paws! Twenty-four brave dwarfs of the Ironbeard clan did fall in stalwart defiance of the verminous host that did seek to overrun the Karag Durak watch post. They will be remembered. Four-score tails are demanded in recompense for this outrage. Also on this day did Grimnar Ironbeard personally defeat the rat-king of the Eight Peaks, and his scampering foe did cause the rest of the cowardly host to flee for their lice-ridden holes. The thaggoraki show their true mettle! This bold act did allow fifty-five clansmen, including Grimnar himself, to bring word of these fell deeds that they may be recorded for all time. A thousand curses upon the rat-king that, before his craven flight, he did maim bold Grimnar’s hand. May the halls of Karak Eight Peaks flow with rat-kin blood for this act. Grimnar does take the name ‘Halfhanded’, and forever shall he thus be known to his ancestors until the debt is repaid in full – a thousand vermin tails and the head of the Headtaker himself.

from the Karak Kadrin Book of Grudges

The damp earthen floor shook to the pounding of a thousand clawed paws, the narrow passage filled with the panting squeals of skaven warriors as they shoved and fought through the press of their brethren.

Ska Bloodtail ran amongst them, keeping the flagging rat-men moving with the judicious application of the flat of his sword. His belly growled as a particularly plump specimen wheezing under the weight of its rusted chain hauberk struggled by. The clanrat stumbled, his footpaws tangling in knots as he fell. The skaven had barely hit the ground before those following after were diving onto his prone form. His agonised wails were short-lived as starving comrades ripped the flesh from his bones.

The other skaven nearby chittered angrily, their own bellies clenching in envy.

Ska took advantage of the distraction to slip a paw into the leather satchel he wore over his ancient and punished gromril coat. Tearing a thin sliver of goblin meat from the rations, he popped it into his mouth, swallowing without chewing as he looked around suspiciously. It had been wise of the warlord to entrust him with the rations; it was important that the fangleader kept his strength up. Who else would keep these lazy meat-sacks running?

The press of warriors ahead of him grew tighter, and even slashing their wiry backs to bloody ribbons could not force them to move. Ska felt his famed strength falter, his gromril chain spattered with gore when, suddenly, he spotted the reason for their slowing.

They had arrived at last. The gates of Karak Varn were within sight.

Biting and shoving, he bullied his way through the massed ranks, ignoring their squabbling as he barged to the front.

Ska slowed to a standstill as he came upon the giant gateway, gazing up towards the distant ceiling, the two great marble blocks towering into the hidden blackness. Each had once been adorned with glittering runic script but millennia of rot had eaten at their proud surfaces until all that lingered was the sad glint of gold beside dank slime and corroded stone. One giant block sat uncomfortably across the other, affording Ska a narrow view of four frightened red eyes on the other side.

‘Go away,’ hissed a voice from the darkness. ‘Fisk-Warlord say none enter Varn-lair. Not unless he say-say.’ The voice paused for a moment. ‘And he not say-say.’

Ska growled, pressing his muzzle against the gap to peer into the impenetrable gloom beyond. He listened with approval as the gate-rats scurried back. Just in case.

‘You open! You open now-now. Warlord comes and you no-no want cross. He skin you alive and feed you to each other.’

This time there was an extended pause, a faint chittering of tense conversation just below Ska’s hearing. After a few moments, one of the gate-rats hesitantly piped up.

‘But, Fisk-Warlord say...’

‘Grah!’ Ska head-butted the gate in a rage, taking little pleasure in the way the insolent vermin squeaked aloud in fright. He rolled his head sorrowfully against the cool surface. What was he to do now? It was so unfair that he should suffer for the stupidity of others.

His brain was running on nothing but warpstone fumes and adrenaline, but he desperately trawled it for some fresh ploy to coax the idiot gate-rats into opening up, before a bitter scent excited his nostrils.

His heart leapt into his throat.

Hurriedly Ska spun from the gate, collapsing to the damp loam in the most obscene demonstration of obsequiousness his aching limbs could achieve. He didn’t look up. He didn’t dare. But he could sense the mass of skaven warriors around him doing likewise. He tried to close his nose to that bitter scent, but the musk of fear rose from the assembled masses, blending with the foul moisture that clung to the fractured walls, the miasma descending over the throng like the none-too gentle paw of a vengeful god.

A terrified voice filtered through the tremulous thunder behind his ears and into his brain.

‘Open gate! He comes. Open now-now! Hurry-hurry. Fast-quick!’

A chittering wave of obeisance rolled from the far end of the chamber, crashing over his hunched shoulders as he lifted his voice to add to it, straining to out-squeak the voices of his rivals. But still, he hadn’t the courage to raise his muzzle from the dirt.

A footpaw squelched into the mud by his nose.

Suppressing a whimper, he cracked open one eye. His gaze tracked upward past the chainmail skirt to the scarlet plate where sigils of skaven supremacy had been roughly carved into the metal. Ska fancied he could could still scent the lingering traces of warp-dust from the chisel’s passing in the ensorcelled armour.

He lifted his eyes higher still and quailed. The warlord was a black-furred vision of death. A terror incarnate. From within a scarlet helm, eyes blazed with an inner fury, like fire agate drenched in the blood of a man-thing daemon. Those eyes commanded submission but, even so, Ska couldn’t stop his panicked gaze from flicking over the grisly array of trophies held aloft on the warlord’s shoulders, suspended on a wooden frame like half of a morbidly spoked wheel.

The decaying heads rocked with Warlord Queek’s twitching movements, the creaking of the wooden spikes like the spoken words of the dead. Queek cocked his head first one way, then the other, offering his ear to the shrivelled lips of the dead things as if heeding their council.

‘Yes-yes,’ he hissed. ‘Queek make fool-meat suffer.’ His eyes suddenly focused on Ska, his displeasure evident. ‘Why is gate not open for Great Queek?’

‘Is not my fault, most vicious of tyrants. Is stupid gate-rats. Their small minds fill-fill with mould, I think. They not open door for your mighty passing.’

Queek’s lip twitched, exposing the faintest display of glistening fangs as a snarl erupted from deep within the warlord’s gullet.

A fresh wail of terror streamed through the gateway, pitched to a level of horror far beyond anything Ska could have engendered himself. A panicked command was heeded with the whip-crack of a lash that drew a tortured moan, building in pitching to a squeal of rusted metal. Brackish water fell from the ceiling, drenching the massed skaven who eyed the trembling walls with mounting alarm.

His knees slowly sinking into the mud, Ska watched as Queek stalked amongst his warriors, baring his fangs and banging muzzles together to keep order as the metallic shriek rose to an ear-splitting crescendo that seemed to snap the gates in two. Protesting every inch, the great doors retreated, dragged inwards by what smelled like at least two-hundred skavenslaves to each mighty slab. Straining in despairing silence, the slaves hauled on thick, corroded chains that looped up through vast iron hoops and disappeared into the dripping darkness.

Ska felt the vibrations running up his paws as the marble doors slammed against the far walls, bringing a fresh shower of foul smelling rain onto the heads of the assembled warriors. He hurried to his feet, turning to inspect the open gate as a wave of damp, cankerous air washed his whiskers. Feeling pleased with himself for overcoming the obdurate gate-rats to fulfil his warlord’s instructions so masterfully, he waited expectantly for the high praise that would soon be heaped upon his tireless shoulders.

‘Fool-fool!’ yelled Queek, mere inches from Ska’s ears. ‘What use are you that cannot open simple door? Time wastes. Get worthless meat moving or I take every minute’s delay from your lice-ridden hide.’

Ska’s head bobbed enthusiastically. ‘Yes-yes, I obey. Perhaps if you explain the rush-hurry that pulls so many warriors from battles with–’

The fangleader never finished his sentence as Queek’s fist tightened around his throat.

Ska watched through bulging eyes as the corded mass of black-furred muscle that was the warlord’s neck grew taut, dragging his kicking footpaws from the ground. Ska struggled to calm the urge to fight – an urge that would surely see him killed – as the warlord pulled him close, almost until his own blood-red eyeball pressed against that of his fearsome master.

‘A little knowledge is most perilous thing. Is a thing for warlords. Does Ska think to be warlord today?’

‘No-no,’ he croaked. His vision began to blur but still he bit down on the impulse to fight back. ‘I just... I just... I...’

With a snort of contempt, Queek dropped him, kicking him back into the milling ranks of warriors. Each one, to a rat, looked studiously elsewhere. With any other warlord, such a spectacle would have drawn a baying crowd looking to curry favour with the victor and, with luck, take a bite of their own from the loser. But the warriors of Clan Mors knew better.

Queek’s temper was a force best avoided.

‘Get them moving. I want away gone soon-soon. If not...’

There was no need for Queek to elaborate. Ska’s eyes widened as he thrust too-slow skaven from his path, roaring until his throat was hoarse to hurry the malingering rats to their feet.

He didn’t spare any notice as his warlord spun gracefully on his footpaws, stalking like a hungry predator towards the open threshold to Karak Varn.

Queek stood alone in the cavernous chamber, staring after the gate-rats’ fleeing silhouettes. He doubted they would have ran as fast had it been an army of stone trolls at their back.

‘Indeed,’ whispered the sepulchral voice from behind his shoulder. ‘Where is the troll that could equal the might of Queek?’

Queek didn’t turn to answer. The voices always listened when he spoke.

‘I like to meet this troll, I think. This troll that think it equal of Queek. Queek tear its chest and eat its beating heart.’ He hissed with amusement. His trophy heads jerked on their poles, laughing with him. ‘Stupid-dumb rock-thing. I am Queek Headtaker! I have no equal!’

His laughter faded as he looked around. The chamber was vast, shaped like an enormous inverted bowl to house the gateway’s gargantuan opening mechanism. A noisome ooze glazed the crumbling walls. It made the rock clammy to the touch, like being inside the churning stomach of a giant made of stone. Massed banks of skavenslaves huddled in fearful silence mere paces away to either side, although such was the sickly damp that seemed to smother his senses that he almost failed to notice.

A damp rustle from behind made him turn. He was the most feared warlord in skavendom, but some instincts existed for a reason. He relaxed – slightly – when he saw it was just Ska with a group of clanrats who had followed him in. Ska had a strange look. His gaze was vacant, animal, his breath coming in ragged gasps that heaved on his ogreish chest. Looking across at the others, Queek noticed many of them in a similar state. He had driven them hard, he realised, almost into the ground.

More skaven piled in through the gate, eyes glinting red and hungry in the blackness, their dark craving focused on the terrified ranks of helpless slaves. Seeing the madness in the warriors’ eyes, the manacled slaves thrashed and screamed, some even attempting to gnaw through their own paws to flee the butchery they knew would come.

Queek could not have restrained them, even if he had felt compelled to try.

As one chittering mass, the skaven surged forward, their vicious squeals melding with the wails of the dying, echoing grimly through the dripping halls of Karak Varn.

The army raced through the warrens of Karak Varn, groups splintering off to drag individual skaven kicking and screaming from their dens to be eaten alive by the frenzied warriors. Like the walls they cowered behind, the rat-men of Varn seemed wasted and decayed, the foul air mouldering the scrawny creature’s very bones. They fled before the army’s rampage, scurrying for soaked and sodden burrows that were sunk into the dank earth.

Queek rode the river, directing it as best he could, but even he was not immune to his nature. Watching his minion’s feasting had stirred the Black Hunger within his own gut; the insatiable agony of the Horned Rat himself gnawing at his innards.

And the Black Hunger could not be fought. Only fed.

‘Eat-feed, Queek-Warlord. We hunger!’

Queek snarled, foam flying from his lips. That was the whining voice of Ikit Slash. The long dead skaven warlord of Fester Spike had always been weak.

‘Is only one skaven in Varn-lair fit for belly of Queek. He learn fast-quick not to bar path of the Headtaker!’ Queek shrieked his own bloodlust and hunger as his starving warriors surged past. He tried to focus their death frenzy, to channel it. He would make an example of Warlord Fisk that would test the fortitude of even the blackest of skaven hearts.

He guided his army down what he judged to be the lair’s main thoroughfare. Tunnels punctured the walls of the cavern like the worm-ridden core of a particularly vile apple, skaven swarming over every opening like flies. The armoured mass of rabid warriors drove the skittish locals squelching for their holes – those too slow of foot or wit were quickly hacked to pieces, with Queek’s warriors tearing each other apart to get at the remains.

The sound of a goblin-skin drum pounding to the rhythm of armoured footpaws slowly became audible over the chittering hoard. Summoning every reserve of authority his fearsome reputation bestowed, Queek squealed a sharp command, the sound rebounding from the walls of the cavern. In ones and twos at first the orgy of blood-letting eased, the effect gradually spreading through his army as dripping weapons were lowered and crazed minds cleared of crimson mist.

Queek gave his musician an angry shove. The scarlet-armoured stormvermin took his cue, striking the great brass bell he bore suspended from the cross-bar of a worm-eaten stave. Thrice the dissonant bell tolled, sounding the order to reform. Responding to the command, his warriors fell in to disordered ranks, lowering a corroded ensemble of halberds, cutlasses, spears, daggers and everything in between, and issuing a barrage of coarse, challenging squeaks into the approaching darkness.

The drumming grew louder. It seemed that even the drum itself was slave to the foul, malodorous damp that infested this place, every beat conjuring images of stagnation and decay. Just as the full emptiness of the hall seemed to tremble in sympathy to its beating, a mob of skaven spewed from the mouth of one of the many side tunnels, charging down the walls in an unruly swarm towards Queek’s depleted force.

The charge slowed to a halt about a dozen strides back, the two blocks of skaven warriors snapping and snarling as they quickly worked out whether the force to their front was stronger or weaker than the one at their back.

Ensconced within that protective shell of rusted steel and furred flesh, Queek saw a hulking giant in silver plate scoured to an impossible shine. A pair of segmented horns spiralled down from the sides of his helm, red eyes gleaming from beneath the thick, iron brow with undisguised malice.

Queek knew Warlord Fisk of Karak Varn only by reputation. The warlord’s fur carried an unhealthy green-tinge, lending him the repulsive appearance of a hulking orc-thing, something he only compounded with his fondness for large and noisy weaponry. From the corner of his eye, Queek spied a number of ratling gun teams taking positions in the tunnel mouths flanking his force. He watched as the loaders fed belts of ammunition from casks on their backs into the long-barrelled contraptions, the gunner’s paws hovering over their cranks with a terrible, optimistic glee. The whisper on the Underway was that Fisk liked to coffle his prisoners before strafing the lines with warpstone shells, not letting up until the weapon detonated in its unfortunate handler’s paws.

Fisk was a disgrace to the skaven race. Clan Skyre charged a fortune for their weapons, and almost as much for their operators.

Ignoring the pitiful sight of Fisk’s so-called warriors, Queek stabbed a claw towards the craven warlord, hissing his challenge. The gesture pitched forward his gruesome array of trophies, setting the bones to rattling. ‘Beware,’ they seemed to chatter in chorus. ‘Beware Queek!’

Queek grinned as he saw Fisk attempt a backward step, only to be blocked by the press of his own warriors, smashing the pommel of his sword into the snout of one of his clanrats as he attempted to cover his own obvious fear. Scowling at his underlings, the silver-helmed warlord barged forward, his bulk scattering his minions as he came to stand toe-to-toe before Queek. In a show of disdain, the warlord spun away from him to face his warriors, slamming a fist into his breast plate and screeching at the top of his lungs. His warriors responded in kind with a thumping of spear butts into soft earth and rusted blades upon shields.

Queek watched the peacock posturing without concern. The weak always felt the need to show off.

‘You come to fight-die with great Queek? Is your mind slow-soft? Run-hide to your burrow. Queek has no match.’

Fisk flourished his blade, a nicked and rusted bastard sword. Queek broke into a snicker of laughter as he drew his own weapons – the spiked maul, Dwarf-Gouger, and his own tried and tested blade. His heart thumped. He had denied himself too long. Soon his tongue would taste blood!

Fisk lunged forward with a clumsy downward slash. Queek rolled his shoulder, skittering aside with dancing pawsteps. Again his enemy came, and again Queek spun away from the attack, the tip of his sword licking out to open a long gash on his opponent’s cheek. Maddened by Queek’s teasing swordplay, Fisk barrelled forward, swinging his giant sword for Queek’s neck. Grinning, Queek hopped back a pace, parrying the lunge with a deft touch from his own blade.

The over-committed warlord struggled to regain his balance, his chest an open and inviting target. Queek spun on his footpaws, his cadaverous trophies grinning as they sensed a new pretender about to join their ranks. Mid-spin, he reversed his grip on Dwarf-Gouger, shrilling in exorcised fury as its spike punched through the vainglorious sheen of Fisk’s breastplate, piercing the rat-kin’s heart in a hail of bone fragments and blood.

Laughing, Queek yanked the weapon free. Fisk’s corpse fell to its knees at his feet, held upright by a footpaw on the chest.

‘You are on your knees, friend-Fisk? Then all is forgiven, of course.’

Snickering, Queek let Dwarf-Gouger drop from his paw, ripping Fisk’s helmet clear with a flash of his claws. He positioned the serrated edge of his blade against the dead warlord’s spine. Both sets of warriors moaned as Queek sawed through the thick meat of his rival’s neck, looking away as vertebrae crunched and separated. With a yell of triumph, Queek tore the severed head from the tangle of gristle that still clung to Fisk’s shoulders, shaking it defiantly before the subdued horde.

‘Queek is greatest! Queek is fiercest! Queek is strongest!’ With a scream, he hurled the bloodied thing into the opposing ranks, the warlord’s head splatting into a clanrat’s hurriedly raised shield. ‘Who else?’ he cried. ‘Who else dare test Queek?’

Silence was his answer.

Screaming with frustration, Queek threw his gore-spattered sword to the ground, pawing wildly at his own armour with unsated bloodlust. He swallowed the urge to charge headlong into his enemy, to slaughter them like the slaves at the gate.

Slowly, the urge subsided. He did not have to kill them all. Skaven followed strength, and no one was stronger than Queek.

‘You!’ he shouted, directing a threatening claw at one of Fisk’s warriors. The rangy rat-man stared at it as though it might spit lightning. ‘Is there a Clan Moulder quarter in this foetid hole, gutter-spleen?’

The frightened skaven nodded eagerly to indicate that there was.

‘Fetch-bring a representative. They have things I need. It is their honour to serve great Queek-Warlord today.’

Ska cowered before his warlord’s rage, wincing occasionally when his violent temper manifested in a claw stabbed into the meat of his shoulder to emphasise some particularly galling point.

‘Where-where is stupid Moulder-thing. Are beast-meddlers so addled by warp-dust and cave mushrooms that they disobey Queek?’

Wracking his brains for the words his unpredictable master most likely wished to hear, he cringed as he saw the warlord bare his fangs for a fresh onslaught.

The expected blow never fell. Something else had drawn the warlord’s ire and he glanced across at the unlikely shape of his salvation: a tall, wiry, skaven in an oily blue cloak and hood that had separated from the crowd and was padding towards them.

Queek reached for his weapons. Even far from home and in a festering backwater like Varn, assassination attempts followed his warlord like warp-hounds chased warpstone. Ska closed his eyes and prayed that somehow, someday, one of them might finally succeed.

The skaven quickly lowered his hood and prostrated himself, anxiously gesturing the warlord to lower his weapons.

‘It is merely I, oh most gruesome of victors, bane of the green-things, and slayer of a thousand dwarfs.’

Queek kept his sword firmly in paw as he answered. ‘A thousand? Your tongue offends me, Skratch. Maybe I cut it out and eat it. Queek slays dwarf-things in tens of thousands! The blood of kingdoms stains his mighty fur.’

Ska kept his own council on Queek’s extravagant boast. He wasn’t about to stick his neck out just to give the warlord a free swing.

‘Meek and unworthy Skratch meant no insult to Warlord Queek. My head-brain is too simple to keep proper tally of mighty Queek’s many glorious triumphs.’

Grudgingly, Queek released his blade, dismissing Ska with a casual sweep of his paw.

Ska moved away, baring his teeth to discourage his inferiors from looking to him for orders. Making a show of polishing his blade with an old man-skin cloth, he pricked his ears to listen.

‘I received your message rat,’ said Queek, his whispered voice pitched high with excitement. ‘Before twelfth bell, last moon. It is here? You are sure-sure?’

‘Yes-yes. Sure as sure. Smell and hear and see. It is here.’

Queek leaned in, close and menacing, his muzzle pressed against the frightened scout. ‘You are certain it is still here? Varn-lair has lots-many dangers.’

Skratch gulped, answering with a vigorous nod.

With a grin, Queek shoved the scout away and bounded back to his milling warriors, bossing them into action with a vicious enthusiasm.

Ska’s eyes narrowed as he studied Skratch. The skaven fidgeted constantly, running his tail through his paws as his eyes tried to be everywhere at once with a hyperactive paranoia. Skratch’s twitching gaze met his and the scout squeaked in alarm, burying his muzzle in his cowl as he scurried away. Ska watched him disappear into the assembling ranks.

What treasure had Skratch unearthed in this abyssal place? And why was he sharing it with the warlord? Whatever the answers, Ska intended to find out.

Pleasant images of power and riches were still bright in his mind when Queek’s baleful visage brought a stab of fear to his chest, fearful that the warlord might read something traitorous in his scent? It was impossible, he reassured himself. The great and merciless Warlord Queek knew he had no servant as unswerving in his loyalty as Ska Bloodtail!

Karak Varn was vast, and it was empty – devoid of anything that moved but shadows, the black shapes flitting across the distant walls like carrion crows circling a tiring lamb. For the hundredth time since ascending that first stair, Queek wished he’d brought along more of his warriors. Skratch had urged caution, citing the legions of goblins and worse that haunted the sunken shell of Varn that might be disturbed by a large force. But the voices had whispered ‘What has the dark to challenge the all-conquering Queek?’ and he had listened.

Now he felt decidedly naked. Aside from the single Clan Moulder packmaster and his swarming rats, he had only Ska and a score of his fiercest stormvermin to throw between himself and danger. He tried to remind himself that he was Queek the Fearless, but it was difficult to be so dismissive of a threat that seemed to exist only in his mind, tickling the hairs at the back of his nostrils with the bitter scent of fear.

‘Ska,’ he whispered, his voice seeming caged, locked and buried beneath the oppressively cavernous space. ‘Take front-front. Great Queek shall watch the rear.’

Warily, Ska crept to the front of the mob where Skratch lingered on all fours, darting from side to side with his snout raised to the stagnant cross-draughts.

Queek took a sniff of his own and instantly regretted it. Green-things.

His nose wrinkled in disgust. The whole place stank of them. He didn’t know how Skratch could find his way through that. Queek certainly doubted whether he could find his own way back. Pitch darkness was nothing, but the high ceilings were adorned with dwarf glimstones and, although most had faded and died, some shone with an intermittent brightness that threw the hall into stark brilliance one moment, only to plunge it into utter blackness the next. The constant strobing rendered sensitive skaven eyes as good as blind.

‘Skratch,’ he whispered, fumbling in the strange dark-light. ‘Skratch, are you there?’

‘Here-here, most devious of warlords.’

‘Where do we go-sneak?’

‘A stair, oh feared conqueror of mountains. It take-bring to what dwarf-things call “the Fifth Deep”. We much-much close to surface now.’

Queek snarled and sent the scout away, fondling the leather grip of Dwarf-Gouger. He wished he’d taken his chances with the goblins. It seemed that time itself expanded to fill the vast hall... or was it simply the light confounding his senses? He ground his teeth in hatred of the dwarf-things. No one else would be so stupid as to build rooms so huge for a people that were so small!

A curt reprimand to Skratch for taking them on such a terrible route was on the tip of his tongue when suddenly two monstrous giants loomed out from the glare.

Queek screeched and leapt behind one of his stormvermin, but as the light faded to a more comfortable level he realised it was merely two mammoth granite statues flanking the entrance to Skratch’s stair. He took a deep breath, soothing his ego by breaking the stormvermin’s nose with his fist. ‘You stand in Queek’s way-path. Why do I suffer Ska to train you so poorly?’

He stepped over the mewling rat-man to examine the statues. They had once represented dwarfs, but their long beards were chiselled down, their stern countenances defaced with orcish features while their mailed torsos had been daubed with green-thing filth. Queek’s whiskers shivered with disgust.

‘Come-come,’ Skratch chittered. ‘Stair is long-far.’

Long-far. That was an understatement. A lonesome dripping echoed up – or possibly down? – the length of the stairwell, an intermittent torture that made his tail ripple with pent up rage. It felt like an age since he had last eaten, his gut sending vengeful spears of pain into his fur. It was a shame he had so few warriors – the heavy-set stormvermin would go far. But he had what he had, so he suffered with merely vandalising the mosaics that shadowed them insufferably up the walls of the stairwell. It was some kind of repeating, symmetric pattern of gold and silver squares that transformed into entirely new forms when viewed from another angle. It was disconcerting and pointless. The dwarf-things had an eye for the grandiose; they liked to build things to endure. It was a racial failing that he could never understand.

He was just beginning to entertain the notion that he surely couldn’t need all of these stormvermin, when the faintest tickle of cleaner air crept into his nose. An excited squeak from Skratch, several turns above his head, confirmed that the end was in sight. Queek tried to hide his relief, but his muscles seemed to boil beneath his fur like the bubbling warp-forges of Clan Skyre.

The skaven burst from the stairs with palpable relief. Queek winced as he rubbed feeling back into his thighs, hopping from footpaw to footpaw to keep his muscles from seizing. He watched as his so-called elite practically folded in on themselves as they collapsed onto the cracked white marble tiles. He shook his head contemptuously as the pride of Clan Mors lay sprawled on the cold stone.

He closed his eyes, the pulsing glimstones like weeping blades in his temples. At least the stench was bearable. The damp too seemed to have subsided into the sordid depths of Karak Varn – the horrific, cloying moistness that seemed to infect even the shadows themselves had been gratefully abandoned to the lower deeps.

He turned to his warriors. ‘Rest-rest now. But keep moving. Any who can’t walk when we away-go will be food for others.’

His look of scorn was dragged away from the splayed figures as Ska Bloodtail picked his way through the maze of limbs and discarded gear towards him.

‘I suggest we eat-rest. No slaves anymore and still see-scent no green-things.’

‘Green-cowards hide-hide,’ declared Queek. ‘They hear-smell Queek is here. I am like monster of story-tale to fearful green-things.’

Ska said nothing, and Queek snarled. He jabbed a claw at his lounging warriors.

‘Feed-feed then. Give all they can stomach. We have living meat soon enough.’

Licking his lips curiously, Ska padded away, wondering what the warlord had meant. Was it then some living thing they sought? A bound daemon perhaps or some escaped Moulder experiment that would pulverise his enemies? A dragon’s hoard? His heart pumped cold at the thought. Maybe the beast would choke on Queek while Ska made off with its treasure…

Thoughts skirted his brain like mice around a tainted cheese as he walked amongst his rat-men, drawing hunks of salted goblin hide from his pack and tossing them to the starving warriors. There was no great love for the vile meat but the ravenous skaven swallowed it enthusiastically enough. Even the hunter rats turned their noses up at the tuberous lump of gristle and viscera set before them, circling it warily as if it might pounce.

Continuing his rounds with an exaggerated nonchalance, Ska made a wide circle towards where Skratch sat apart. The scout glanced up expectantly as Ska fished in his pack.

‘So-so,’ began the fangleader, his paw still buried in the satchel. ‘You know what Queek-Warlord hunt-seeks. You tell him to come for it, I hear. Why not squeak-tell? Ska can keep secrets.’

Skratch eyed the bag longingly, a pale rope of saliva swinging from his open jaws. With an expansive gesture, Ska withdrew the last piece of meat, noticing how the starving skaven’s eyes chased after it like a hypnotist’s medallion. He shaved off a thin sliver and dangled it enticingly from his claw. Skratch grabbed it and gobbled it down before his paw had even finished moving.

Ska watched the scout swallow, hungry eyes immediately returning to what remained in his paw. Ska jiggled it with a hiss of laughter. ‘Tell-tell. What does Queek-Warlord seek in this foul place? What is so important he leaves green-things un-killed?’

Skratch shook his muzzle piteously, trapped between hunger and fear.

Angrily, Ska opened his own mouth wide to sink his fangs into the glistening flesh.

‘Wait-stop!’ whined Skratch, anxiously drumming his claws on the floor tiles. With an arrhythmic, jerking motion, the scout glanced about. Evidently satisfied nobody was about to kill him, he opened his paw for Ska’s food.

Ska held onto it, a fatty white paste beginning to ooze between his claws. He lashed his tail in delight. ‘Tell-tell first. Tell and you eat-eat. Then you help me kill-kill old Queek and maybe we split-share treasure.’

Skratch cringed, continuing to cast nervous looks over his shoulder every few seconds. Summoning the jittery scout’s attention the best way he knew how, Ska slammed his gauntlet through the floor tile. He raised his paw, meeting Skratch’s gaze. He grinned. He had the runt focussed now.

‘Tell-tell,’ he repeated, ‘and we share-share.’

‘Ska doesn’t understand,’ moaned Skratch. ‘The thing Queek seeks… is not a thing he share.’

Ska listened as Skratch laid out the warlord’s purpose and, with a vicious grin, handed the scout his promised reward. Maybe there was no treasure, but disposing of Queek might turn out to be a simple matter after all.

Ever deeper into the hold, Skratch led them; ever closer to the surface through one vertigo-inducing hall after another. Queek’s head spun from the vastness of it all. The one small mercy he clung to was that the damnable glimstones had disappeared, ushering them into blessed blackness. Chances were they had been pried loose and stolen by goblins. The simple-minded green-things had a magpie-like fascination for that which sparkled.

His claws tensed and relaxed almost with a will of their own. He needed blood on his paws. That was all.

He followed Skratch through yet another immense, vaulted chamber, this one littered with the iron skeleton of some kind of industry. The looming, metallic shadows had been peeled away, layer by layer, until their rusted innards spilled across the tiled floor. A pained squeak broke the silence as the packmaster trod on some ancient nail. He sneered at the muffled sniggers that broke out around him, exacting his rage on the cowering hunter rats in a torrent of vicious lash strokes.

Queek watched as Skratch pattered first one way and then another, lifting his nose to the air as he tried to find his way.

‘Admit it,’ growled Queek. ‘You are lost.’

‘Not lost, not lost,’ protested Skratch, quickly disappearing behind one of the listless hulks, only to be forced back into Queek’s sight with a panicked squeal by an avalanche of falling metal that boomed throughout the eerie machine graveyard like thunder.

Queek winced as the rumbling echo took an age to die. If there was a single goblin left anywhere in Karak Varn, they could not have failed to hear that.

‘You clumsy, dwarf-pawed imbecile! Look-smell where you go!’

Skratch burrowed through the scrap heap, more of the rusted remains trilling across the floor in response to his movements. Queek watched a spiked little wheel clatter across the floor towards him. He stamped on it with a snarl.

‘A tunnel, imperious master,’ said Skratch, his tail sliding anxiously up his leg. ‘Up-up, it goes.’

‘I grow tired-bored of this traipsing, Skratch. I want kill-kill. Tell me we are close.’

Skratch nodded eagerly. ‘Close, mighty warlord. Kill-kill, very soon. But some sneaky sneak has been this way. Tunnel blocked to stop Skratch finding, but Skratch’s nose cunning-good. Humbly, suggest I scout-scout ahead. Can’t warn enemies we come-come with clumsy clattering.’

Queek bit his tongue on what he thought of the scout’s position on clumsiness.

‘Fine-fine,’ he spat. ‘We wait here. Quick-hurry, or it goes bad for you.’

‘No!’ squeaked Ska, earning himself a cuff across the muzzle.

‘Queek is warlord. Queek says no or yes.’

Ska bobbed his head deferentially. ‘Yes-yes, imperious master. But Skratch should not go alone. What if danger? Perhaps strong Ska should protect him.’

Queek studied his fangleader, eyes filled with suspicion. His trophies whispered to him.

‘We see-smell them together,’ observed one. ‘What do Ska and Skratch say-squeak when think-think Queek not hear?’

‘Do they not know that the mighty Queek hears all?’ added another.

‘Yes-yes, fool-fools! What treachery do they plot together?’

‘Ska is untrustworthy. Do not leave him alone.’ Queek’s newest and freshest head hung from his trophy rack by a dark shank of hair. Listlessly, its sunken features turned from side-to-side, its eyes blank and ever watchful.

Whispering warm words, Queek reached up a paw to caress its sallow cheeks. It had belonged to a human adventurer named Torsten, but now it was the property of the Headtaker. Queek was glad for it. This one was new, but it was insightful. Ska Bloodtail could not be trusted.

Queek swiped the fangleader again, his claws drawing blood. ‘Stupid-Ska. You clumsiest clanger of all. Skratch go alone and Skratch hurry back.’ He turned to the scout, licking his lieutenant’s blood from his claws as he spoke. ‘Go-go, fast-quick.’

Skratch leapt to attention as if shocked, scampering away with suspicious enthusiasm into the upwardly sloping passage.

Queek tapped his footpaw impatiently. He had never liked waiting.

It felt like he had been waiting an inordinately long time. Damn that Ska, he thought, for talking his warlord out of sending someone to keep an eye on that useless scout. He glared at the traitorous underling, but the fangleader kept his eyes – and his thoughts – firmly to himself.

‘Moulder-thing,’ he snapped, finally out of patience. ‘Come now, quick-quick.’

The packmaster raced to the warlord’s side, dropping to one knee as he offered his unguarded throat. It was the first time Queek had deigned to take a proper look at the beast handler; his cowled muzzle was riddled with infected cuts and barely healed scars. He reeked of rat musk and warpstone, masking his own scent and leaving Queek wondering whether the rat-man was displaying the appropriate degree of terror as befitted an encounter with so fearsome a skaven as he. He was prepared – just this one time – to accept the violently shuddering shoulders of the packmaster as respect enough.

‘I will tolerate no more failure, Moulder-thing. Your pets had best-best succeed where traitor-Skratch could not.’

‘Moulder hunter-rats find-find anything, mighty warlord.’

‘Pray-pray you speak true, Moulder-thing.’

Without releasing the packmaster from his sight, Queek reached under the scarlet plate of his left vambrace, claws probing as though in pursuit of a particularly cunning flea.

‘Ah,’ he declared. ‘Here-here.’

Withdrawing his paw, he presented the object to the incredulous packmaster. There, hanging from the warlord’s claws on a length of cord, were two shrivelled digits, dried and pickled and pungent. The packmaster reeled from the smell, blinking away tears.

They were fingers. Dwarf fingers.

Queek thrust the grisly relics into the packmaster’s unwelcoming paws. ‘Take-show to your rats. If you succeed then soon I have all five, and you will have your weight in warpstone.’

The packmaster gasped with sudden greed, darting back to his waiting beasts, holding aloft the shrivelled digits like some kind of charm. The rats sniffed them excitedly, exploring their taste with sharp flicks of their tiny, slobbering tongues.

With a sudden gesture, the packmaster pulled the cord away, secreting it amongst the voluminous pockets of his cloak. The rats huffed and whined, raising onto hind legs and pawing at their handler’s legs in dismay. He shoved them aside with an impatient sweep of his tail, focusing their simple minds with a sharp crack of his whip. ‘Find-find,’ he hissed.

Like an explosion of tooth and fur, the rats billowed outward in an expanding wave; sniffing, tasting; some scratching against the tunnel walls while others tried to burrow under the rusted rubble. Then, as if the packmaster had issued some psychic command, the rats ceased their chaotic behaviour – raising their damp noses in unison they turned their eyes upwards, following the incline of the tunnel. As a single, living tide, the mass of rats flooded forward, sweeping past the grinning skaven.

‘We are close-close,’ he said, turning to Queek, his previous fear forgotten. ‘They know-smell their prey is near.’

Queek pushed the packmaster aside, drawing his weapons with gleeful anticipation.

‘No-no Moulder-thing. My prey.’

Without bothering to wait for his bodyguard, Queek charged after the streaming vermin, breaking into a loping run as he tore through the tunnel. The well-trained rodents seemed to take it in turns to pause, turn, and wait for him to catch up before haring off after the rest of the pack. Queek bounded after them with a wild abandon, barely noticing as he burst from the tunnel, his claws skittering across the smoothed stones as he adjusted his footing.

As he ran, a shape began to emerge from the gloom: a great archway, flickering and indistinct like a desert mirage. Queek grinned. It was no illusion, and the light he saw came from no glimstone, he could smell the burning pine cinders of a guttering torch.

Closing fast, he found the origin of the light. It was an opening, framed by a granite arch proudly embossed with runic script. It led onto another staircase that spiralled through a tight rise towards the peak of Karak Varn. Queek launched himself at the stairs, deaf to the crunch and splatter of tiny bodies beneath his footpaws as the mass of rats struggled up the steep climb.

His heart pounded violently in his chest, as though it too yearned to take up Dwarf-Gouger and gorge itself on dwarf-thing hide. His mind was lost, drowning in a foaming sea of rage.

‘Queek comes for you dwarf-thing,’ he screeched. ‘This time there will be nothing left.’

Ska clawed a string of meat from between his teeth, sniffing it briefly before tossing it back down his throat. The paltry scrap did nothing to soothe his hunger pangs.

‘Should we... follow?’ asked a nervous stormvermin whose name Ska had never bothered to learn.

The fangleader scowled, turning his disapproving eyes on the unfortunate skaven. The stormvermin cringed, scurrying out of reach. Ska’s tail flicked angrily, tasting the air like a snake. ‘Mighty Queek deserves first taste of his prize. Is respect to give him good-good head start.’

Slowly he drew his sword, his ears registering the subtle shift in pawholds on a score of halberds at his back. That was long enough. There was always the possibility that Queek might survive...

He led the warriors across the hall after the hunter rats’ scent, taking it at an easy pace. The warlord would not thank him for exhausting his elite before they had the chance to fight. As they approached the stairway, he heard a faint note of anger from the shadow of the packmaster’s hood. Ska looked down upon the smashed and broken bodies of the hunter rats scattered around his paws. He bent to scoop one up, opening his jaws to it like a funnel and crunching down on its tiny bones. His eyes gleamed in the torchlight.

‘Come-come, before we too late to help poor Queek-Warlord.’

Ignoring the sounds of more furry bodies forcing their way down ravenous throats and a murderous parting glance from the packmaster, Ska began his ascent.

After several dozen turns around the corkscrew climb, he waved the trailing skaven to a standstill. He was convinced he had heard something – a scratching behind the walls? And he could smell something. Sulphur and saltpetre. Like the black powder devices of the dwarf-things.

He watched as the packmaster placed an ear to the wall, his tongue loping from his muzzle in a terminal expression of curiosity.

Ska’s jaw dropped in dawning horror. ‘Run!’

Queek stumbled to a halt as the sound of an explosion roared through the tight rise. The steps beneath his feet trembled as though the mountain itself had come alive. He threw out his paws to steady himself on the walls, but they simply served as a conduit for the vibrations, running down his arms and rattling him against his armour like a stone trapped inside a skull.

A stream of rock dust descended from the steps above, layering his fur with a ghostly coat of granite. He sneezed, slamming a fist against his battered helmet to unclutter his senses. It worked, to an extent, the ringing in his ears becoming replaced by a din of a wholly different sort, the sound of a thing he craved more than any other.

Battle.

Skaven bodies threw themselves behind whatever cover they could. Ska struggled upright, offering thanks to the Horned Rat for leading him to that dead Ironbreaker all those years ago as he brushed a jagged spear of blasted masonry from the links in his gromril coat.

The stairwell had been transformed, as though enveloped by some kind of mystic shroud. He could see nothing, smell nothing; the only sounds to reach his ears were squeaks of pain, muffled and distant as though from another world.

As he lifted his snout for another sniff, an ethereal form burst from the haze swinging a giant pick-axe in two meaty hands, a curse fresh on his lips. Ska stumbled back, tossing into the dwarf’s path the only thing he had to hand. The miner’s weapon stove the headless torso of the packmaster, burying itself deeply into dead flesh. The dwarf swore as it tried to shake the body loose.

Ska felt his blood come alive as his fingers tightened around the grip of his sword. He swung his weapon above his head and, bellowing like a gelded ox, decapitated the dwarf with a mighty downward sweep.

Nothing fought harder than a skaven with nowhere to run.

Above the sounds of shifting rubble, the shrill screams of his bodyguard fighting and dying filtered through the ash-choked space. Queek had fought and killed enough of the dwarf-things to recognise their sounds in combat – the whoosh and smash of heavy miner’s picks, and the guttural battle cries of the Khazalid tongue. Khazukan kazakit-ha!

They had a set a trap for him? How good of Ska to keep his warriors back to draw the ambush from his illustrious warlord. It seemed that he had misjudged the depths of the fangleader’s loyalty, but then a warlord of Queek’s stature deserved nothing less.

‘Queek!’

He froze, spinning on his claws to glare through the endlessly rising steps above his head as though the force of his hatred alone might sunder them. A strangled growl rose from his belly, shaking his body with a tremor of pure hatred.

He knew that voice.

His myriad trophies chattered in his ear, rattling on their poles as his shoulders trembled with rage. The idiot dwarf knew Queek came for him and yet still he was here. The creature’s simple-minded arrogance knew no bounds! To survive one encounter with Queek the Unrivalled was to push the limits of one’s luck to a preposterous degree, but to wish for a second...?

‘Do not run-run yet, dwarf-thing,’ he called. ‘The Headtaker comes for you!’

Ignoring the fading cries of his bodyguard he leapt onto the next step, accelerating into a mad rush around and around the narrow spiral like a rabid rat chasing its own tail.

The dwarf’s voice continued to fill the stairwell. Queek had made it a point of pride never to learn a single syllable of Khazalid, but there were only so many holds you could sack, kingdoms you could burn, and dynasties you could tear down before picking up a word or two. Grudge this, great grudge that, may his beard grow for all time, blah, blah, blah. Queek howled his own fury in answer as he rounded the final turn, already imagining the dwarf-thing’s heart pumping its lifeblood into his jaws.

And suddenly there he was.

Grimnar Halfhanded.

The stout warrior stood at ease, a hand-axe held loosely in one hand. A beard as grey as steel spilled from the open face of a winged helm, the proud mess falling over a gromril breastplate to where it was tied off around his ample waist with a leather braid. Queek’s eye was drawn to the steel-rimmed shield strapped over the dwarf’s left forearm – it was painted blue and bore a simple rune resembling a white mountain. The warrior wore it over his mangled hand.

The hand Queek had ruined for him.

The dwarf did not stand alone. He was flanked by two massively built fighters, virtually naked bar tattoos and iron studs. The scent of orange dye and sweat-sodden hides rose from the slayers like musk. One stood ready with a giant warhammer while the second, brandishing a murderous pair of hatchets and with an enormous silver ring through its nose, stood slightly back.

Grimnar paused in his recitation of grudges, the whisper of some glib remark half-formed on his tongue. He waved the slayers back. With a grunt of disappointment, they shuffled away, their wild eyes fixed on the skaven warlord.

‘I knew you would come for me, vermin-king,’ said Grimnar, his thick beard shifting into a smile. ‘Never treat with the thaggoraki, they said. Hah! I knew better. If there’s one thing more certain than the treachery of elves, it’s that a skaven will always betray his own... and that the Headtaker’s ego won’t allow the memory of defeat to walk free.’

Queek spat, his knuckles whitening on his weapon’s grips. ‘Queek has never been defeated!’ He thrust his sword at the dwarf’s groin, hissing in fury as Grimnar’s axe parried it aside. ‘Queek will never be defeated!’

Grimnar laughed, his mirth rattling his mail undershirt against his breastplate, but the dwarf’s humour soon died as his cold eyes hardened into a more deadly hue.

‘Today, countless Grudges shall be unwritten and, tomorrow, my ancestors in Karak Kadrin will remember me once again as Ironbeard!’

With a roar, the dwarf barrelled forward, swinging his axe in a crosswise slash for Queek’s midriff. Taken aback by the un-dwarfish speed and fury, Queek’s sword rose too sluggishly and Grimnar’s axe smashed into his right pauldron. The strength of the blow forced him to his knees, but the weapon’s edge turned on his warpshard armour, the dark suit’s quiescent malice coming violently alive. Green-black tracers arced outwards, earthing themselves in Grimnar’s axe and stabbing down into pliant flesh. The dwarf stumbled, his teeth clenched against the pain. Black steam rose from his axe-hand with the scent of charred meat, but Grimnar held his grip with a stubborn defiance.

Queek’s chittering laugh preceded him as he dived forward, his sword coming around in a searing arc. Pre-empting the move, the dwarf swung up his shield, smashing it against the bone of Queek’s wrist. The warlord squeaked in pain, his fingers jangling, nothing more than the strength of his hatred keeping the weapon from flying from his paw.

Grimnar took advantage of his momentary distraction, stepping in with his axe to unleash a barrage of short, controlled strikes. Queek spun away, his sword darting back and forth, a ceaseless blur of motion as it deflected them. He snickered as his sword rose and fell with mesmeric speed, the perfect shadow to Grimnar’s axe. All the while, Dwarf-Gouger probed for an opening, but Grimnar had faced Queek before and knew well the potency of the maul. Accordingly, the dwarf fought carefully and his eyes, alight with the cold anger of the Grudge, were ever watchful for the characteristic flicks and feints.

Hissing in fury, Queek spun into a renewed attack, his twin weapons becoming a whirlwind of steel, hammering down blows like warpstone rain. Displaying a prowess that Queek’s otherwise brilliant memory had neglected to recall, the dwarf evaded or parried every blow that fell, but even Grimnar’s superior strength couldn’t keep himself from being swept ever back by the sheer ferocity of the attack.

Side-stepping the downward sweep of Dwarf-Gouger, Grimnar countered, slamming the haft of his axe into Queek’s snout. Queek scrambled back a pace, blinking in surprise, his nose spouting blood. The two Grimnars before him blurred back into one, and with a harsh squeak, Queek thrust his sword for the opening in the dwarf’s helm. Grimnar raised his shield to block the strike, but his feet floundered as the expected pressure never arrived. Leaving his sword quivering in the longbeard’s shield, Queek took up Dwarf-Gouger with both paws and – spinning with the awesome weapon like one of Skarsnik’s hated fanatics – smashed Grimnar’s shield to splinters.

The dwarf fell with an anguished cry, clutching his ruined hand as it fell from what remained of his shield.

‘Die-die, dwarf-thing,’ Queek hissed, pouncing on the prone fighter with Dwarf-Gouger raised high.

The dwarf rolled aside and the maul smashed the flagstone beneath him. Queek rose, shaking his head to fend off the sudden wave of dizziness, Dwarf-Gouger feeling oddly heavy in his paws.

‘Tired, are we?’ Grimnar sneered.

Queek glared daggers at the hated dwarf, but his foe wasn’t even sweating, whereas he could barely stand still without his legs trembling. For the first time since catching the scent of dwarf-meat, he felt his hatred ebb. He caught sight of the two slayers, standing off from the fight, a nervous twitch spreading to his lips as he eyed their monstrous bulks.

Grimnar followed his look and grinned. ‘There’s no escape for you, vermin-king. Even in death, I’ll have my honour.’

Queek ground his teeth and cursed silently. He cursed the Horned Rat. He cursed Skratch for leading him into such an obvious trap. He cursed Ska for getting caught in an ambush when he should be here, at his warlord’s side. They would all suffer once he was done devouring this wretched dwarf-thing!

And then he cursed the Horned Rat once more, for good measure.

A vicious howl emanated from the mouth of the stairwell. Queek’s heart sank – it appeared that the dwarfs had finished with his bodyguard and now wanted to crown their day’s work with him. Yet, with his back to the stair, he was most puzzled by the expression of horror that spread across Grimnar’s bearded face until he heard for himself the shrill voice of Ska Bloodtail exhorting his stormvermin to butcher their fill of dwarf-meat.

Wonderful, loyal Ska! Queek always knew that the fangleader would stand by him!

For a moment, it seemed Grimnar forgot he stood not three paces from the most feared warrior in skavendom. The perceived insult stoked the embers of his hatred, filling his tired limbs with fresh strength. Squealing in incoherent fury, he lashed out with Dwarf-Gouger.

With a sharp intake of breath, Grimnar threw himself back, the maul’s cruel spike passing mere inches from his face. He swayed unsteadily from his desperate leap, one foot hovering in the air as he his balance wavered.

It was a momentary lapse, but it was all Queek needed.

Allowing Dwarf-Gouger’s momentum to carry him around, Queek’s tail snaked out, looping around the ankle of the dwarf’s standing leg. His spin continued until his tail grew taut.

And then he pulled. Hard.

The dwarf cried out as his leg was yanked out from under him, his armoured body crashing to the ground with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. Queek angled his weight so his next spin carried Dwarf-Gouger through a high arc. In that instant, his eyes met those of Grimnar, but the dwarf’s face was a blank mask. There was neither fear nor anger, merely grim acceptance.

Grimnar’s arms jerked spasmodically as the maul’s great spike drove through his forehead in a triumphal spurt of bloody brain matter and beaten shards of steel and bone, rupturing the back of the dwarf’s helm and gouging the stone floor beneath.

Queek lifted his face to the ceiling and roared his victory. Let all know that he was Queek Headtaker. Let all know that he had no equal! His veins flooded with a giddy euphoria, Queek paid scant attention as the two slayers tore into the remnants of his bodyguard, ululating war cries ringing from their throats.

He didn’t care. He ignored it all. With the battle receding from his mind, he crouched down beside his kill, lowering his salivating jaws to the dwarf’s wrist.

His fangs never closed.

He froze, the barrel of a dwarf-made pistol pressed into his open mouth. A familiar scent filled his nose.

Skratch!

The traitor giggled gleefully. ‘Queek-Warlord, you make me richer than Gnawdwell.’

Before Queek could summon an answer, Skratch pulled the trigger.

The shot filled his head with thunder and he coughed on the black smoke that was thrown into his snout. Curious, but still coughing and very much alive, he glanced up into the trickle of dust from where Skratch’s shot had burrowed into the ceiling.

Snickering, he stood up, reclaiming Dwarf-Gouger from the bloody mess that had once thought itself his match.

‘Fool-fool, traitor-meat. Arms too weak for big dwarf-thing guns.’

Skratch squealed in terror, flinging the spent pistol at him before scuttling away and hurling himself into the melee. The weapon clanged harmlessly from Queek’s helmet and, curiously, he bent to pick it up; it bore the same white mountain rune on its grip as was on the dwarf-thing’s shield.

A skaven will always betray his own.

With a snarl, he hurled the pistol back to the ground, Grimnar’s words echoing in his mind. Even after death, the stubborn dwarf would try to cheat him of victory! He stalked after the fleeing vermin’s tail, the musk of his fear so strong in Queek’s nostrils that he could have tracked him across the shifting plains of the Chaos Wastes.

A stormvermin lay in his path, wrestling with the nose-ringed slayer through a mound of dead. The hunger-maddened skaven thrashed for the dwarf’s jugular, his claws drawing deep cuts into the thing’s tattooed hide as the slayer stubbornly squeezed the rat-man’s throat, massive biceps bulging in his crushing grip. With a single, murderous blow from Dwarf-Gouger, Queek dispatched them both, kicking them from his path with a snarl.

He would teach Skratch the price of betrayal.

Howling with fury, Queek burst from the battle. Blood dripped from his weapons and stained his granite-dusted fur to match his armour, re-forging him as some hellish elemental of blood and slaughter. He spotted Skratch, the cowardly traitor-meat trying to worm his way into the walls of the chamber. For the first time, Queek felt admiration for the handiwork of the dwarfs. Not with a Skyre digger-engine could Skratch escape him through those stones.

The scout dropped onto all fours. ‘Is a mistake,’ he wept. ‘I not try-try to kill. How could small, puny rat like Skratch hope to harm mighty Queek-Warlord?’

‘He could not,’ Queek answered, a wicked glint in his eye.

‘Of course not! I have much-much wealth. You take!’

Skratch fumbled through his oily rags, spilling his wealth to the ground. Queek watched as the eclectic mound of treasure grew: gold coins from the mints of Karak Kadrin; warp-tokens with the scratch marks of Clan Mors; wildly coloured mushrooms from the night goblins of the Crooked Moon; glowing amulets, precious stones, and more besides.

Queek poked his claw into the pile. The vile, mouse-spleened, man-brained, troll-nosed traitor. It wasn’t just Grimnar; Skratch had sold him out to everyone!

His back straightened with pride. Only a great warlord such as Queek Headtaker could have so many enemies.

‘Yes-yes,’ gabbled Skratch, misreading the warlord’s intent. ‘Is yours. All you ask is yours.’

‘Great Queek does not ask! Great Queek takes!’ He grabbed the snivelling traitor by his neck and, in the same movement, swept the scout’s blade from where it had been dropped on the floor. ‘So die-die all traitor-things!’

With all his strength, Queek plunged the sword into the rat-man’s shoulder, forcing the blade through and into the stone wall beyond. With a dying moan, the handle snapped from the rusted weapon, pinning the weeping skaven where he hung.

Queek spun away, screeching. ‘So die-die all traitor-things!’

Lifting his gore-slicked muzzle from the swollen belly of the slayer, Ska shook his head to rid it of the lingering traces of blood frenzy. The three surviving stormvermin stood apart squabbling over the second slayer, not daring to challenge Ska’s claim to the heftier of the two dwarfs.

‘So die-die all traitor-things!’ Queek howled again.

Ska shrunk before the advancing warlord, scurrying away from the half-eaten dwarf, abandoning it as an offering to the Headtaker.

Warlord Queek towered above the carnage like a titan, his blood-spattered trophies swaying above his armoured shoulders like gnawed trees in a winter gale. He clenched one gauntlet into a fist, red eyes aglow with fierce pride as his other paw pointed to the pinioned traitor.

Ska followed the outstretched arm. Skratch still lived, his muzzle damp with tears, still professing his innocence in whispered words that even the Horned Rat himself might strain to hear.

‘Feast-feast on traitor-meat,’ Queek growled. The hungry stormvermin needed no further urging as they charged past the warlord, deaf to Skratch’s increasingly desolate screams.

Ska ran to join them, only to be held back, a scarlet gauntlet on his shoulder. He looked around and into the unholy gaze of Queek Headtaker. His legs turned weak and he fell unceremoniously to his knees.

‘Remember well its taste, Ska,’ Queek whispered, lowering his jaw to Ska’s level, his breath ripe with the stench of rotten meat.

Queek’s vision glazed for a moment, Ska seemingly momentarily forgotten as some other thing – some other voice – intruded upon his thoughts.

‘Yes-yes,’ the warlord murmured, ‘Queek tell him.’ A predatory grin played across his bloodied fangs as his attention returned. ‘Ska should listen to dead dwarf-thing. Halfhand know. He know the fate of those who cross Queek!’

THE KING OF BLACK CRAG

Guy Haley

Gorfang Rotgut, King of Black Crag and lord of the Red Fangs Tribe, sat in murderous silence. The great throne room was almost empty, just his majesty, his overrunt Gabble, and a couple of Gorfang’s big uns lingering by the hall’s giant doors, trying not to fall asleep.

And the entertainment: Birgit Boggle’s Bouncing Gobbo Entertainanters. They pranced around and showed their behinds, bells on hats a-jingling. They sang rude songs about dwarfs, which might have been funny had they all sung the same song at the same time. The defaced carvings of hall’s walls echoed to the screeching of goblin song and the unpleasant warblings of squig pipes. The noise was enough to deafen a troll. A shaved dwarf, broken in body and spirit, danced miserably on the end of a long chain. Every time he slowed down, one of Birgit’s boys poked him with a cruel spear, and he moaned hopelessly. His body was covered in scars, his ears mutilated.

Swathed in filthy tapestries against the cold, the battered crown of the long-dead dwarf king of the Crag balanced on his pointy head, Gorfang weathered the racket of with remarkable calm. At least, he had not yet killed the squealing troupe.

As far as Gorfang was concerned, the definition of entertainment was being stretched beyond tolerance by Birgit’s boys. Being an orc, Gorfang was not overly concerned with such things as definitions. He certainly was not concerned with tolerance, probably not even entertainment, come to think of it, at least not entertainment such as Birgit offered. Rending and maiming were more to his taste. Not even the leaden dance of the dwarf raised his spirits.

What should have concerned everyone was that Gorfang was beginning to contemplate a spot of rending and maiming right there and then. Gorfang glowered at the capering goblins. One caught his red eyes. The runt’s smile froze, and he faltered. His juggling balls thumped to the floor and he wobbled on the shoulders of the runt he was riding. A third slipped on a ball and banged into the juggling goblin’s mount, dropping his squig pipe. They collapsed on one another. Quicker than seemed possible, all twelve of Birgit Boggle’s Bouncing Gobbo Entertainanters were tangled in a heap, shouting high-pitched imprecations at each other. Within seconds they were punching and biting, rolling about in the filth and bones of the floor.

They said things like: ‘That was your fault!’ and ‘Nah! Shut it’ and ‘I’s gonna bite your bleedin’ nose off Klatter!’ and consequently ‘Nyargh! Ged ob be node!’ The dwarf cringed, its ruined face confused and frightened.

Gorfang half-smiled at the fight, but it slipped off his face before it could become properly established, and he growled and sat forward on his furs. He tensed, bending the ornate golden cup in his hand out of shape. Gabble recognised the warning signs and clapped loudly. His ears twitched in annoyance when Birgit’s boys paid no attention, so he lifted the long skirt of his filthy overrunt’s garb and began kicking. He wore heavy iron boots under his robes, did Gabble, right and proper for kicking runts into shape or bruising the shins of aggressive orcs. As all runts need kicking and all orcs are aggressive, Gabble used his boots rather a lot, and was therefore skilled in their application. He huffed as he booted; too many squig snacks and mushroom delights sat in the rolled fat about his midriff. Other goblins said that being overrunt had been good to Gabble, but the truth was he ate to dull his terror, and he was terrified often. Being overrunt was nothing like as easy a job as he had thought. The skills needed were many, the tasks arduous and complicated, the life expectancy short.

Gabble was smart enough not to let Gorfang know any of this. He soon had the Birgit’s tatty, motley-clad crew in a line. With a series of hissed curses and cuffs around the head he drove the troupe out of the hall. One of Gorfang’s guards kicked at the goblin holding the dwarf’s chain as he passed. The goblin dodged out of the way and the big un missed. The goblin blew a raspberry and tittered his way from the hall.

The doors creaked closed behind them.

Gorfang passed one huge hand over his face, pulling down hard on his gnarly green skin till his cheeks nearly snagged on his tusks. He cleared his throat and stared hard at his overrunt. ‘What did you do that for, Gabble?’ he said. His expression spoke of danger, lots of it.

Gabble’s stomach rumbled. ‘Eh heh. You looked like you was about to kill ’em, your great greenness.’

Gorfang nodded his barrel-sized head. ‘Well I was. They was rubbish. I might have had a bit of fun squeezing their little heads until they went squelch. You said entertainment. That was not entertaining, runt, not one bit. You mess up like that again, I’ll be looking for a new overrunt.’

Gabble shrugged insouciantly, although ever fibre of his gobliny being was screaming at him to run. ‘Dancing runts is hard to come by. Sorry, boss. Waste of teeth to squish their heads. And, er, that dwarf was funny, wasn’t he?’ Gabble gave an experimental titter.

‘Is it a waste now?’ Gorfang scratched under his chin with a dirty talon. It made a sound like a rasp on steel. He squinted at the runt. ‘I decides round here what is a waste of teeth and what is not. You want me to squeeze your head instead then? Until?’

‘Until what boss?’

‘Until it goes “squelch”.’

Gabble laughed as if Gorfang were joking. ‘Very good, boss. You want to kick something to death? I can get a couple of real squeakers sent up for you if you wants?’ Gabble leaned toward his master, his hands steepled, his mean goblin face the very image of solicitude under his ridiculous hat.

‘I hate that hat,’ Gorfang growled. ‘I hate you.’ He threw his cup down his throne room. It clattered off the steps of the dais, spilling fungus beer in a fan on the floor. Gabble’s ears twitched as the cup flew past his head, but he did not move. To allow himself a fully fledged flinch when his boss was in a mood like this would be fatal. Gorfang snatched the crown off his head and cast it onto the filthy flagstones. Gabble quivered under his robes as Gorfang unfolded himself from the throne. Up and up he went, like he would never stop standing and just keep on getting bigger. His spine unbent and he was as tall as a man, his legs straightened and he was big as a very big orc, then he stood up properly straight, which is something an orc will rarely do – crooked legs like ramrods, hunched shoulders arched back. The tapestries slipped from his enormous muscles and he raised his fists over his head, and then he was as big as an ogre. He roared, loud enough to bother Mork himself.

This is what Gorfang Rotgut, king of Black Crag, sometimes called Troll-Eater, looked like: huge, for starters. As tall as the tallest thing under the mountains, nearly as tall, it seemed to poor little Gabble, as the mountains themselves. His shoulders were as broad as the pass below the fortress, his head as big as the moon. His jaw was long and had many fine teeth. Two impressive, iron-capped tusks jutted out when his mouth was closed and eight smaller tusks were visible when he shouted or roared, which was often. His skull was broad, his brows unusually beetled, even for an orc, his eyes glowed dull red from under them when he was angry, and blazed when he was fighting. He wore scale mail and a leering face upon his belly plate – part of his famous magical armour. His boots were large enough for Gabble to set up house in. There were not many orcs of any kind either brave or stupid enough to duel with Gorfang. Stacks of the skulls of those who had tried lined niches in the walls.

‘Grah!’ shouted Gorfang. He glowered down at the goblin from on high, his eyes like two red fires in the caves of an impossible, green mountain peak. ‘I’m bored, Gabble! Bored! I don’t like being bored!’

Gabble slunk backward, his ears flattened. His fingers strayed to the bloodstain on his robe, all that was left of the last overrunt. He allowed himself a little sigh of relief as Gorfang moved off, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Gorfang slammed a ringed fist into the wall. A chip of stone fell from it. He paced up and down the cracked slabs of the dais, kicking detritus out of the way.

There was a clatter as a group of big uns ran into the hall.

‘Boss! We heard something, everything alright?’ said their leader.

Gorfang shook his head. ‘If it weren’t I’d be dead by now, so slow you lot are.’ He strode down the steps and the length of the hall. He drew his fist back as he came, and punched the big uns’ boss square in the face. The force of the blow pushed in the nose guard of the Boss’s helmet. He went down with a noise reminiscent of a terminal accident in an armoury.

‘Typical,’ said Gorfang. He shuddered and snorted like a bull. ‘Not even big uns have got any fight in them these days.’

The outburst of violence had calmed Gorfang, and he relaxed back into the usual stooped posture of the orcs. ‘Thing is, runt, there’s no one left to fight! No stunties this way for months.’

‘You beat them good boss, they won’t come back!’ said Gabble with forced gusto. ‘When they tried to come in through the mine workings last month, all them guns and armoured beardies…’

‘Hur hur hur,” Gorfang laughed. ‘Now that was a fight, eh? And what a stunty bake after!’

Gabble was pleased by Gorfang’s change in mood, and seized his chance to avoid a beating. ‘The ratties won’t show themselves neither, will they? Last lot tried that…’ He gestured to a white, horned ratskin rug laid on the floor close to the throne with a vicious smile. He nodded encouragingly as Gorfang grinned at the memory.

‘True, true,’ said Gorfang. ‘Done them in good, didn’t I?’ He chuckled hoarsely, but then he sighed, and Gabble’s ears drooped. ‘And the humies won’t try anything. Too busy tripping over their feet to give me gold so’s they can go out east, and them ogres, they wants me to pay to fight with me…’

He strode over to the looking hole occupying the whole of the wall behind the throne. Black Crag had once had scores of these ornate traceries of stone. Many had been bashed in by the orcs or broken by earthquakes. Where the tracery survived, their crystal glazing had long gone. Gabble couldn’t think why the stunties wanted so many looking holes, as a result, although Black Crag was lighter than its underground nature would suggest, it was freezing cold for nine months of the year, the broken windows allowing mountain winds free access to its deepest recesses. Stupid, if you asked him, and he’d tell you it was so even if you didn’t.

The looking holes afforded sweeping views up and down Death Pass and out onto the Badlands beyond. On a clear day, it was possible to see a hundred miles or more, but now it was night and Gorfang was not interested in what lay outside the pass. He stared out into the dark. Tiny lights wound their ways along the floor of the pass, following the old dwarf road to the Dark Lands. Greenskins of all kinds, passing back and forth over the mountains, even some foolhardy human caravans with strong guards and deep pockets to pay Gorfang’s tolls. To the left and the right of the window, the mountain’s flanks were alive with the flames of campfires and torches, as was the ruined town outside the main gates of the Crag, the camp of greenskin freebooters and other creatures drawn in by Gorfang’s reputation.

He wasn’t looking at this either. He was looking across the pass to the black shapes of the mountains on the other side.

Death Pass was broad, twenty miles maybe where the Crag was. Diagonally opposite, a little to the east, hidden behind three snow-clad peaks, was the great city of the Eight Peaks. Domain, it was said, of a new power.

‘There’s always that runt,’ Gorfang said thoughtfully. He grasped the ruin of dwarf stonework and ducked through to the wide balcony outside. One half had crumbled away and the remaining part had been reinforced with crooked timbers and rusted iron. Heads in various states of decay were mounted on spikes along the balustrade. Some of Gorfang’s large collection of banners snapped in the wind. ‘I could go pay him a visit. That might be fun.’

Gabble popped his head out of a hole low down the fretwork. ‘Boss, boss, think about it! They say he’s got the whole city under his control, or near enough. They say he’s beat the ratties and the stunties are afraid of him! They say he’s the craftiest goblin what ever there was.’

‘What’s his name again?’

‘What, him? The runt boss? Skarsnik, boss.’

Gorfang shook his head. ‘Cave runt taking a name like that. Not right. That’s an orc name that. Perhaps I should go give him some educay… educat… edu…’

‘Education, boss?’

‘Yeah that. Don’t finish me words for me Gabble. I might see what kind of squelch your head makes yet.’

‘Sorry boss.’

‘What we know about him, Gabble? What do we know about this cave runt Skarsnik?’

Gabble shook his head sadly. ‘Not much boss. I sent me best spies in and they sent them back. In pieces.’

Gorfang laughed. ‘In pieces, eh?’

‘Yeah, marinated in fungus beer. We ate them the other day. Right tasty.’

‘And not poisoned.’

Gabble wanted to say, ‘Obviously not’, but wisely refrained. ‘Nah, I had Fugwik try it first.’

‘Don’t seem like his style,’ said Gorfang. ‘I hear he’s a bit crafty, that one. What’s he up to?’

Gabble wanted to say, ‘But I just said that, boss,’ but he didn’t say that either. In general, Gabble was better at holding his tongue and not cheeking his boss than most goblins. It was how he had become overrunt in the first place, and why he was still alive. ‘Yeah boss. He is.’

Gorfang stared. The far side of the pass was unlit. Gorfang’s boys advertised their presence for all to see with fires and banners. Skarsnik’s side was dark as a slab of fresh cut midnight. True, thought the orc king, he’s not been in charge long, and most of the old stunty delvings over there are inside the stone, but there used to be fires up there. ‘Used to be lots of them,’ he said aloud.

‘Your royal greenness?’

‘Fires. Lots of fires. None now. You reckon he’s watching us?’

‘Probably, boss.’

‘Hmmm.’

Gabble gave an inward sigh. Gorfang was more thoughtful than your usual orc, and prone to voicing his interminable internal debates aloud.

‘Thing is, I is very, very bored. I could do with a good war. You do with a good war, Gabble?’

‘Oh yes your highestness, that would be fun,’ said Gabble, who really couldn’t think of anything worse than a good war, especially if he had to fight in it.

‘But if we has ourselves a good war, all them gobboes and others will sneak through the pass without paying up, and that won’t do. I likes gold.’

‘Yes boss.’

‘On the other hand, I can’t be doing with no uppity runt taking an orc name and thinking he’s the boss on me bleedin’ doorstep! Gabble – that’s a proper goblin name that, not, not… Skarsnik!’ Gorfang spat.

‘Thanks boss. Er boss, perhaps, you know, you could team up? I hear a little rumour the stunties have come back over there, got ’emselves dug in in the old castle up top. Give them a kicking together. You could–’

Gabble’s advice was cut short by an outraged bark. ‘Me, Gorfang Rotgut, baddest orc warlord of the biggest orc fort in all the Badlands and mountains, chief of the Red Fangs and boss of the Broken Toofs and a whole lot others besides, team up with a goblin? A cave runt?’

‘Er, yes boss,’ said Gabble, who suddenly felt very vulnerable with his head poking through the lattice. He pulled it out and came through to the edge of the balcony. Not too close to the warlord – the overrunt before the one before Gabble had been pitched over the edge by a drunken Gorfang one day to prove that goblins could not, in actual fact, fly. There was a crusty patch on the back of Gabble’s robe that he thought might once have been his predecessor’s brain. Nothing frightened Gabble more. Thinking about it made him feel ravenous.

‘War and fun, but no gold. Or no war, no fun and loads of gold. Or,’ Gorfang grumbled, ‘team up to fight the stunties and have everyone say I’s gone weak and them get all uppity and me have to slap them all down. Hmmm. You know what, Gabble?’

‘No, boss?’ Gabble said.

Gorfang’s top lip lifted in a smile, exposing his impressive collection of teeth. ‘I’m going to have to see old Zarrgakk, ain’t I?’

‘Boss!’ squeaked Gabble, pointing upwards. ‘Go all the way up there, up the Twisty Stairs, past the Wyvern Crag, over the Cold Place, into the Deadly Cave, past the Smasher and into the crazy wizard’s lair?’

‘You left out the Troll Hole.’

‘But boss–’

‘Shut it, Gabble. It sounds like fun. Get me armour sorted, and get me Red Fang. Have it ready for tomorrow. All shiny and polished like. I wants to look me best.’

‘Yes, boss.’

Gorfang stroked his chin. ‘Team up with the runt. Might work. Not a bad idea, Gabble. We’ll see what Zarrgakk has to say for hisself on that score.’

‘Thanks boss.’

‘Shut up, Gabble. I hate you.’

The giant orc pushed his way past Gabble, leaving the goblin’s sensitive nose full of his offensive, frightening reek. On shaky legs, the overrunt went to obey his master.

That is, once he’d got his own business out of the way.

Gabble hurried down the secret steps as quick as he could, his bare feet slapping on the stone. He’d left his iron boots at the top under a rock, the noise they’d make clanging down here would be sure to bring something on his head. Whether it was an orc or a scumbloid, it wouldn’t be nice. Without his kicking boots he felt extremely vulnerable. It was dark and mildewed on the secret stair. Damp things brushed his face, and if he stopped and held his breath he could hear something nasty scrabbling about in the dark. He didn’t like the secret steps, not one bit. They were dark and stank funny. What with the scare the king had given him today, it was altogether too much. Now he was all alone, he permitted himself to whimper. The sound escaped his lips as his feet touched each slimy step. It comforted him. It made him feel like a proper goblin to whimper. ‘What is I doing?’ he muttered. ‘I ain’t no overrunt, I should never have come here!’

It was too late for all that now. He was the overrunt of Black Crag. Stupid, he thought, where your ambitions can get you. Like dead. He should have stayed out in the Badlands, strangling travellers for coins. Happy days!

So he whimpered and he took comfort from whimpering.

He stopped when he caught the reek of fungus pipe smoke on the air.

Gabble slowed, his ears went back. He sniffed cautiously. He pulled a face, stuck his tongue out over his sharp teeth and wiped it on his sleeve. The smell of the smoke was bitter and clung to his throat.

Only cave runts smoked that muck.

He came around a curve and found the smoker, who sat cross-legged atop a large deathshroom that had not been there last week. The goblin’s long robes covered every part of him but his nose, his pipe and the hand that held the pipe. A dirty, yellow, pointy hood adorned with the badges of the Crooked Moon tribe towered over his head, tall as a goblin in itself.

Cocky, thought Gabble, wearing a bosshat that big. His nose wrinkled. Cave runts smelled peculiar: all mould, cold and damp. And this one was no normal cave runt. He smelled of magic too.

Sure enough, as Gabble approached, a green light glowed out from nowhere in particular, casting creepy shadows and spoiling any chance Gabble had of seeing into the cave runt’s hood.

‘Hello there, Gabble,’ said the shaman amicably. ‘You got something to tell me?’

‘Where’s Guk?’

‘Now, who do you think pays Guk?’ said the shaman. ‘I’s come isstead, haven’t I?’ The shaman’s accent was strange and musical to Gabble’s ears: cave runt talk. ‘Sometimes, you got to do your own dirty work, oh yus. You know about that don’t you, Gabble? Creeping down them smelly old stairs in the middle of the night.’

Gabble stopped a few steps up from the cave runt. He put one hand to the wall and snatched it back; it was streaming with freezing water. ‘I dunno what you is talking about.’

‘Oh come on, Gabble, don’t be shy, we’s all gobboes here, innit?’ The shaman was much bigger than most of the night goblins Gabble had met. One thing Gabble liked about coming down the secret stair to see Skarsnik’s spies was that whoever was at the bottom was going to be much smaller than Gabble, but not today. This loss of advantage put him on edge.

‘You is a cave runt!’ snarled Gabble. ‘We is nothing alike at all.’

The light flared brighter. Shapes appeared in the smoke. Gabble didn’t like to look at them too closely. The figure withdrew his fungus cob and pointed the stem at Gabble. Gabble’s ears flattened involuntarily against his head and he hissed.

‘Now now, you know we night goblins don’t like to be called cave runts, and I is bigger than you,’ said the night goblin. ‘So mind your manners. I’ll let it go this time. Don’t make me turn you into something… unpleasant, cos I can and I will. Let’s be friendly, eh?’

Gabble peered down the passage past the shaman. It was really dark down there, and smelled bad. No one knew about the secret stair. If anything happened, he’d disappear for good.

Gabble nodded hesitantly. ‘Alright, but I ain’t doing nothing funny. I ain’t here to sell out Gorfang, just the usual reports.’ Saying Gorfang’s name when he was about sneaky business made Gabble quail inside. He was afraid the warlord would hear somehow, although that was ridiculous.

The night goblin burped. The smell of stale fungus beer washed over Gabble. ‘That’s better. So what are you here for then? You ought to work for Skarsnik, he’s a gobbo. Better serve your own kind. There’s a new king in these parts and he’s less likely to cook you up for tea than the old Troll-Eater up there.’

Gabble shook his head. ‘Gorfang’s my boss. That’s the way it is. It’s like I told that Guk, I just want to make sure your boss and my boss stay mates; having them biff it out will be real bad for business.’

‘Indeedy,’ said the night goblin. ‘What you got then? Let’s keep the peace. Stunties about, you know. I thought mebbe we’s could talk about them and their stupid beards, oh yus.’

‘Well,’ said Gabble. He sat down with a heavy sigh. ‘Funny we should be talking about war and stunties and that…’

There was a glint of teeth and eye in the shaman’s hood. ‘Oh, do tell.’

‘Right then youse lot,’ shouted Gorfang. Goblins bustled around him, fastening buckles and strapping on the thick metal plates of the Evil Sun armour. The sun was coming up, its light blazing through the eastern half of the great window. The throne room was full of orcs grumbling about being rousted from their pits so early. ‘I is going for a special chat with Zarrgakk the Mad. I expect I’ll be back before the day after the one that comes after tomorrow, probably by teatime.’

Puzzled orcs looked at each other and shrugged.

Gorfang punched a goblin and shouted. ‘I means soon, you zogging idiots! No fighting while I’m not here. No wandering off. No starting any wars without my says so, that kind of thing.’ Gorfang was positively cheerful today; a bad sign, as far as Gabble was concerned.

‘Aren’t you going to take one of the lads with you boss?’ said Gabble.

‘What? Nah, where’s the fun in that? Besides, Zaggrakk don’t like visitors, be stupid to wind him up taking a whole bunch of boys with me. Anyway, if I go without me big uns, anything big I finds I get to kill all on me own, don’t I?’ From the runts, Gorfang took his shield emblazoned with the Evil Sun, and swung it onto his back.

‘But boss, it’s dangerous up there, all them monsters and that. You sure you ought to go on your own?’

‘Eh?’ Gorfang looked puzzled and then laughed so hard he shook the armoury runts off his limbs. ‘I’m not going on me own, Gabble. Who’s going to carry me lunch?’

Gabble felt the colour drain from his face. He suddenly felt very, very hungry.

‘Yeah, that’s right overrunt,’ said Gorfang wickedly. He bent forward and jabbed Gabble hard in the chest. ‘You’re me chief servant. You’re coming with me! Right then.’ Gorfang snatched up Red Fang, his enormous serrated sword, from the back of two struggling gobboes. He gave it an experimental swish through the air. Two more goblins approached Gabble. They were carrying a heavy backpack that smelled of food and was hung all about with torches, pans and bundles of dry mushroom firesticks. They giggled as they helped Gabble struggle into it. He wheezed as he took its weight, his legs sagging with it. He snapped at them, ordering a couple off to fetch him his warm coat and a bottle of firebrew.

‘Remember you lot, any bother and I’ll break your heads,’ said Gorfang, waggling Red Fang at his orcs. He shoved his way through the crowd, slapping favoured lackeys on the back, punching others in the head.

Way too cheerful, thought Gabble.

‘Come on then Gabble! Get a move on!’

‘Give us… a minute…’ he panted.

‘Er, nah,’ said Gorfang. ‘Get a move on. Now.’

Gabble’s goblin lackeys returned. They pushed a bottle of firebrew and a coat into Gabble’s hands. He slipped out of his pack quickly, and put the coat on before struggling himself back into the backpack straps. Gabble uncorked the bottle and took a quick swig. The warmth of it spread through his body, pushing the weight of the pack back until he could just about bear it. He stood unsteadily. Spurred by the firebrew and the warlord’s glare, Gabble staggered forward. Orcs laughed at him as he wobbled his way out.

Gabble clung to the steps of the Twisty Stairs. ‘Stairs’ was a grand term for a bunch of ice-covered, badly formed stone steps that had been half-heartedly hacked out of the rock four hundred years ago. The faces of them had probably never been flat, and they had been worn to a deadly angle by generations of greenskin warlords who’d passed this way. The greatest shamans had always chosen the mountaintop as their home.

Gabble went on all fours, his nails and knees gripping the cold rock so hard they hurt. Gorfang was unbothered by it all, striding from canted surface to treacherous stone with the thumping tread of the happy orc. Gabble hadn’t seen him in such a good mood for a long time. The orc stopped and turned back.

‘Look at that view, Gabble! You can see nearly the whole pass from up here! Wor, it makes me want to get a bunch of boys together, march out into the Badlands and knock some heads together!’

‘Er, if it’s alright with you boss, I’ll just catch up a bit while you have a gander.’ The goblin wheezed on up the stairs. The pack was a deadweight. He deeply regretted his fondness for roasted squigling.

Gorfang stopped smiling. ‘What did I say? Was it “You do what you like?” No, it bleeding well wasn’t! What did I say?’

Gabble suppressed a whimper. He looked back, and wished he hadn’t.

The Twisty Stairs spiralled away so precipitously that Gabble had to swallow his breakfast again. They waggled down the mountain, as uncertain as a serpent’s tail. Gabble could all too easily imagine it twitching and shaking him off. At the base of the steps, a spur of rock as big as a giant rose up. It was carved into a stunty’s face, but the statue had been cleft in two long ago, the raw rock where it had been broken rubbed smooth by the ceaseless wind. A diagonal line cut it clean across from right eye to chin, the other half was rubble. They’d come out there, from the door in the stunty’s mouth. There was a broken balustrade of stone around a platform to the side of the statue; perhaps it had once been a lookout post or something. The orcs had built the steps, not the stunties.

Below the platform was what made Gabble’s stomach lurch. The mountain stopped so abruptly it made it look like they were floating on a stone in the sky. He could see nothing else of the mountainside. Only the pass floor, far, far below, so far distant its detail was blue and blurry. Thick pine forest raw with scars from Greenskin axes, scabby moorland and the broad wound of the old dwarf road. Gabble saw something tiny moving on it, like worms. His head spun with vertigo as he realised they were streams of goblins or other creatures passing to and from the Dark Lands, so far away they didn’t look like gobboes at all.

Gabble whimpered and squeezed his eyes closed. Tears leaked out from their corners. He gripped the rock hard. He could just imagine Gorfang eyeing him, wondering if height made a difference to the flight capabilities of goblins, and…

‘Gabble! Oi, Gabble!’

‘Yes, boss?’ he said, as loudly as he could.

‘You gonna spend all day gawking or are we getting a move on?’

‘Sorry boss, coming boss, just admiring the view, boss.’

‘Yeah, well, do it on your own time.’

Gabble let out a quiet squeak of relief. He didn’t open his eyes until he’d turned back around and was facing up the mountain.

It was getting dark and colder by the time they went round the final bend of the Twisty Stairs. Snow blew at them in stinging flurries, cutting down the visibility. Rather than making the drop at the side of the steps seem less threatening, the blankness of the air had made the fear worse for Gabble, and the last half an hour had been a torture of chill misery, utter terror and hunger pangs. Gabble heaved a sigh of relief as the steps turned from the cliff face and cut into the rock. They came to an end, becoming a path that sloped comparatively gently upwards, comforting walls of stone rising up either side of it. Gabble sat down hard. He made sure Gorfang wasn’t looking before he pulled out his firebrew from his belt. His hands were shaking with more than the cold as he uncorked it and gulped it down. He sighed gratefully as its warmth and strength filled his limbs and tingled their way up his nose. Not his fingers though. They were as numb as rocks. He swore at himself for not bringing some gloves.

Gorfang had gone on ahead. Gabble scrambled to his feet and set off after him. The orc warlord was shouting. At first Gabble thought he was being shouted at, but then he realised Gorfang was not addressing him at all.

He came around a shallow curve to find Gorfang stood on the path. Further along was a rough stone wall, about Gorfang’s height, reinforced with bone. A pair of goblins armed with spears stood atop it, the flames of a brazier sizzling in the snow next to them. The smoke was vile; they were burning dung. The goblins smelled almost as bad; mountain gobboes, dressed in greasy fleeces, dirty scarves wrapped about their faces.

‘What’s all this about then?’ bellowed Gorfang. ‘I’m the king of this mountain. Who told you lot to build a wall across this path?’

‘Wassa password?’ said one of the mountain goblins.

‘This is my path! I’m the zogging king!’ roared Gorfang. ‘I don’t need no zogging password!’

The mountain goblins giggled. ‘Not any more it’s not. You ain’t our king.’

‘Oh yes I am, you cheeky runt. Now let me through, or I’ll kill the lot of you.’

‘Oooooh!’ said the goblin. ‘You and whose army, mate? You and fatty back there?’

The second goblin thought this hilarious. Both laughed and pointed as, all along the lip of the path more mountain goblins appeared, spears and rocks ready to be cast, arrows nocked to bows.

‘Now, wassa password?’ said the goblin.

‘Or we’ll gut you bad,’ said the other, bending low and jabbing suggestively with his spear.

‘Yeah, gut ’em!’

‘Yeah!’ agreed his companion. They pulled back their lips to show sharp yellow teeth.

‘Right then,’ said Gorfang. He snatched a choppa from his belt, tossed it in the air and caught it by the blade. He drew his arm back and flung it. The choppa spun through the air making a thick, thwacking sound, and buried itself in the talkative goblin’s chest.

‘Urk!’ said the mountain goblin, and toppled forward off the wall.

‘That do you for a password, runt?’ growled Gorfang.

The goblin glanced at his dead companion, his ears twitched but he stood his ground. ‘That’s not it.’

‘You what?’

‘I said…’

Gorfang strode up to the wall.

‘Stop him!’ screeched the mountain goblin. Arrows and stones bounced off the warlord’s armour. He caught a spear without looking and snapped it between his fingers. He kicked the wall hard in the middle. The rocks grated on one another, then slithered away, causing Gabble to bounce about to dodge them as they rumbled down the slope.

The goblin guard landed on his back, the only reason he didn’t join the rest of his shaggy-coated mates in legging it.

‘Er, yeah, that’s about right.’ He flashed a grin at Gorfang. ‘Just a test, you unnerstand. Lots of bad sorts about, your highnessness. You come on through now.’

‘You’re zogging right I will!’ said Gorfang. He picked up the goblin by the throat and pitched him down the path.

‘Aieee!’ he screamed as he flew over Gabble’s head and disappeared into the gloom.

‘Bleeding nerve of ’em!’ said Gorfang. ‘See, goblins can’t fly. Come on, Gabble!’

Gorfang strode off, muttering to himself about the cheek of all runts. Gabble followed.

‘Go on, fatty!’ shouted a voice from the dark. Somewhere above, goblins laughed.

Gabble licked his lips. ‘Zog off!’ he shouted. His boldness went as a stone crashed down feet from him, sending stinging splinters into his face. Heavy pack or not, he ran after his king, the jeers of the mountain goblins nipping at his heels.

They slept that night in a freezing cave. Gorfang had Gabble hunt about for fuel, but all he could find was a bit of heather. It took him ages to get out of the ground, and burned for all of three minutes. The sticks they had brought were exhausted almost as quickly. Gorfang was not happy, but Gabble kept up his usual chatter, and plied his boss with meat and beer from the pack. This calmed the warlord and lightened Gabble’s load significantly.

Gabble’s condition was otherwise miserable. He was freezing cold, the cave floor was hard, and sleeping in such close proximity to the king of Black Crag did little for his peace of mind. Gorfang had therefore been snoring loudly for an hour before Gabble managed to get to sleep.

His dreams were his usual unhappy ones of goblins spinning flightless through the sky, only on this occasion it was snowing, and so bitingly cold Gabble’s dream self had frozen solid before he hit the ground. Still conscious somehow, he felt his body shatter into a million pieces, whereupon it was devoured by a horde of laughing Snotlings.

And then Gorfang kicked him awake, and ordered him to make some breakfast.

There were no wyverns at the Wyvern crag, much to Gorfang’s annoyance, and so they came to the Cold Place without incident.

If the cave were cold, the Cold Place was colder; a great, fissured river of ice that creaked and groaned as they walked over it. Piles of dirty snow and stones dotted its surface, cairns erected by the frowning mountain gods of frost and snow and freezing ways to die. The sun was mercilessly bright, and Gabble’s eyes streamed from the glare of it reflected off the glacier.

The glacier reared up to one side, and they passed a giant corpse half trapped in a cliff of blue ice. To Gabble it looked like one of the giants that sometimes fought alongside Gorfang’s boys, but the body, clad still in blackened flesh, was of finer proportions. The remains of the clothes it wore were far better tailored than those that Gorfang’s giants wore, and it carried broad blade of pitted bronze in one hand as long as a tree trunk. It frightened Gabble, but he could not stop glancing at it until it had gone out of sight. If such a titan could be felled by the mountain, what chance did a fat little goblin like him have?

Gorfang’s good spirits diminished as they crossed the Cold Place and were forced to double back again and again to avoid the deep crevasses that opened up under their feet. He grew surly, and the sky clouded over as if in sympathy.

Gorfang turned to the goblin, and Gabble thought his time had come, but the warlord was smiling. ‘See Gabble, look! Nearly there.’ The big orc pointed to a round opening, fringed with old snow, that led straight into the rock; the next stage of their journey.

Gabble shifted the pack on his back. There were suspicious brown and black stains all around it. And piles of bones; big piles of bones. ‘The Deadly Cave?’ he said.

‘Nah,’ said Gorfang, shaking his head. ‘That’s not the Deadly Cave.’

Gabble relaxed.

‘That’s the Troll Hole. Keep forgetting that, don’t you? Come on, if we’re lucky there’ll be a big troll to kill. There usually is, Zarrgakk leaves meat out for ’em, extra guards. He’s got the smarts, that wizlevard. I knew this trip was a good idea.’

His mood lifted, Gorfang drew Red Fang and began to whistle.

Gabble hung his head as they crunched across the ice toward the Troll Hole. He tarried in the daylight as Gorfang went inside. He glanced at the bright patch in the sky where the sun was. Half an hour ago he’d hated it. Now he feared he’d never see it again.

‘Oi! Gabble! Gabble! Get in here!’

‘Yes boss,’ sighed Gabble.

He hated being the overrunt.

‘There’s nothing here, boss.’

‘Shut up and dance, Gabble.’

Gabble was naked apart from his iron boots and grubby loincloth. Gorfang thought the trolls could smell him better that way. He shivered as he held the torch high over his head. ‘Here, trolly trolly troll troll!’ he sang. ‘Tasty gobboes here for your tea! Er, diddly, diddly, diddly dee!’

‘Put some spirit into it, you little runt,’ growled Gorfang. ‘That song’s not very appetising.’

Gabble sang a little louder and hopped unenthusiastically from foot to foot. He was uncomfortably reminded of Birgit’s cringing dwarf. Hot pitch dripped from the torch onto his shoulder, so he was freezing and burning at the same time. His gut wobbled as he danced.

It was humiliating.

Torchlight glittered off ice and black rock. ‘There’s nothing…’

A rumble came out of the darkness, so low they felt it more through the stone than heard it.

‘Yes!’ grunted Gorfang. ‘Louder, Gabble, louder!’

‘Here trolly, folly, roll-de, troll… Boss, I feel stupid.’

A roar boomed up one of the cave’s many passages. Rank air came with it. Gabble’s ears stood bolt upright and he shrank in on himself. Scraping, heavy footsteps came toward them, then another roar.

‘Stand your ground, you cowardly gobbo,’ said Gorfang, ‘or I’ll eat you meself.’

Something vast and noisome came out of the dark. Dark eyes and drool reflected the light, then huge, pallid hands uncurled, revealing dirty grey claws as long as Gabble’s arms.

Gabble’s teeth clattered uncontrollably as the snow troll limped into the room. It was twelve feet tall, covered in filthy, matted hair. One foot was malformed, clubbed and adorned with many extra toes. Its long nose quivered as it snuffled at the air. Its dead black eyes found Gabble quaking in front of it, its expression of trollish confusion turned to one of glee and it reached out a long, long arm toward him. Gabble felt a gush of warmth run down his legs.

‘Alright Gabble,’ said Gorfang, stepping out from his hiding place. ‘You can get out of the way now. Oi! Troll!’ he shouted. ‘That’s my gobbo. Anyone’s going to eat him, its going to be me!’

The troll snatched its hand away. Its head snapped toward Gorfang.

‘Glargle…’ it said thickly. ‘Yum.’

‘Oh, a talky one, is it?’ said Gorfang. ‘Well, well, well. Come here trolly, and we’ll show you why they call me Troll-Eater.’ Gorfang swung his shield off his back and clanged Red Fang against its rim twice. ‘Let’s fight, troll boy.’

Gabble recovered enough of his wits to dive toward cover as Gorfang ran at the troll.

Gorfang was an enormous orc, but the troll overtopped him. Gorfang wasn’t bothered. He whooped and brought Red Fang around in a whistling arc. The troll followed it, its face puzzled. The blade sank deep into its bad leg. It looked at Gorfang, then at its leg, then let out a tremendous howl of pain.

‘Rargh!’ it bellowed, and backhanded the orc warlord. Gorfang twisted, but not enough, and the troll’s huge hand caught him in the side, sending him flying backwards to crash into the cave wall. Gorfang pushed himself up and shook his head. He wiped blood from his nose with his shield hand and laughed.

‘That’s more like it,’ he said.

The troll’s leg writhed, fingers of flesh pulling themselves over the wound and dragging it shut. The wound turned to a cut, then a pale scar, then faded altogether as hair grew over it. The troll lumbered forward, showing its dung-encrusted rear to Gabble.

Gabble whimpered, and shrank back into the shadows.

The troll swiped downward with its claws. Gorfang caught its wrist on his shield boss and turned the blow aside with a grunt. He rammed Red Fang into the creature’s gut and gave it a savage twist. The troll howled and clutched its belly. Gorfang leapt backwards as the beast’s fanged maw descended. The troll chomped hard onto the stone wall of the cave. Gorfang dodged under its flailing arms, cutting at its flank. The troll bellowed and circled around. Its stomach was closing up. It spat shards of broken teeth from its mouth and glared moronically at the orc. New fangs were already forcing their way up out of its gums.

Gorfang let out a joyous shout. ‘This is what I loves about trolls,’ he said, ‘they take ages to kill!’

Gorfang grinned as he battered at the troll with his heavy blade, carving great chunks from its flesh. Blood splattered across Gabble’s face. The troll aimed its heavy fists at the warlord, but as often as not they collided only with the stone of the cave as Gorfang repeatedly evaded his slow-witted adversary. He jabbed and sliced at the troll until its wiry fur was matted with its own blood. Most of its wounds closed up, but not all, and soon the troll was panting with effort.

‘Ro-oooogle,’ it slurred.

‘No chance,’ said Gorfang. ‘It’s about time we finished this. I’ve got a shaman to see.’

Gorfang let out a warcry and brought Red Fang round and down toward the troll’s forehead. The troll reacted with unexpected swiftness. Red Fang embedded itself in the creature’s arm as it punched its hand outward, palm flat, and was wrenched from Gorfang’s grasp. The troll swatted aside the warlord’s shield. It grabbed Gorfang by the chest and pinned him to the wall and began to squeeze.

‘Yummeeeee!’ it said evilly.

‘Mork’s teeth!’ said Gorfang. He gave up struggling against the troll’s iron grasp, and started slamming his shield boss into the troll’s face.

The troll gurgled. Saliva ran in torrents from its mouth.

Suddenly, it let out a screaming yell. The acrid smell of burning hair filled the cave as fire leapt up the fur on its back. The troll dropped Gorfang and clumsily batted at the flames, hopping around and warbling in panic.

‘Ooof!’ said Gorfang as he dropped to the floor. He grabbed the hilt of Red Fang, pulled it from the troll’s arm, and gave a shrill whistle.

The troll stared down at him, confused and still on fire.

‘Dumb zogger,’ said Gorfang, and with one mighty blow decapitated it.

The headless troll staggered around for a few seconds, then fell over.

Gorfang stared at Gabble on the other side of the troll’s smouldering corpse. The fat goblin stood holding his torch, a look of surprise on his face at what he’d done.

‘Don’t think this means I hate you any less, Gabble,’ said Gorfang.

‘No, boss.’

The king wiped his sword on the troll’s fur. ‘Now get a fire going and cook up some of this troll. Be a shame to let it go to waste. Cook it properly, mind. I don’t want to do a fat Grom.’

‘Yes boss.’

In the corner, the troll’s eyes rolled. The head had not yet realised that it was dead.

Gabble slunk off to find his clothes and pack, then set about looking for things to burn. He swore and spat as he collected bones and bits of old club. He hated cooking troll steaks. They were always trying to get out of the pan.

They rested a while before they passed on through the Troll Hole. If there were any more trolls about, they had the sense not to show their faces. They crossed a chasm on a rickety rope bridge, and came to a tall cleft in the rock. Skulls were heaped on either side of it, glyphs telling visitors in no uncertain terms what kinds of violent death awaited them should they proceed.

‘Now that, little overrunt, is the Deadly Cave.’ Gorfang slapped Gabble on the back as if this were a good thing, making him stagger. Across the top of his pack the troll’s head was strapped, neck charred to stop it growing a new body. As a result, it was even heavier than when they’d set out.

‘Come on then,’ said Gorfang. ‘Old Zarrgakk’ll be expecting us.’

They went into the cleft. The top was lost in darkness, the sides thick with ice. The Deadly Cave was a thin passage for much of its length, but it broadened out in the middle enough to be worthy of the name. Seated stone idols of Gork and Mork, twice the height of Gorfang, took up much of this space, their crude orcy faces glaring down at the interlopers, weapons in piles at their feet. Torches burned in sconces on the walls.

Gorfang sighed. ‘Right then. Zargakk lives just through there.’ He pointed down the cave with Red Fang. ‘Better tell him we’re here.’ He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Oi, Zargakk! Zargaaaaaaaaakk!’

Gorfang’s voice echoed from the stones. ‘…akk …akk …akk’ and died away.

There was no response.

‘Old zogger,’ grumbled Gorfang. ‘Oi! Zargakk! It’s me, the king! I need some advice, you crazy old dropsquig licker!’

Still no reply.

‘Right then,’ Gorfang huffed. He looked at Gabble. ‘We’re going to have to go through. When I say run, you runs, alright? Don’t get yerself squished, I’m not carrying that head all the way back to the Crag by meself.’

Gabble nodded.

Gorfang unslung his shield and drew Red Fang. He glanced at the idols. ‘Nice and slowly does it,’ he said quietly.

He walked between the Gork and Mork. Gabble looked up at them fearfully. As the greenskins passed, witchlight played around the head of one of the statues.

‘Boss…’

‘Not now, Gabble.’

There came the creak and grind of stone moving on stone.

‘Boss!’ Gabble squeaked. ‘That idol of Gork,’ he said, although he wasn’t entirely sure – it could have been Mork. ‘It just moved its head!’

More scraping. A groan. The sounds of rock moving in ways that rock isn’t supposed to move in.

‘Right. Remember what I said about running?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Now’s the time.’

Gorfang set off at a lumbering jog, armour jingling. Heavy footsteps followed, picking up speed. Gabble stumbled under the pack. He dared not look backwards.

Gorfang outpaced him. The footsteps of the idol grew closer and closer, shaking the ground.

Then Gabble was soaring high into the air. For a brief instant he thought that maybe goblins could fly after all, then the pain of having his ankle pinched between stone fingers hit him. He was dangling upside down. The crudely hewn face of Mork (or perhaps it was Gork, after all) opened below him, the stone magically rearranging itself to gape wider and wider. Green light blazed in the idol’s empty eye sockets. Its gullet was blacker than the blackest blackness in all the Black Crag.

‘Noooooo!’ howled Gabble. The mouth drew closer and closer. Gabble screwed his eyes shut.

Everything stopped.

Once he’d convinced himself he had not been eaten, Gabble opened his eyes.

A toothless orc, naked but for a pair of shorts and a stunty hide cloak, was leaning on a copper staff in front of the king. The stunty’s head had been flattened out, and the orc, who could only have been Zarrgakk, wore it on his own head, the skin of the stunty’s arms tied about his neck in a strange embrace. The beard of the stunty dangled on either side of the shaman’s head. It wobbled as he spoke.

‘Should’ve sent word,’ said the shaman.

‘How am I supposed to do that, when you’ve got the zogging Smasher standing guard?’ shouted Gorfang.

Zarrgakk shrugged. ‘You’re the king. You work it out.’

Zarrgakk’s lair was deliciously warm. A fire roared on a hearth in the centre of the cave. It appeared to burn no fuel, and its flames were tinged green. The cave opened out onto a shelf overlooking a rocky valley, but miraculously there was no draft.

Gabble sank down with a sigh, letting the warmth sink into his toes and ears and frozen nose. He tried to ignore the stunty heads mounted on sticks right the way around the room. Their lips worked speechlessly, and their eyes followed him around the room and glimmered with horrible awareness. If it weren’t so uncanny it would have been funny to see stunties tortured so, but as it was Gabble found it seriously disturbing.

Zarrgakk the Mad muttered something to himself and the fire jumped higher. He pulled out a couple of hollowed-out stunty heads, filled them with fungus brew from a clay jug and passed one to Gorfang. The orcs ignored Gabble, so he stole furtive swigs from his own firebrew and listened as they talked.

‘What can I do for you, your highnessness?’ said Zargakk, grinning at some private joke.

‘Word is there’s two kings in Mad Dog Pass now, and I was wondering what to do about it, Zargakk the Mad.’

‘Who calls me mad?’ snapped Zargakk. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me,’ he said to himself. ‘Shut up you, I’m talking to the zogging king.’ He shook his head and closed his eyes until he had composed himself. ‘Two kings? You want to know if you should biff him or not, that it?’

‘He’s just a cave runt. It looks bad,’ said Gorfang.

‘Why not biff him then?’ Zargakk shrugged. ‘Seems simple to me.’

Gorfang looked uncomfortable. ‘If I does that, there’ll be no tolls. It’s fighting or gold, and I likes them both, see. And he did beat the ratties recently. Word is he’s got them all riled up, and they’s coming to get him. Now, ways I sees it, if they’s fighting him, they’s not fighting me, so it keeps ’em out of the Crag. On the other hand, if they’s fighting him, they’s not fighting me, and I likes fighting, don’t I? Tricky.’

‘Thought about teaming up?’

Gorfang shrugged. ‘Yeah, sort of. But…’

‘He’s a cave runt?’

Gorfang made a rumble deep in his chest.

Zargakk stared right at Gabble then, although he wasn’t looking at him, but to some other place. His eyes glowed like a wolf’s caught in torchlight at night. Gabble shuddered.

‘There’s a war coming, Gorfang. A big one. Bigger than any that’s been around here for a long whiles. The stunties want their houses back, yours and Skarsnik’s. They hates you, king of the Crag, they hates you for what you did to that King Kazador, and they is going to come for you. You let them get Skarsnik and stand aside, fine, they might beat him, and then you’ll have one less rival. They might not beat him straightaway, and then you’ll not have to bother with him or the stunties for a little whiles, but there’s something come over the beardies recent, like. They’ve got all het up. You seen their whirlybirds, chugging away at night all around the sky? You lost any patrols recently?’

‘I beat them good. They don’t dare come here. I got so many in me dungeons. I kill one every couple of weeks and put his head on a spike to remind them,’ said Gorfang. ‘They is scared, I tells you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Zarrgakk thoughtfully. ‘But is they really scared? What’s old beardy doing? I’ll tell you, king, he’s not wasting his strength, that’s what. If the Eight Peaks fall to the stunties, and they is coming – Gork showed me, Mork told me – if the Eight Peaks goes, then all the rest of the stunties’ll get it into their heads that maybe they’d like their other stunty houses back, and then what?’

‘If they comes for the Crag, I’ll beat them down,’ growled Gorfang.

Zarrgakk laughed. ‘Will you? Or are the stunties strong again, strong in a ways they’ve not been for a long, long time?’ The shaman leaned over the fire, then right into the flames. His head poked through them like a puppet through a curtain, but they didn’t burn him. ‘I’ll tell you something, King Gorfang Rotgut Troll-Eater. The stunties’ pride’s taken a beating. One good victory could give them that pride back. When that happens and they realise how strong they is, who’s to say where they’ll stop?’

Gorfang snarled. Who was to tell him stunties were strong and he’d get beaten? Gabble could see the thoughts working their way across his face. But his eyes, they were thinking eyes. Gorfang was very clever, for an orc.

‘And if you get the cave runt as an ally, then who’s to say where you’ll stop? Beat the stunties…’ said Zarrgakk, let the sentence hang.

Gorfang glanced up. ‘Then the Badlands.’

Zarrgakk smiled. ‘Why stop there?’

Gorfang nodded. Dreams of conquest flickered through his mind. It had been a long time since his famous attack on Karak Azul.

‘I’ll wait,’ he said at length. ‘Gabble?’

‘Yes boss?’

‘When we get back, send me Big Boss Bograt. He’s been hanging around looking for something important to do. About time he did it. We’ve been sending gobboes over for a look at this Skarsnik, let’s send us an orc instead, gobboes aren’t up to it. Have him knock some heads together and take over them outcasts in the top city over there. Have him get to know this boss runt, and keep an eye out for us.’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘We’ll see how this Skarsnik does against the rats. Keeps ’em out of the Crag for starters. If he’s a real warboss, then he’ll do them in, and the boys won’t think me a pansy for teaming up with a real warboss, gobbo or not. If he’s not a real warboss, they’ll murder him good and proper, and the stunties can spend their time fighting the ratties instead, I can fight both and I get to keeps me gold.’

‘Now you’re talking like a king,’ said Zarrgakk approvingly.

Gorfang glanced at the troll head on Gabble’s backpack. He was longing for simpler times. ‘Makes me head hurt.’

Zarrgakk took a big pull of beer. ‘No one said being a king was easy, your highnessness.’

‘No one said it was hard. Be big, smash! That’s the orcy way. They don’t tell you about all that other stuff. All this…’ He pulled a face, ‘thinking!’

‘If they did, who’d want to do it? Someone’s got to stand up and be counted by Gork and Mork. Glory that way, and power, and more gold and teeth than you can possibly think of. Being brutal ain’t enough.’ Zargakk smiled his strange smile. ‘You gotta be cunning too.’

Gorfang nodded, but said no more. He stared into the fire as he drank his brew.

The next day, Gorfang and his goblin lackey left Zarrgakk squatting by his hearth. They’d not been gone two minutes when Zarrgakk’s neck prickled. The mouldy stink of night goblin tobacco and bad fungus beer filled his nose.

Zarrgakk rubbed his forehead, but did not turn to look. ‘You back?’ he said. His face changed. ‘Course he’s back, you idiot!’

‘Calm down you two,’ said a gravelly goblin voice. ‘He going to go for it then?’

Zarrgakk nodded. ‘Maybe. Tricky thing, getting an orc to listen to a goblin. Cave runt at that. Well tricky.’

There was a low chuckle. ‘I managed, didn’t I? We do this, Gork and Mork will both be pleased. One day, Skarsnik and Gorfang will lead the biggest Badlands Waaagh! since the days of Grom the Paunch and no mistake, oh yus.’

Zarrgakk rocked back and forth and laughed. ‘That’d be a zogging fine thing! All three of us agree on that!’

He laughed hysterically, talking to himself excitedly about war and death and post-battle barbecues.

Then he frowned. He put a finger to his lips and shushed himself, his eyes wide.

Zarrgakk turned around.

There was no one there.

‘Zogging Duffskul,’ he said. And then he laughed some more.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Knights of the Empire.

It was, to no one’s great surprise, raining in Middenheim that day.

Spring rain, fresh as ice needles, spattered down on that vast old city which sat brooding atop its granite crag, gazing down across the dismal forests around it. Another long winter season was slowly thawing, and the city, and everyone in it, was cold and wet and miserable to the bone.

In a puddled yard behind the Spread Eagle tavern, Morgenstern carefully adjusted a line of plump turnips he had arranged along the flagstones, each one sat on an upturned pail. Then he walked to the end of the yard, belched delicately with a hand to his mouth and little finger cocked, then spat on his meaty palms and hefted up the great warhammer leaning against the slimy bricks.

He began to spin it, crossing his grip deftly, looping the mighty head back and forth in a figure of eight around his shoulders. Whoooff! Whoooff! Whoooff! it hissed as it circled. But Morgenstern was standing a little too close to the back wall and, after another circuit, the hammerhead struck against the stonework. Several bricks shattered and dropped out, and the warhammer bounced to the ground.

Morgenstern swore colourfully, and wobbled slightly as he stooped to retrieve his weapon, rainwater dripping from his vast shaggy beard. Then he wobbled some more as he stooped to retrieve his tankard. He straightened up and supped from it. Then he tried unsuccessfully to replace the bits of brick, fussing as if somehow no one would notice the dent if he smoothed it over. Several more bricks fell out.

Giving up, Morgenstern turned back to his row of buckets and started to spin the hammer again, this time checking he had swinging room.

‘Is this going to take much longer?’ Aric asked from the tavern doorway. He stood leaning against the doorjamb: a tall, powerfully built young man not yet twenty-two, with a mane of black hair and bright blue eyes. He carried the gold-edged plate armour and the snowy pelt of the White Wolf Templars well.

‘Hush!’ said the older knight, concentrating on his swing and not looking round. Morgenstern adjusted the fall of his own wolf-pelt so it did not constrict the movement of his armoured limbs. ‘Behold, my young friend, how a master of the warhammer displays his skill. See! Before me, the heads of my foes!’

‘The turnips on the buckets?’

‘Quite so. That is indeed what they represent.’

‘These foes are what? Lying down? Buried up to the neck?’

Morgenstern smiled patiently. ‘They are large and able-bodied warriors, Aric. I, however, am on a horse.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘For the purposes of this demonstration, imagine I am on a horse.’

Still spinning the hammer, Morgenstern began to prance back and forth on the spot like a hobbyhorse mummer in a mystery play. He made clip-clop noises with his tongue and occasionally admonished ‘Steady there! Whoa, girl!’

Aric closed his eyes.

‘Yah-hah!’ Morgenstern barked suddenly and lurched forward, head back, as his imaginary horse bolted.

His great, thundering, armoured mass, with the hammer swooping about him in a vast circle, drummed down the yard, spraying up water and dislodging flagstones as he charged the buckets. His initial swing smashed the turnip on the first bucket, then, without breaking stride, he galloped in and out of the remaining buckets, decapitating each turnip in turn, slaloming between the rows, swooping and crossing the hammer with astonishing precision.

Aric by then had reopened his eyes. For all the pantomime idiocy, for all the drunkenness, for all the fact that Morgenstern was at the wrong end of his fifties and two hundred pounds too heavy, Aric was still impressed by the big man’s weapon skill.

With a bellowing flourish, Morgenstern elegantly took out the last of his foes, bucket and all, crushing both with a blow that lofted them over the gable end. Then his boot slipped on the sheened cobbles, he stumbled at full pelt and went headfirst into the stables. Through a door he hadn’t opened first.

Aric winced. He turned and went back inside. It was going to be a long day.

Inside the Spread Eagle, he rejoined Anspach, Gruber and von Glick at the small table in the corner.

‘Did he do it?’ Gruber asked.

Aric nodded. ‘All of them.’

Anspach chuckled his dirty, melodic chuckle. He was a handsome man in his late thirties, with devilish eyes and a smile that could charm chastity belts into spontaneous release. ‘That’s six shillings from each of you, I fancy.’

‘By the Wolf, Anspach!’ von Glick grunted. ‘Is there nothing you won’t wager on?’

Anspach accepted his winnings. ‘Actually, no. In fact, that reminds me, I have a bag of gold riding on a certain goathead going the distance at the Bernabau this afternoon.’

Von Glick shook his head in dismay. A veteran Wolf of the old school, von Glick was a slender, angular man of sixty years. His grizzled hair was long and straggly, and his chin was shaven to pepper stubble. He was stiff and disapproving about all things. Aric wondered if there was anything von Glick couldn’t complain about. He somehow doubted the prim old man had ever had the passion to be a noble warrior.

‘So where’s Morgenstern now?’ Gruber asked, toying with his tankard.

‘Having a lie down,’ answered Aric. ‘You know, I think… he drinks too much.’

The other three snorted.

‘Brother Templar,’ Anspach said, ‘you’re too recent an addition to this noble order to have witnessed it, but our Morgenstern is famous for the prodigious scale of his imbibing! Some of his greatest victories on the field of combat… like those orc-scum he took at the Battle of Kern’s Gate… such feats have been fired by Ulric, and fuelled by ale!’

‘Maybe,’ Aric said doubtfully, ‘but I think it’s getting to him. His reflexes. His co-ordination…’

‘He killed the turnips, didn’t he?’ von Glick asked.

‘And the stable door,’ Aric said darkly.

They fell silent.

‘Still, our Morgenstern…’ Anspach began, ‘I’ll wager he could–’

‘Oh, shut up!’ growled von Glick.

Aric sat back and gazed around the smoky tavern. He could see Ganz, their new, young company commander, sitting in a booth side, with the hot-blooded Vandam talking eagerly at him.

‘What’s that about?’ he asked Gruber. The white-haired Gruber was deep in thought and snapped up with a start as Aric addressed him.

He looked almost scared just then, Aric thought. That’s not the first time I’ve caught him lost in thoughts he doesn’t like.

Gruber was the most respected of the Company’s men, a veteran like Morgenstern and von Glick, who had served with old Jurgen from the beginning. His hair was thin, his eyes pale, his papery skin almost translucent with age, but Aric knew there was a power, a terrible force inside that warrior.

Except now… now, for the first time since he joined the Company eighteen months before, Aric sensed that Gruber’s power was waning. Was it age? Was it… Jurgen? Was it something else?

Aric gestured again over at Vandam and Ganz. ‘What’s Vandam bending our commander’s ear about?’

‘I hear Vandam wants to transfer,’ von Glick said quietly. ‘He’s a glory-hound. He wants promotion. Word is, he sees our company as a dead end. He wants to move to another mob. Red Company, maybe.’

The four of them grunted their disapproval and all took a drink.

‘Don’t think Ganz will let him. Ganz has barely had time to make his mark in command since the… since that business. He won’t want to lose a man before he’s had a chance to prove something.’ Gruber looked thoughtful. ‘If they ever let us prove anything again.’

‘It’s not long till Mitterfruhl,’ Anspach said. ‘Then the campaign season really starts. We’ll get something… a good raid into the Drak. I bet you.’

Aric was silent. Something had to happen soon, or this particular brave company of White Wolves was going to lose its heart entirely.

The Great Temple of Ulric was almost empty. The air was still and cold and smelled of candle smoke.

Ganz walked in, and reverently placed his gloves and warhammer in the reliquary in the entrance hall.

The acoustics in the vast, vaulted chamber were superb, and Ganz could hear the precise intonations of four knights who were whispering prayers on the other side of the high altar, kneeling, heads down. He could also hear the faint squeak of lint as a Temple adept polished the brass finials of the lectern. The great statue of Ulric himself rose up like a thundercloud to block the light from the high windows.

Ganz bowed his head and made his observance, then crossed the chamber and knelt before the Sacred Flame.

He was kneeling there when he felt the hand on his shoulder. Ganz looked up into the face of Ar-Ulric, the High Priest himself, his craggy, bearded features catching the flame light.

‘We should talk, Ganz. I’m glad you came by. Walk with me to the Regimental Chapel.’

Ganz got up and fell into step beside the venerable warrior. He saw the four knights were leaving, casting curious glances in his direction.

‘I came to seek… guidance, High One,’ Ganz began. ‘This season will be my first as a commander of men, and already, I–’

‘Do you lack confidence, Ganz?’

‘No, lord. But I lack experience. And the men are… listless.’

They walked down a short flight of steps and reached an iron cage door where a Templar of Grey Company stood watch. He saluted the High Priest respectfully, and undid the padlock so that the cage door could swing open. Ganz followed Ar-Ulric through and they entered the smaller, warmer interior of the temple’s regimental chapel, decorated with standards, banners, trophies and the honour roll of memorial slabs.

Both men bowed briefly to the great wolfskin pelt on the wall, and to the snarling, silver-inlaid treasure on a raised plinth beneath it. The Jaws of the Wolf, the Temple’s most precious icon.

The High Priest bent before it for a moment, murmured a blessing to Ulric and to Artur, then rose and turned to Ganz. His eyes twinkled like the first frost of a hard Jahrdrung. ‘Your company is more than listless, Ganz. There was a time when White Company was the finest and best this Temple could field, performing deeds that the riders of other Wolf Companies like Red or Grey could only dream of. But now it is weak – it has lost its way. This whole winter they have idled here in the city, wasting their health and money and time. Several have become noted drunkards. Especially Morgenstern.’

‘It is easy to exaggerate–’

‘He relieved himself in the font in the Temple of Verena,’ the High Priest said with great and sad certainty. ‘During High Mass. And then he suggested to the priests that the Goddess herself was a “piece of all right” who could really do with a good… what was it again?’

Ganz sighed. ‘Man in her life, High Priest.’

The High Priest nodded. It seemed to Ganz he was almost smiling but that could not be so and his tone confirmed it. ‘Morgenstern is a disgrace. And Anspach. You know about his gambling? He owes a large amount to the stadium brokers and to various less-official wager-takers. And I have had audiences with that hotblood Vandam twice now to hear him petition me for a transfer to Red Company. Or Gold. Or anywhere.’

Ganz hung his head.

‘There are others with problems too… each to his own. I don’t pretend your job is easy, Ganz, taking command of a demoralised mob like this. And I know everything stems from that one incident last summer in the Drakwald. That beastpack got the better of you. They were strong. Sometimes, Ulric save us, the evil ones do win. It was a tragedy White Company lost so many good men. And to lose Jurgen. It can’t be easy for you to take his place.’

‘What can I do, High Priest? I don’t command the respect Jurgen did. How can I rally White Company?’

The High Priest crossed to the far wall and lifted down the standard of Vess. It was old and tattered and stained with ancient, noble blood. It was one of the oldest and most revered battle standards of the Wolf Companies, carried at some of the Templars’ greatest victories.

‘You will take your company out, into the forests, beneath this old and venerable standard, and you will destroy the beastpack that broke your honour.’

Ganz took the shaft of the standard with amazement. He looked up and met the steely gaze of his old commander, Jurgen, the newest of the graven memorials on the wall. For a long while, Ganz stared into that marble face, remembering the long white beard, the hawkish look, the famous studded eye-patch. Ganz knew the High Priest was right. It was the only way.

It was a cold dawn, and raining once again. The fourteen brothers of White Company assembled in the stable block behind the Temple, adjusting the harnesses of their warsteeds, grumbling in low voices, their breath steaming the air.

‘A raiding party? Before Mitterfruhl?’ Morgenstern complained, swigging from a flask in his saddlebags as he pretended to check them.

‘A drink? Before breakfast?’ von Glick sneered quietly.

Morgenstern laughed at this, booming and hard, but Aric knew it was sham good-humour. He could see the pale strain in Morgenstern’s pallid face, see the way his great hands shook.

Aric looked about. Vandam was resplendent, his face flushed with determination. His white wolf pelt hung just so across the shoulders of his gold-chased plate armour. Gruber looked far away, distant and preoccupied as he fumbled with the harness straps of his stamping steed. Einholt, the old, bald warrior with the facial scar and the milky eye, looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept well. Aric felt sure some old dream chased the veteran each and every night without fail.

Anspach laughed and joked with his fellows. Von Glick scowled at him. Ganz looked grim and quiet. The others began to mount up, exchanging jokes and slurs – haggard Krieber, stocky Schiffer, the blond giant Bruckner, red-maned Kaspen, the whipcord Schell, and Dorff, whistling another of his tuneless refrains.

‘Aric!’ Ganz called, and Aric crossed the yard. As the youngest of the company, it was his privilege to carry the standard. He was amazed when Ganz placed the precious Standard of Vess into his mailed hand. Everyone in the yard fell silent.

‘By the decree of the High Priest himself, we ride under the banner of Vess, and we ride for revenge,’ Ganz said simply and swung into the saddle.

He turned his steed about and the company fell into step behind him, riding out of the yard into the streets and the rain beyond.

They came down the western viaduct out of the city, in the shadow of the great Fauschlag Rock. High above them, the craggy walls and towers of Middenheim pushed their way up into the cold, friendless skies, as they had done for two thousand years.

They left the smoke and stench and clamour of the city behind, moving past trains of laden handcarts bound for the Altmarkt markets: strings of cattle from Salzenmund, the piled wagons of textile merchants from Marienburg. All pulled themselves to the sides of the sixty-foot wide viaduct to let the Wolf Company pass. When a party of Ulric’s best rode out, only a fool got in their way.

White Company left the viaduct and joined the Altdorf road, cantering into the damp woodlands, and followed the forest track for six hours before stopping to water their horses and eat at a village by the way. In the afternoon, the sun came up to glint off their grey and gold plate mail. The heat drew mist out of the wet trees, and they rode as if through smoke. In each village they passed, the locals came out to see a brave and feared band of Templars, singing a low battle hymn as they rode along.

They slept the night in a village longhall above a waterfall, and they rode at dawn into the darker paths, the long tracks of black mud that ran down into the oily darkness of the Drakwald Forest, a region that lay across the land like the fallen cloak of some black-hearted god.

It was noon, but a pale, weak noon, and chill rain pattered down through the naked branches of black elms and twisted maple. The ground beneath them was coated in a stinking, matted slime of dead leaves that had fallen the autumn before and now lay rotting back into the dark soil. Spring would be a long time coming here.

There seemed no sign of life except for the fourteen riders. Occasionally a woodpecker would hammer in the distance, or some loon or other bird would whoop. Aric saw cobwebs in low branches hung with rainwater like diamond chokers.

‘Smoke!’ von Glick called suddenly, and they reined up, sniffing the air.

‘He’s right!’ Vandam said eagerly, sliding the long haft of his warhammer out of his saddle loop.

Ganz held up a hand. ‘Steady, Vandam! If we move, we move as a company or not at all. Aric, raise the standard.’

Aric edged alongside the leader and pulled the old banner upright.

With a nod, Ganz led off and the column moved two abreast through the trees in the direction of the smoke, hooves splashing through the leaf slush and rot.

The clearing was wide and open – trees had been cleared for it and now the wood was being burnt on a stone slab set before a crude statue. Five shambling, hairy forms were worshipping at the fire.

‘For Ulric! Wolves! Ride!’ Ganz yelled and they broke into a gallop, tearing down the slope into the clearing itself, exploding water from the marshy ground with their heavy hooves.

The beastmen at the shrine looked round in horror, baying and breaking for cover.

At the back of the file, Morgenstern turned from the charge and looked to Gruber, who had reached a dead stop.

‘What’s the matter?’ he bellowed. ‘We’re missing the fun!’

‘I think my steed has thrown a shoe,’ growled Gruber. ‘Go on, you old fool! Ride on!’

Morgenstern turned again after the main charge and took a deep pull from his saddle bottle. Then with a huge cry he charged down the slope after the main party.

The low branch took him clean out of his saddle.

The rest thundered out across the clearing, Aric bellowing as he held the banner high. Three of the beastmen broke and fled. Two snatched up pikes and turned to face the charge, shrieking in a deep, inhuman way.

Vandam was by now leading the charge. His swinging mallet-head destroyed the skull of one of the defenders, smacking the goat-headed aberration back into the ground.

Ganz, just behind him, overshot the other and tried to wheel around. His horse lost its footing on the wet leaves and slid over, spilling him off.

The beast turned to capitalise on this but in a moment Aric and Krieber had run it down between their horses, smashing its bones.

Anspach galloped past the shrine after one of the escapees, whirling his hammer. Von Glick was close on his hind.

‘Ten shillings says I make this kill!’ laughed Anspach.

Von Glick cursed and tried to pull level, but Anspach hurled his hammer and it went spinning off after the fleeing creature. It decapitated a sapling and missed the beast by ten yards. Anspach swore and reined in his charge.

‘Gods help you that you ever win a wager!’ von Glick cried as he carried on and caught up with the beast at the tree line. He swung two blows which both missed, but the creature doubled back and was driven into the aim of Dorff, who crushed its brain.

The other two fled into the trees. Vandam, without breaking stride, galloped after them.

‘Back! Vandam! Back here!’ bellowed Ganz as he got up and righted his shaken horse.

Vandam paid no attention. They could hear his whoops echoing into the forest.

‘Schell! Von Glick! Go and round that idiot up!’ Ganz ordered and the two riders obeyed. Everyone else had galloped to a standstill around the shrine. Ganz looked back and saw that Gruber had dismounted at the edge of the clearing and was helping to prop Morgenstern against a tree. Morgenstern’s horse was trotting around, with its reins trailing.

Ganz shook his head and spat an oath.

He strode up to the shrine and gazed for a moment at the crude statue. Then he swung his hammer and smashed it into splinters.

Ganz turned back and looked at his men. ‘Now they know we’re here. Now they will come looking for us and our job will be easier!’

‘Vandam? Where are you, you idiot?’ bawled von Glick as he rode slowly through the dark glades beyond the clearing. Dark meres stood stagnant between the filthy trees, and brackish water trickled down the slate outcrops. Through the trees and the mist, von Glick could make out Schell, riding a parallel course, yelling out ‘Vandam! Come around the back or we’ll leave you out here!’

Von Glick heard movement in the trees nearby and raised his hammer ready. Vandam rode out of the trees.

‘Trust you to come looking for me, von Glick!’ he snorted. ‘You mother-hen the whole company! You’re so stiff you wouldn’t know valour if it came knocking!’

Von Glick shook his head wearily. He knew too well his own reputation with the younger members of White Company: stiff, inflexible, an old bore who nagged and complained. Jurgen had once told him he was the backbone of the company, but von Glick had a suspicion the commander had been trying to make light of von Glick’s attitudes. Von Glick hated himself for it, but he couldn’t help himself. There was no discipline these days. The young Templars were reckless bravos, and Vandam the very worst of them.

‘Ganz ordered me to find you,’ von Glick said sharply, trying to hold his anger. ‘What sense is it to ride off alone like that? There’s no glory in it!’

‘Isn’t there now?’ Vandam smirked. ‘I ran one to ground, broke his back. The other slipped away though.’

That was the worst of it… Vandam’s arrogance was matched only by his skill as a warrior. Damn his eyes! thought von Glick.

‘We’ll ride back. Now!’ he instructed Vandam, who shrugged mildly and turned his horse around. ‘Schell!’ von Glick called. ‘I found him! Schell!’

Von Glick could still make out the other rider, but the mist and trees were deadening his voice.

‘Go on,’ von Glick told Vandam. ‘I’ll fetch him.’

He spurred up along the edge of a mere in the direction of Schell who saw him at last and began to ride over. Von Glick turned his horse back.

The beastman came out of the bushes with a feral scream. Driven, hounded by Vandam, it had hidden, but von Glick had passed close by its hiding place and panic had galvanised it into fierce action. The iron barb of the spear took the old Wolf through the right hip. He bellowed in pain and the horse reared. The beastman clung on, shaking his weapon, which was wedged fast in the bone and meat and armour. Von Glick screamed, hooked like a fish, pushed back in the saddle by the spear so far he couldn’t reach his warhammer.

Schell bellowed in dismay and galloped in.

Vandam, hearing the commotion, turned and looked in horror.

‘Ulric’s bloody fists!’ he gasped. ‘Oh lord, no!’

The spear broke. Freed, von Glick tumbled from the saddle and landed in the shallows of the mere. The beastman lunged forward.

Schell’s horse leapt the mere at the narrowest point and the warrior swung the hammer spike down on the creature, killing it instantly.

He leaped off his horse and ran to von Glick, who lay on his side in the pool, his face pale with pain. It looked like his red and gold armour was leaking into the black water.

Vandam raced up.

Schell looked up at him with fierce, angry eyes that blazed from his lean face. ‘He’s alive,’ he hissed.

Ganz strode across the shrine clearing to where Morgenstern was picking himself up.

‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘Away from the others. I’m sure you don’t want them hearing what I’m going to say to you.’

Morgenstern, who had twenty years more service to the Temple than Ganz, looked sour, but he did not disobey. Talking low, they moved away across the clearing.

Aric joined Gruber, who sat to one side on a fallen log.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘My horse was wrong-footed. Thrown a shoe, I thought.’

‘Looks fine to me,’ said Aric.

Gruber looked up at the young man, his lean, lined face hard but not angry. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Aric shrugged. With his long dark hair and trimmed black goatee, he reminded Gruber of the young Jurgen himself. ‘Anything you want it to mean,’ he said.

Gruber steepled his hands and thought for a moment. Aric had something, a quality. One day he would be a leader, a lot more effortlessly than poor Ganz, who tried so hard and was liked so little. Aric had natural command. He would be a great warrior for the Temple in time.

‘I…’ Gruber began. ‘I seem to lack the fire I once had. At Jurgen’s side, courage was easy…’

Aric sat next to him. ‘You’re the most respected man in the troop, Gruber. Everyone acknowledges that, even bluff old warhorses like Morgenstern and von Glick. You were Jurgen’s right-hand man. You know, after Jurgen’s death, I’ll never understand why you didn’t take the command when it was offered you. Why did you hand it on to Ganz?’

‘Ganz is a good man… solid, unimaginative, but a good man. He’d paid his dues. I’m just a veteran. I’d be a poor commander.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Aric said with a shake of his head.

Gruber sighed. ‘What if I said it was because Jurgen was dead? How could I take the place of that man, my sworn commander, my friend? The man I failed?’

‘Failed?’ Aric repeated in surprise.

‘That dreadful day last summer, when the beastpack fell on us out of nowhere. We stood together as a company or we fell, each man watching the other’s back.’

‘It was hell, all right.’

‘I was right by Jurgen, fighting at his right hand. I saw the bull-man swing in with the axe. I could have blocked it, taken the blow myself, but I froze.’

‘You weren’t to blame!’

‘I was! I hesitated and Jurgen died. If it hadn’t been for me, he’d be here today.’

‘No,’ Aric said firmly. ‘It was bad luck and Ulric called him to his hall.’

Gruber looked into the younger man’s face. ‘My nerve’s gone, Aric. I can’t tell the others… I certainly can’t tell Ganz… but as we rode in to the charge, I felt my courage melt. What if I freeze again? What if it’s Ganz who pays the price this time? You? I’m a coward and no use to this company.’

‘You are no such thing,’ Aric said. He tried to compose an argument to snap the veteran out of his grim mindset, but they were interrupted by shouting. Morgenstern strode back into the clearing, bellowing, with a stern-faced Ganz in his wake. The big ox reached his horse, pulled three bottles from his saddle bags and hurled them at a nearby tree, smashing them one by one.

‘Satisfied?’ he bawled at Ganz.

‘Not yet,’ Ganz replied stoically.

‘Ganz! Ganz!’ the shout echoed round the clearing. Schell led von Glick’s horse back to them, the old warrior slumped in the saddle with Vandam riding alongside to support him.

‘Oh great God of the Wolf!’ Gruber cried leaping up.

‘Von Glick!’ shouted Morgenstern, pushing past the dismayed Ganz.

They lowered the wounded man down and the company stood around as Kaspen, who had studied with a barber-surgeon and an apothecary, treated the ugly wound.

‘He needs a proper surgeon,’ said the thick-set, flame-haired man, wiping blood from his hands. ‘Wound’s deep and filthy and he’s lost blood.’

Ganz looked up at the sky. Evening was slipping down on them. ‘We’ll return to Middenheim tomorrow. First light. The fastest will ride ahead to fetch a surgeon and a cart. We–’

‘We will not,’ von Glick said, his voice thin and bitter. ‘We will not go back on my account. This mission, this undertaking, is a holy cause to refound the strength of this company and avenge our fallen leader. We will not abandon that task! I will not let you abandon this!’

‘But–’

Von Glick pulled himself up to a sitting position, wincing. ‘Promise me, Ganz! Promise me we’ll go on!’

Ganz faltered. He did not know what to say. He wheeled on Vandam, who stood to one side. ‘You bloody fool! This is your fault! If you hadn’t been so impetuous, you’d never have led von Glick into that!’

‘I–’ Vandam began.

‘Shut up! The company stands together or it falls! You betrayed the very foundation of this brotherhood!’

‘He’s not to blame,’ von Glick said. His eyes were glittering with strength born out of pain. ‘Oh, he shouldn’t have broken from the pack and ridden off alone, but I did this to myself. I should have been wary, I should have been looking. I dropped my guard, like any old fool, and paid the price.’

Silence. Ganz looked from one man to another. Most looked uncomfortable, awkward, disconcerted. The company spirit had never seemed so deflated, not even after Jurgen’s death. At least then there was anger. Now, there was just disillusion, a loss of faith and comradeship.

‘We’ll make camp here,’ Ganz said finally. ‘With luck, the beasts will come for us tonight – and we can finish this.’

Dawn came, cold and pale. The last shift of watchmen – Schell, Aric and Bruckner – roused the others. Morgenstern poked the fire into life and Kaspen redressed von Glick’s wound. The old warrior was as pale and cold as the morning, shivering with pain. ‘Don’t tell Ganz how bad I am!’ he hissed to Kaspen. ‘On your life, swear it!’

Anspach was going to water the horses when he found Krieber. At some time in the night, a black-fletched arrow had skewered his neck where he lay sleeping. The Templar was dead.

They stood around in silent mourning, more sombre than ever before. Ganz boiled with rage. He strode away from the group.

At the tree line, Gruber joined him. ‘It is bad luck, Ganz. Bad luck on us, bad luck on poor Krieber, Ulric take his soul. We didn’t deserve it, and he deserved a better end than this.’

Ganz wheeled round. ‘What do I have to do, Gruber? For Ulric’s sake! How can I lead this company to glory if we don’t get a chance? I destroyed their shrine to bring them to us, to make them angry and drive them into a frontal attack. A pitched battle where we would shine! But no! They come back all right, and with typical beast cunning, they harry us and kill us as we sleep!’

‘So we change our tactics,’ Gruber said.

Ganz shrugged. ‘I don’t know how! I don’t know what to suggest! I keep thinking about Jurgen, and how he kept command. I keep trying to think the way he did, to remember all the tricks and inspiration. And you know? I can’t remember a thing! All those great victories we shared, and I can’t recall the plan behind a single one of them!’

‘Calm down and think, Ganz,’ Gruber said, sighing. ‘What about Kern’s Gate? Remember? The winning stroke there was to swing around behind the orcs.’

‘Yes, I remember it. Sound tactics.’

‘Exactly!’ Gruber said. ‘But that was Morgenstern’s idea, wasn’t it? Not Jurgen’s!’

‘You’re right,’ Ganz said, his face brightening. ‘And it was the same with the siege at Aldobard… there it was von Glick who suggested a two-pronged attack.’

‘Yes,’ Gruber agreed. ‘Jurgen was a good leader all right. He knew a good idea when he heard it. He knew how to listen to his men. The company is strength, Ganz. We stand together or we fall. And if one of us has a good plan, a good leader knows not to be too proud to adopt it.’

‘So?’ Ganz said, trying to sound lighter than he felt. ‘Any ideas?’

Late winter wind sighed through the elms. The company coughed and shuffled.

‘I bet I know–’ Anspach began.

There was a general groan.

‘Let’s hear him out,’ Ganz said, hoping he was doing the right thing.

‘Well, myself, I like a wager,’ Anspach said as if this were news, getting up to address them. ‘So do many folk – the chance to win something, something important and valuable, something more than you normally get a chance at. These beastmen are no different. They want revenge for the smashed shrine, but not so much they’re going to risk their stinking hides in a frontal assault on armoured cavalry. Who would give them good odds on that? They’d rather live. But if we tempted them with something more – something they might feel was worth risking their necks for – we could lure them out. That’s my plan, a tempting wager for them. And I’ll bet it works.’

There was some nodding, a few sneers. Dorff whistled aimlessly. Morgenstern turned a belch into an approving chuckle.

Ganz smiled. For the first time there seemed to be a slight sense of union, of all their minds working as one.

‘But what do we offer them?’ Kaspen asked.

Anspach shrugged. ‘I’m working on that. We carry gold and silver, between us probably quite a lot. Maybe a pot of coins…’

Vandam laughed. ‘You think they’d care? The beasts don’t value gold much.’

‘Well, what else have we got?’ asked Schell, scratching his sinewy cheek thoughtfully.

‘We have this,’ Aric said and lifted the standard of Vess.

‘You’re mad!’ cried Einholt. A quiet, reserved warrior, he seldom said anything. This outburst startled them all. Aric wavered, looking into Einholt’s scarred face, wishing he could read anything except scorn in the man’s one good eye.

‘Think! Think of the prestige, the glory they would achieve amidst their foul kind to capture this. Think of the victory it would represent,’ Aric said at last.

‘Think of the disgrace if we lose the bloody thing!’ scoffed Vandam.

‘We won’t,’ Aric said. ‘That’s the point. It’s precious enough to lure them out en masse…’

‘And precious enough to make damn sure we fight to the last to keep it,’ von Glick finished for him. ‘A good plan.’

Ganz nodded.

‘So,’ Dorff asked, ‘do we just… leave it out in the open for them?’

‘Too obvious,’ Ganz said.

‘And I won’t leave it,’ Aric said flatly. ‘It’s my duty. I cannot abandon the standard.’

Ganz paced the circle of men. ‘So Aric stays with the standard. The rest of us lie in cover ready to strike.’

‘Aric can’t stand alone,’ Gruber began.

‘It’d still look too obvious,’ Anspach added. ‘Someone has to stay with him.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Vandam said. There was ferocity in his eyes. Ganz knew the young warrior was eager to make amends for his earlier rashness.

He was about to nod when von Glick spoke up. ‘A brave offer, Vandam. But you’re too good in the charge to waste. Let me stay, Ganz. We’ll stay with Krieber’s corpse and it’ll look like the standard bearer has been left to watch the dead and the dying.’

‘That would be more convincing,’ Anspach said.

‘I’ll stay too,’ Gruber said. ‘They’d expect at least two men. And my horse has thrown a shoe.’

Ganz looked around at them all. ‘Agreed! Let’s do it! For the glory of Ulric and the memory of Jurgen!’

The ten riders mounted up and thundered off across the clearing to disappear into the dark woods. Ganz paused before he rode. ‘May the wolf run beside you,’ he said to Aric, Gruber and von Glick.

Aric and Gruber made von Glick comfortable by the shrine. They covered Krieber with a saddle cloth, tied the horses off to the west, and lit a fire. Then Aric planted the standard in the clay soil.

‘You needn’t have stayed too,’ he told Gruber.

‘Yes, I did,’ Gruber said simply. ‘I need to do this very much.’

Evening sloped down on them, speckling the heavy sky with dark twists of cloud. Rain lanced down, slantwise, and a wind picked up, lifting the ragged hem of the old standard and swishing through the miserable forest.

The four remained by the fire – the two living warriors, the dead man and the man halfway between.

Von Glick’s eyes were clouded as dark as the heavens. ‘Ulric,’ he murmured, gazing up at the cold sky. ‘Let them come.’

Gruber reached out and pulled at Aric’s arm. This message needed no words. Stiff from the cold, the two men lifted their warhammers and rose, standing by the guttering ashes of the fire, looking across the clearing.

‘By the sacred flame, Aric my brother,’ said Gruber, ‘now we’ll see a fight.’

The beastmen attacked.

There were perhaps four score of them, more than Aric remembered from the pitched battle the previous season when the beastmen had caught them by surprise and Jurgen fell. The misshapen monsters were clad in reeking pelts, their animalistic heads crowned by all manner of horns and tusks and antlers, their skins scaled and haired and furred, bald and muscular, diseased and slack. They bellowed as they charged in from the eastern tree-line, their foul collective breath gusting before them, eyes wild like insane cattle, wet, drooling mouths agape to expose ulcerated gums, black teeth and hooked fangs. The ground shook.

Aric and Gruber leapt onto their horses and galloped around to stand between the charge and the lonely standard.

‘For Ulric!’ yelled Aric, his hammer beginning its swing.

‘By the hammers of the Wolf!’ raged Gruber, holding his horse steady.

‘For the Temple! For the Temple!’ came a third voice. The riders glanced back. Hammer in hand, von Glick stood beside the standard, supporting his weight against the haft.

‘For the Temple!’ he screamed at them again.

Their battle roars as feral as the beasts, Aric and Gruber leapt their horses into the front of the pack as it came to them, giving themselves momentum and meeting the charge head on. The hammers swung and flew. Blood and spittle sprayed from cracked skulls. The hooves of the warhorses tore into flaccid flesh. Spears and blades thrust at them. The war cry of the two wolves echoed above all. Aric rejoiced. He had almost forgotten the ecstasy of combat, of the raging melee. Gruber laughed out loud. He had just remembered.

Von Glick stood his ground by the standard, despite the blood that leaked down his armour from the broken wound, and slew the first beast that charged him. The second fell, its skull cloven. The third rocked back, its ribs cracked. Now there were three, four around him, five. He was as deep in the fight as Aric and Gruber.

Aric struck left and right, blood painting across his grey armour, foam flecking back from the frenzied mouth of his steed. He saw Gruber laughing, striking…

Falling.

A lance thrust took down his mount. Gruber fell amongst the howling beasts, his hammer swinging in furious denial of the end.

They heard the thunder.

Above, in the sky as the storm broke.

Below, on the ground as the Company of Wolves charged in behind the beastpack.

Inside, in their hearts, as Ulric bayed the name of Jurgen.

The Knights of the White Company charged in line abreast, with Ganz at the centre, flanked by Vandam and Anspach.

‘God’s teeth, but I need a drink!’ shouted Morgenstern as they swept in.

‘No, you don’t! You need this kind of courage instead!’ rallied Ganz.

They hit the beastpack as it turned in confusion to meet them, ploughing over ranks of the fierce creatures, toppling and trampling, warhammers raining down as furiously as the downpour from above. Lightning flashed on the grotesque mayhem. Blood and rainwater sprayed into the air. The baying creatures turned from their original targets and swept into the fight with the cavalry force. Aric rode forward across the corpse-strewn ground and helped Gruber to his feet. The older warrior was speckled with blood, but alive.

‘See to von Glick and watch the standard. Give me your horse,’ Gruber said to Aric. Aric dismounted and returned to the banner of Vess as Gruber galloped back into the brutal fray.

Von Glick lay by the standard, which was still stuck upright in the earth. The bodies of almost a dozen beastmen lay around him.

‘L-let me see…’ von Glick breathed. Aric knelt beside him, and raised his head. ‘So, Anspach’s bold plan worked…’ breathed the veteran warrior. ‘He’s pleased, I’ll wager.’

Aric started to laugh but stopped. The old man was dead.

In the thick of the combat, Morgenstern wielded his warhammer and drove his horse through the press of bodies, swinging left and right, destroying the enemy as easily as if they had been a row of turnips on upturned pails. He laughed his raucous laugh and set about himself. Nearby, Anspach saw his display and joined the laughter, smashing down with his own hammer.

At the heart of the fight, Vandam, the fiercest of all, glory singing in his veins, destroyed beast after beast, three times the number of any of them. He was still slaughtering the monsters as their spears cut him down.

In the tumult, Ganz saw the great bull-man, the pack leader, the beast that had slain Jurgen. He charged forward, but his hammer was dragged down by the weight of creatures on him. The bull-man swung to strike at him.

The haft of Gruber’s hammer blocked the axe. Gruber, yelling the war cry, rode in on his commander’s right hand, guarding his flank. Ganz pulled his weapon clear and, before the massive bull-head could swing again, drove its snout back into its skull in an explosion of blood.

‘In the name of Ulric!’ Ganz screamed, rejoicing. The heavens thundered their applause.

Smoke rose from the storm-swept field, smoke and the steam from the blood. The Wolf Templars dismounted one by one amidst the carnage and kneeled in the mud to offer thanks to the raging sky. Fierce rain washed the blood off their armour as prayer cleansed their spirits. Of the beastman horde, not one had survived.

Ganz walked quietly to view the fallen.

Von Glick, at Aric’s feet. Ganz was sure Aric was guarding the old man’s body more than he was guarding the fluttering banner.

Vandam, skewered four times with crude lances, twisted at the top of a mound of dead.

‘He has found his glory,’ Morgenstern said. ‘He’s transferred to that better company. Ulric’s own.’

‘May the wolves guard his brave soul,’ said Ganz.

Across the bloody, torn-up field, Dorff began to whistle a tune that resembled a battle hymn. Anspach caught it up and began to sing, making a shape and melody out of Dorff’s notes. Einholt joined him, soft and low. It was a mourning song, of victory and loss, one of old Jurgen’s favourites. Within three bars of it, all the other voices had joined the song.

They came back into Middenheim three days later. It was raining then too.

Mitterfruhl was almost on them all, but the High Priest came away from the preparations at the Temple, drawn by the excited whispers. He and his entourage were waiting for them in the Temple Square as White Company rode in, eleven riders, proud behind the fluttering banner of Vess, three noble dead lashed to their steeds.

Ranked in honour behind the motionless priest, Red, Grey, Gold and Silver Companies, the fighting packs who, with White, made up the Templar force, raised their voices in a throaty cheer.

Ganz, tall on his horse, gazed down at the High Priest.

‘White Company has returned to the Temple, lord,’ he said, ‘and the heart has returned to White Company.’

A Black Library Publication

Skarsnik first published in 2013.
Headtaker first published in 2013.
Thorgrim first published in 2014.
The Karag Durak Grudge first published in 2013.
The King of Black Crag first published in 2013.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.

Warlords of Karak Eight Peaks © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Warlords of Karak Eight Peaks, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78030-793-0

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