‘Draw your blades,’ he rasped, the sound of old oak carrying to every dwarf beneath the overhang. ‘They are coming for us.’
Those who still had axes showed them to the failing light.
Krondi drew his hammer, the weapon he had carried since he had been a Gatekeeper. Never in all the years he’d spent campaigning had the haft ever broken.
Darkness filled the gorge as the sun faded, drowning the dwarfs taking shelter at its edges in a black sea. Like shadows detaching themselves from the darkness of falling night, the elves emerged six abreast and filled the narrow road.
From the other side came four more, only this quartet still had arrows nocked and bows unslung. To Krondi’s eyes the slender necks and white pine shafts of the bows looked incongruous in the hands of the black-garbed killers.
‘There is more to this than mere thievery and murder,’ he murmured.
The hooded dwarf answered, a staff of iron appearing suddenly in his gnarled hands. ‘They cannot allow us to leave this place,’ he said. ‘A great doom is coming…’
From the group of six an elf came forwards, evidently their leader. He said something in a tongue unfamiliar to Krondi, though he could speak some elvish, and the four archers fell back.
So they wish to cut us then.
At least it was a better end than dying at the tip of an arrow.
When the six drew long serrated knives from their belts, Krondi knew his earlier assumption was true.
One of the other dwarfs piped up, ‘If we fight them, the others will shoot us in the back!’
‘Thagging elgi scum!’ spat another.
Krondi knew them both. They were brothers, Bokk and Threk. He briefly wondered if their father had any more sons to continue his name.
‘Make a circle,’ said Krondi. For the old veteran campaigner, memories came back in a red-hazed flood of similar last stands. On each of those previous occasions, fighting beasts or greenskins, dwarf tenacity had won out and he had survived. Somehow this time, it felt different.
The dwarfs obeyed Krondi’s command, coming together and raising shields. Only the hooded dwarf stood apart, and Krondi was content to let him. He hadn’t asked who the dwarf was and why he needed to be ferried to Karaz-a-Karak, but he’d seen enough, felt enough to realise he was not just some mere warrior.
‘Like links in a shirt of mail,’ he told the other dwarfs, ‘we do not part, we do not break. Stone and steel.’
‘Stone and steel,’ echoed all three in unison.
Seemingly amused by their antics, the leader of the elves bade some of his cohort forwards. Four night-clad warriors advanced with slow but deliberate purpose.
Krondi saw the glint of stone-cold killers in their eyes, and knew the last stand had been a mistake. It was far too late to do anything about that now. Closing his eyes for a moment, he made an oath to Valaya and then Grungni.
Let me die well, he beseeched them. Finally, he added a remark to Grimnir too, and let me take some of these whore-sons with me.
Four elves attacked as one, shrieking war cries.
Ugdrik stepped from the circle, breaking the wall, for the fall from his wagon had damaged his ear drum and he hadn’t heard Krondi’s command. Sparks flew for a few moments between his axe and an elven blade but poor Ugdrik was quickly gutted on a long knife, his guts spilling all over the road.
The others fared better. Under Krondi’s anvil-hard leadership, they repelled the first proper elven attack against their wall. Krondi buried the head of his hammer in the skull of one, which made it three apiece.
Frustrated, the elven leader sent his other warrior into the fight. In the warrior’s eyes, Krondi beheld a fathomless abyss of darkness and suppressed a tremor running through his body at the sight. The leader of the elves then hailed his archers to return and waded in himself, a sickle blade held low and by his side.
Seemed the elves did not fight fairly after all, which was no more than Krondi expected.
In a few seconds, what was a short skirmish became a dense melee through which it was tough to discern anything except flashing steel and the reek of copper. Bokk died swiftly, two jagged knives in his back and neck. His fountaining blood bathed Threk in a ruddy mire. He roared, threw himself at one elf, cut him down and wounded another, but a third slit open the grief-maddened dwarf’s neck.
It left only Krondi, the leader and the hollow-eyed warrior.
One of the elf archers went for the hooded dwarf. Embattled himself, Krondi heard a low whoomf! of crackling, snapping air, followed by a sudden burst of heat that pricked his bare skin. Screaming came swiftly on its heels. Burning flesh filled his nostrils with a noisome stench.
The hooded dwarf was chanting again, though this time he was much louder. It sounded like an invocation. Between his words, the yelled orders of the elven leader grew more frantic.
Then Krondi realised who he had in his midst and that they would not die after all.
Arrows were loosed by the three remaining archers, but the shafts broke as if they struck a mountainside.
In a momentary respite as the elves’ resolve began to fail them and they retreated, Krondi saw the hooded dwarf had one gnarled hand outstretched in front of him, clenched into a claw. Rings upon his fingers glowed brightly in the night gloom and as he brought them into a fist another flight of arrows snapped as if he had been holding them.
Out of shafts, the archers drew blades too and rushed the dwarfs.
Casting aside his cloak, the once hooded dwarf revealed his
