Gotrek despaired at the thought of it. They had gone from peace… to this.
‘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
