Nugdrinn wanted to know what it was.
Lantern light washed over the water, casting it in ruddy orange. It was as if a fire was burning beneath the waves, just about to emerge and swathe the Black Gulf in conflagration.
Beasts lurked in the deeps, way down in the cold ocean darkness. Tales abounded of tentacled kraken and vicious megaladon, the dread black leviathan and the unearthly Triton. Such stories were spun by drunken sailors looking to enhance their reputation or angling for a pint of grog at the listener’s expense, but Nugdrinn knew first hand there was some truth to them.
Out in the deep ocean he had seen… shadows lurking just beneath the waves, too vast and grotesque to be some mundane predator. Issuing from miles below, he had heard the call of beasts, abyssal deep and full of malice.
One moonless night, many years ago in the waters of the far north, he had witnessed the hide of some gargantuan beast slowly disappearing beneath the waves. Returning from Kraka Drak and the snow-clad fastness of the Norse dwarfs, the holds of their three grubarks brimming with the gold of the northern huscarl-king, Nugdrinn had glimpsed the monster from a distance. By the time he had the telescope to his eye, the beast had sunk beneath the water but several sundered ships were left in its wake.
It was a chill night. Frost clung to the deck, resolved as a ghostly pale mist in the captain’s breath. Ice cracked as the dwarfs’ ships ploughed through it. Nugdrinn’s teeth chattered and not just from the abominable cold. It took several minutes to find the courage to sail close enough to the scene of devastation to look for survivors. It took less time for them to discover there were no crewmen amongst the broken hulks. Only blood remained, and carnage.
Stooping to hook a broken piece of debris that carried the clan’s sigil so he might bring word of their demise to their kin, Nugdrinn saw a great blackness through the gaps in the floating remains of the ship. Too late, he recoiled but by then the beast had scented his fear. It came crashing out of the waves stinking of old blood and the cold dank of death. With its single gelatinous eye, the beast fixed on Nugdrinn. Its first bite took apart the grubark, tore a great cleft from the hull and doomed it. Under such incredible pressure, the deck violently split apart and sent a dagger-sized splinter into the dwarf’s eye. Nugdrinn screamed but had enough about him still to try and scramble back up what was left of his ship before a second bite claimed his foot.
Half blind, Nugdrinn roared. He bit his lip, used the pain to stop himself from passing out. Blood gushing from the ruined stump of his left leg was already freezing, sealing up the wound. A deeper cold was spreading through Nugdrinn’s body when the other dwarfs attacked. Crossbow bolts, some with their tips drenched in oil and then lit, hailed the beast. Thick-bladed throwing axes gouged its flanks. Piercing its blubbery hide, the barbed quarrels drew a bleat of pain from the beast’s puckered maw, which was champing up and down on the rapidly disintegrating hull. A noisome stench rolled from its gullet, redolent of putrefaction and the slow rot of the half-frozen dead.
A second barrage of axes and quarrels forced the beast under but it had claimed Nugdrinn’s foot and his eye.
Anger and a desire for retribution kept him alive until the dwarfs reached Barak Varr some months later. A mattock head was forged by Guildmaster Strombak to replace the piece of his limb he had lost and so Nugdrinn became ‘Hammerfoot’ to ever remind him of what he owed the beast.
The memory of that night still brought a tremor to his hand that made the view through his telescope quiver, if only slightly. Nudgrinn took a stronger grip of the rope, glad his rune axe was looped to the belt around his waist.
‘Is it you, daemon?’ he asked the water. ‘Has the gulf spewed up a monster from the watery hells of Triton’s cage?’
The water didn’t answer.
Instead, the amber glow of the lantern crept across the waves until it found something to alight on.
Nugdrinn snapped shut the telescope and pulled out his axe. He’d fight the beast one-handed, lashed to the prow.
‘Come forth then,’ he bellowed, vying against the roar of the water that was in a foaming frenzy with the wind peeling off the northern peaks. ‘And I’ll take from you what you took from me in recompense.’
His ghazan-harbark pitched and yawed but Nugdrinn barely noticed. Adrift on rough water was akin to walking to the experienced captain. His face was slick with spray, little diamonds of seawater clinging to his beard. A rime of salt layered his upper lip and he licked it.
‘I taste blood on the water, fiend,’ he promised. ‘I’ll open up yer belly and release those poor lost souls you devoured. I’ll cut yer until your entrails spill into the black and are swallowed whole by the briny deep. Come forth!’
For such a monster to be found so close to Barak Varr was unheard of, but Nugdrinn wasn’t about to shame the ancestors by doubting it.
A shadow, half-revealed in the lamplight, became more distinct as its identity was unmasked at last.
Nugdrinn lowered his axe, and let his ire cool.
‘Douse the lamp,’ he said. His heart thundered, and his breath quickened in his chest.
It was wood floating on the gulf. Just a piece of hull, a chunk of stern or prow, some vessel broken out in the deep ocean and washed up on the shores
