It did not mean the dwarfs were without magic of their own, however.
‘There is one more weapon in my arsenal,’ said Hrekki Ironhandson whom Gotrek had joined on the hillside not far from the war machines.
‘Summon it and its keeper,’ said the High King. His eyes never left the battlefield, for somewhere in the chaos was his only son.
Snorri fought at the east gate under a mantle of iron. The stout shaft of a battering ram swung between his cohort of warriors, smacking fat splinters from the wood.
‘We’ll make a dirty mess of their door,’ he promised, shouting to be heard, ‘and then we’ll make a mess of them. Khazuk!’
‘Khazuk!’ chimed the warriors together, heaving the ram back for another blow. The end was fashioned into the simulacrum of an ancestor head, Grimnir, his beard wrought into spikes. It gored deep, tearing at the gate.
Boiling oil, alchemical fire, swathes of arrows all fell upon Snorri’s warriors but they didn’t even flinch. These were hearthguard, king’s men, and they would not shirk from the deadliest of battles. Either the gate would fall or they would.
A prickling sensation in Snorri’s beard made him look up. The view was narrow, and the prince caught snatches through the slits between the tiles in the roof.
‘Spellcrafter,’ he growled.
Above, an elven mage was conjuring. She wore a pale robe, emblazoned with stars, and a moon-shaped circlet sat upon her brow. But it was the crackling staff to which Snorri’s eye was drawn, and the tempest waxing around it.
‘Spellcrafter!’ he roared this time, inciting a dour chorus as the dwarfs invoked earth, stone and metal to retard the harmful magicks.
A hundred dwarfs clamouring at the east gate chanted in unison. It began slowly but grew into an almost palpable wall of defiance. A hundred became two hundred, then three hundred until all the warriors assaulting the east gate were united in purpose.
But elven sorcery came from the Old Ones, it was High magic and could not so easily be undone. Eldritch winds were already clawing at the heathguard, tugging at their limbs, buffeting them into their fellow dwarfs. The chant faltered. Rain lashed down, sharp as knives, impelled by the gale. The slashing deluge turned the ground beneath the dwarfs’ feet to sludge. Several warriors were fouled in it, some even to their necks. Easy prey for the archers whose arrows flew with storm force, piercing armour like it was parchment.
Despite his best efforts, Snorri could feel his body sinking into the mire. Hail stung his face, opening a cut on his cheek. He reached out, letting his hand axe hang by the thong on his wrist, hauling a hearthguard to his feet.
‘Up, brother,’ he growled. ‘Stone and steel.’
‘Stone and steel, my prince,’ the breathless hearthguard replied.
Snorri turned, and roared to the others, ‘Heads down and heave!’
One warrior was blown free of the ram’s protective mantle. The elven archers seized upon him, pinioning the dwarf with a dozen arrows before he could so much as raise his shield. Another, sunk almost to the waist, was left behind and fought defiantly until a shaft took him in the neck and he spat his last.
‘Thagging bast–’ Snorri began, but the tempest had them now.
Rivets fixing the mantle to the ram frame were loosening. A flap of metal swung up briefly before clamping down again. In those few seconds, four hearthguard warriors lay dead with arrows jutting from their bodies.
Wrenching his boots free of the mud, Snorri stepped up to take the place of one. Clutching the iron handle of the ram, he pulled it back.
The hefty wooden log lurched, swinging wildly in the gale. Its violent backswing almost pushed the prince out from the mantle. The wind was rising, building into a fist of elemental force that would punch the roof of the battering ram clean off.
Drowned in mud or condemned to death by elven arrows, neither was a favourable ending worthy of song. The gate was weakening, Snorri could hear it even above the storm in the protestations of the wood. A few more solid hits and it would buckle. But only if there was time before the battering ram was torn apart.
Behind them to the south, distant thunder was booming.
Snorri groaned under his breath, ‘What now?’ before he realised it had come from the dwarf ranks.
Lightning sheared through the storm dark a moment later. It struck the elven battlements, a second arcing bolt spearing the elven mage. Her death scream echoed loudly before her scorched body crumpled and the tempest lifted.
Snorri tried not to be relieved. There was no time for it. A minor reprieve, nothing more. The real fight lurked behind the gate, and he planned to smash it wide open.
‘Khazuk!’
Twenty hearthguard heaved and the ram swung back.
Grimnir snarled and the angry god swung forwards, baring his teeth.
But the east gate held.
Fundrinn Stormhand called the lightning back. He was standing on an Anvil of Doom, feet braced apart. Great runes of power crackled and flashed across the anvil’s pellucid silver surface, and the storm lived briefly in the runesmith’s eyes, in the rivulets of magic coursing through his jagged red beard before earthing harmlessly.
But as soon as the storm lightning had faded, Fundrinn was calling fresh elemental power into being. It began as a mote of flame in his outstretched palm but as he spoke the rune rites the fire grew until the runesmith could no longer hold it and was forced to set the conflagration loose. What began as a flaming wind swelled into a tidal wave of burning vengeance, a score of spectral dwarf faces snarling and biting at its fiery crest.
Fundrinn cried out, ‘Zharrum!’, coaxing and shaping the raging inferno with sweeping arcs of his runestaff. ‘Zharrum un uzkul
