Nick Kyme - The Great Betrayal

‘So arrogant…’

‘My king?’ asked Thurbad, as the rest of the throng joined them in serried ranks to begin the march. ‘You mean the elgi?’

‘No, Thurbad,’ Gotrek replied. ‘I mean us.’

His raised his axe and the dwarfs marched on the east gate.

Through a fog of dust and spilling rock, Nadri clambered out of the breach and up to the surface.

Ironbreakers were already fighting as well as several cohorts of clan warriors led by King Valarik. Seeing the imminent destruction of the wall and gatehouse, the lord of Karak Hirn had urged his throng towards it. The elves were quick to counter, and by the time most of the miners were shoulder to shoulder with their kith and kin, the fighting around the breach was ferocious.

Nadri was still blinking the grit out of his eyes, adjusting to the light, when a shadow roared overhead. Though he didn’t see it, the very presence of the thing above filled his gut with ice and made his limbs leaden. The reek of sulphur wafted over him, burning his nostrils, and he heard the crackle of what sounded like a furnace being stoked only much louder, much deeper.

Someone shouted; he couldn’t make out the exact word, but it sounded like a warning. Then a heavy weight smacked into him, bore him down until day became night and Nadri tasted hot armour on his tongue a moment later. Something was burning. There were screams, smoke, the stench of scorched meat, but it wasn’t boar or elk. It was dwarf. The roar came again, resounded across the breach.

A gruff voice told him, ‘Stay down, until the monster has passed.’

Blood flecked Nadri’s cheek. It was warm and wet. After a few seconds hunkered in the dark, he realised it belonged to one of the ironbreakers shielding him. He went to move, trying to find the injured warrior, but the gruff voice spoke again.

‘Hradi’s dead. Stay down.’

Shouting this time, heard through a press of armoured bodies that were slowly crushing him. Nadri couldn’t breathe. Terrified, he’d been holding his breath and only now realised that he couldn’t draw more into his lungs. He also couldn’t speak to let his saviours know they were killing him.

More shouting and the screech of something old and primordial. It was above him, squatting on the rubble. Nadri could almost see it. He caught a glimpse of scale, a tooth, a baleful yellow eye.

Shadows lingered at the edge of his sight, growing deeper as he crept closer to oblivion. Singing, he heard. It sounded distant and at odds with the battlefield. He tasted beer, rich and dark, and smelled the succulent aroma of roasting pork.

‘Heg…’ It was all he could think of to say, though he wasn’t sure whether the name had actually passed his lips or he had merely imagined speaking. Either way, it was the last word of a wraith, Gazul beckoning him towards the gate, darkness closing in all around…

It was like an anvil being lifted off his back. When he came to, the pressure was gone and Nadri heaved a long, painful breath into his gut. Hours must have passed; the sky above, what little he could see through the smoke, was darkening. He saw the suggestion of walls, a ruined tower, and remembered he had fallen on the battlefield inside the elven city. It took almost a minute before he got up, and even then he only sat. He’d lost his pickaxe. A host of dead ironbreakers surrounded him, cooked in their armour. Their champion’s face was etched with a grimace. They had protected him, in life and death. Deeper into the west quarter of the city, not that far from the breach, a battle was ongoing. Nadri heard shouts to the east, too, and the clash of arms at the northern gate that still held.

His dead saviours weren’t alone. Nadri saw a dwarf he recognised, despite the horrendous burns. Exotic-looking armour was half-melted to his face. A veneer of soot clad his body like chainmail. Tendrils of smoke spiralled from his mouth. The rest of the brotherhood had advanced deeper into the breach, the miners too. Nadri and the others had been left for dead, except he was a sole survivor.

‘Heg…’ This time he knew the word was spoken aloud, and felt tears fill his eyes at his miraculous escape. Even surrounded by death, for the first time Nadri believed he might see his brother again. He was rising, pushing himself up on pain-weary limbs, when something nearby moved.

It coughed, or at least it sounded like a cough but such a thing wasn’t possible. Then he saw the soot, flaking away like a second skin, the flesh beneath pristine and untouched by flame. Nadri gaped and would’ve grabbed for his weapon but the pickaxe was gone, lost in the chaos, and he was too paralysed to reach down for an ironbreaker’s axe. Most were fused to their gauntlets anyway.

‘Valaya,’ he breathed, staggering backwards from the thing that also lived. ‘What are you?’

White teeth arched into a pitiless smile and a voice that was several but really no voice at all said, ‘Nothing you would understand, little dwarf.’

Dusk was painting the horizon, creeping towards the battlefield with soot black fingers. They had held the breach for several hours, drawing the elves away for an attack on the east gate that had yet to breach much farther than its outer defences. Nightfall was approaching rapidly and with it the end of the sixth day and the third assault.

For all that they pushed and pressured, the dwarfs could not sack the city — though it burned badly, there were fires everywhere and even the dragon rider had been put to flight when the heavy ballistae from the Varn had pierced its wings and sent it fleeing.

Snorri raged. For every elf he cut down another took its place, two more ready after that and then three, four. It was endless. And these foes were not like greenskins or the beasts of the forest, or the terrors of the deep places or the high mountains; they were disciplined, determined and utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Only one thing gave the young prince heart as he heard his father’s war horn sounding the retreat — the elves were wearying. Only a dwarf could match another dwarf in a war of attrition. Dwarfs were stubborn to the point of self destruction. Entire clans had wiped themselves out in proving that point to a rival or out of grudgement. Elves were strong, there could be no denying that now — only a fool would, and Snorri was no fool — but they were not dwarfs, and in the end that would prove their undoing.

So as the throngs departed, leaving the ragged breach in their wake and the elves to contemplate how they might secure it before the dawn’s next attack, Snorri was smiling.

And what was more, the dragon still lived.

For now, the battle was over and Morgrim toured the field of the dead with shovel and pickaxe. As before, the elves granted the dwarfs clemency to tend to their injured and dead, and the dwarfs reciprocated. But even with this tenuous agreement, Morgrim eyed the silent ranks lining the walls of Tor Alessi with something that approached trepidation.

His attention returned to the battlefield as an elf apothecary passed close by to him. Morgrim gave her little heed, but noticed there was no malice in her eyes, just a desire to ease suffering. Considering the dwarfs’ own healers, he wondered just how different they really were to one another when blades and pride weren’t getting in the way.

Shrouded in cloaks of deep purple, a silver rune emblazoned on the back, were the priestesses of Valaya. They roved in pairs, administering healing where they could and mercy where they could not. Morgrim thought it was the least he could do to help bury those beyond help. Though the ground was hard from the winter frost, despite the heat from the dwarf forges softening the earth, it was purifying work. There was rejuvenation in good, honest, toil, even though it was grave digging. To wield an axe for something other than bloodletting came surprisingly welcome to him.