Hacking away a desperate lunge with the short haft of his hand axe, he buried his rune axe in the attacking elf’s torso. Silver scale and blood shed from the warrior like he was a gutted fish. Snorri whirled, cleaving the forearm of another, splitting apart his shield. A stomp forwards with a heavy boot and he cut the groin of a third elf, bifurcating the spearman all the way to the sternum. A shoulder barge put down a fourth before the prince took a shield smash to the face, which he shrugged off with typical dwarf resilience.
‘Harder than that, you kruti-eaters,’ he spat, hewing down another.
For all the carnage he wreaked, him and his hearthguard who were just as merciless, the elves maintained their ordered retreat.
‘Stand and fight, thagging cowards!’ Snorri raged at the disappearing spearmen, who were edging closer and closer to the wall and the gate.
Within a hundred feet of the defences, the archers took aim again and loosed. With the measured retreat of the spearmen, gaps had begun to appear in the fighting. It was no longer a tightly packed melee with heaving, pushing ranks; rather a patch of open killing ground had materialised between the two forces that was thronged with the dead and dying.
A shaft struck Snorri in his shoulder guard but he ignored it, ignored that the tip had pierced metal and meat. One of the hearthguard took an arrow in the neck, an impossible shot between helm and gorget, and died gurgling his own blood.
Seconds after the first arrow, another shaft hit the prince in the thigh. He cursed once, snapped it and drove on.
‘Into them,’ he bellowed. ‘By Grimnir’s wrath, we’ll overrun the gates!’
A cheer rang out from the nearby clans, but the hearthguard were stoic in silence, determinedly sticking to their task.
The elven shield wall returned, spears levelled like spikes. At some unseen signal they stopped falling back and solidified again, hoping to bulwark the dwarfs against a cliff face of high shields.
Charging, impelled by their prince, the dwarfs hit it hard. Several warriors, not expecting the sudden shift, were impaled and the brutal melee renewed. As elf and dwarf clashed at close quarters, jabbing, hacking, cleaving, the arrow storm continued unabated. Hearthguard warriors lifted their shields to protect the prince, whilst the pushing back ranks were pinioned. Like an anvil the dwarf line had come together, some three thousand warriors of the clans and brotherhoods, fighting shoulder to shoulder against a thin, glittering line of elves. Attrition was simply the reality of war for dwarfs, they weathered it well, used it to break the most determined and numerous of foes. Here against elven skill and discipline that strategy was being sorely tested.
Caught between the will of the spears and the volleys of the archers, the dwarfs were taking a beating.
Snorri tried to change that single-handed. He ploughed into the enemy ranks, splitting them down the middle. A champion, some elven lordling with a shimmering spear and armour of gilded metal, went to impede him. The prince cut him down like he was a common soldier.
Elves recoiled from the vengeful prince. Dwarfs followed him, King Brynnoth leading a determined charge of his own, Valarik too. Like a swelling tide, the sons of Grungni puffed up their chests and became the hammer.
Such discipline the elves possessed, not like the ragged tribes of the greenskins or the feral beasts of the dark wood, but even their resolve was buckling in the face of the dwarf onslaught. And just as it felt as if they were about to break for the last time and surrender the field, white mantlets decorated to look like overlapping swan feathers tilted to reveal the deadly reason why the elves had drawn their enemy on.
Bolt throwers, rank upon rank of them, but not like the dwarf machineries for these racked a quartet of bolts at a time, unleashed a devastating salvo.
‘Mercy of Valaya…’ Snorri breathed, as the spear-thick arrows descended.
Horns were blowing. Nadri heard them above the whipping report of the elven bolt throwers raining down death upon them. Despite the terrible barrage, the Copperfists continued to advance. As they closed on the wall, barely twenty feet away and almost beyond the minimal range of the elven reapers, Nadri saw the gate open into Tor Alessi. There were more warriors within, hard-faced veterans wearing long skirts of mail, adorned with jewelled breastplates and carrying immense two-handed swords.
The spearmen retreated into the relatively narrow aperture, walking backwards unerringly, spears outstretched as they condensed their long shield wall into a tight square of blades angled in every direction.
Without the bolt throwers to skewer them relentlessly, Nadri felt a tremor of relief through the ranks, but it was short lived. Murder holes opened in the walls above, manned by pairs of archers who had fallen back into the city before the spearmen. The storm returned, thickening the air with hundreds of feathered shafts.
Nadri’s shield sprouted more than a dozen arrows in a few seconds.
The hand-to-hand fighting had all but ceased, the spearmen retreating faster than the dwarfs could keep pace and the archers making them pay for every step.
A flash of light and the stink of burned flesh heralded a magical attack. Turning their efforts from destroying the deadly cargo of the siege engines, the elven mages had their eyes fixed on the advancing dwarfs.
From nearby came chanting, a doleful, sombre refrain that fizzled out a second lightning arc before it could strike. Incandescent serpents of amethyst, spears of luminescent jade, the enchanted manifestation of dragon-kind spitting crimson flame, came at the dwarfs in a sorcerous hail that the runesmiths were hard pressed to repel.
Nadri grit his teeth, barely fighting, merely marching against the attack. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck spike, tasted copper in his mouth and smelled the reek of brimstone in his scorched nostrils. The dwarfs resisted, calling upon their natural resilience to harmful magic, channelled it
