Still, the lads had done a good job spreading bits of moss and loose gravel across the floor of the hall. Hopefully it would be enough to conceal the shoddy carpentry.
As if to echo Ratgob’s thought, there came a deep crack from under the claws of the advancing magmadroths. The slats covering the squig pits might be stout enough to support the weight of fleeing gits, but a mess of charging war-beasts was much different.
Ratgob cackled as the floor gave way, tipping Thunas-Grimnir and the other foolhardy magmadroth riders into the seething mass below. The squigs fell upon the fallen magmadroths like creatures possessed, gnawing and chomping at the flailing beasts. Caught in their charge, the front ranks of the fyreslayer host tumbled into the pit, there to disappear amidst the churning scrum of squigs.
‘Beware the pits!’ Thunas-Grimnir’s voice rose above the din. He hacked at the mass of maddened squigs, unable to stem the toothy tide that swept over his magmadroth, dragging the great beast down. At last, roaring like a burning troggoth, he was forced to leap from the magmadroth’s back or be enveloped by the gnashing horde.
‘Hearthguard to the fore!’ The runefather leapt to catch the edge of the pit, where he was quickly dragged up by the other stunties. With delight, Ratgob noted the other magmadroth riders had not been so lucky.
A knot of pike-bearing fyreslayers adorned with tall helmets and necklaces of animal claws pushed to the front. They took aim down into the pits, but before they could fire more than a few blasts the squigs boiled up from below, the howling, gnashing horde hopping up the scaffolds Ratgob’s lads had thrown down earlier.
‘By the Oathflame,’ Thunas-Grimnir bellowed as the pike-wielding stunties disappeared beneath the wave of teeth and claws. ‘Pull back, form ranks!’
Runes flashed and axes bit into rubbery flesh as the fyreslayers fought to stem the tide. Here and there the flare of a magmapike cast crimson shadows across the gloom, but the fury of the stunties’ charge had spread them out across the hall, their endurance sapped by the poisoned ale.
Ratgob saw a fur-cloaked fyreslayer with an enormous double-bladed axe rear from the carnage, a squig clamped onto his drooping crest. With a roar, he carved a circle of ruin, runes flashing gold amidst the sprays of crimson. Squigs piled about his feet, still biting and snapping through reflex alone. One sunk its fangs into the fyreslayer’s bare calf, and the stunty stumbled, live squigs sweeping over him.
Ratgob turned his attention to the gates, where a cadre of stunties with flaming poleaxes and fur cloaks had formed around the runefather, runes glinting evilly as they slowly beat back the tide.
He turned to Spookfinger. ‘Now, now!’
The shaman raised his hands and, with a whoop fit to wake the dead, conjured a bolt of jagged, greenish lightning that blasted one of the fyreslayers from its nasty feet, beard burning, its flesh crackling with mad energy. The signal was taken up by other gits, and soon the cavern echoed with mad whoops.
From the tunnels came a beastly clatter, the clicking of claws on stone like a rain of arrows. Hundreds of segmapedes burst into the hall in a tide of roiling chitin. Spookfinger’s loons had terrified the normally placid beasts into a wild panic.
The stampede shook the floor of the cavern, sending tremors through the rock. Ratgob thought he might have heard an answering rumble from deeper down in the caverns, but shrugged off the concern, too excited to watch the carnage to worry about a little quiver in the mountain.
The giant insects crashed into the stunty line, knocking even more into the pits. Ratgob had expected the stunties to flee before the stampede, but the fools stood firm even as the segmapedes crushed them by the score. Axes rose and fell, sprays of greenish ichor rising like flies from an old kill. One by one the segmapedes stumbled, their legs hacked away. Runes sparked as Runefather Thunas-Grimnir leapt upon the back of one of the giant insects and beheaded it with a single sweep of his huge axe.
‘Show-off.’ Ratgob’s delight soured. Fresh stunty warriors poured through the broken gate, adding their numbers to the growing ring of steel. The momentum of their furious charge broken, the squigs shattered into smaller mobs, the duardin surrounding and hacking them apart one by one.
‘Should I unchain the loons?’ Spookfinger asked.
‘Stunties can have the hall, we gots more surprises.’ Ratgob shouldered past the shaman, risking a glance back. The lads had done good. The cavern was littered with duardin bodies, with even more wedged down in the squig pits.
Snarling, Ratgob scuttled for the tunnels, pursued by the deep rumble of stunty cheers. Let them celebrate, they would be weeping soon enough.
Those that survived, at least.
‘Die, thagi filth!’ The stunty’s axe swept by close enough to ruffle Ratgob’s robes.
The loonboss brought his moonslicer around to shriek across the sparking runes embedded in the fyreslayer’s flesh. Although the duardin bled freely from a dozen such slashes, the wounds seemed to barely slow the maddened brute.
Another swipe from one of the stunty’s axes almost took Ratgob’s head. Eyes stinging with panicked sweat, he glanced around the tunnel. All around, terrified gits fled before the roaring fury of the fyreslayers. Bare-chested, their beards plaited with images of ferocious beasts, the stunties had come on in a wild, animalistic charge, runes flaring like a fresh blaze. It had been all Ratgob could do to convince the lads not to bolt at the mere sight of the duardin.
‘Show yourself, creature!’ Thunas-Grimnir’s voice boomed from around the tunnel bend. Desperately, Ratgob shoved an unfortunate git into the path of the roaring stunty. The poor lad managed a single mournful screech before the fyreslayer’s axe smashed him to the cavern floor.
Sprinting past a rust-scabbed vent, Ratgob breathed in the damp, heavy air, feeling strength return as the spores filled his lungs. The stunties were deadly,
