Headtaker Page 4

  Dwarf locks were a cut above the standard that Thordun had routinely broken in the wealthy houses of Nuln. He had enjoyed little experience of dwarf-made things, save those which his father had borne with him from Karak Azul. It was that same inexperience that had sealed them here. A true son of Grungni would have seen the trap. He shook his head to clear it of self-pity and got back to work.

  Bernard laughed without humour, looking to salvage some face in front of the other hired swords. ‘Don’t forget, I used to pay you to do this sort of work. And I don’t remember you being such an uptight piece of–’

  The human’s colourful language fell on deaf ears as Thordun felt the mechanism click under the applied torque. The dwarf whooped in triumph as the door edged marginally outward. The mercenaries glanced over in surprise, having never witnessed such an outburst of emotion from their usually taciturn paymaster.

  Thordun stood up, dusting grit from his breeches and shaking out his cloak. He turned to Bernard with a broad grin. He didn’t have to speak a word.

  Grumbling in his own tongue, Bernard turned and stomped back towards the waiting mercenaries.

  ‘Que pensez-vous de cela?’ Thordun shouted at his back, with a grin.

  Bernard tensed. Thordun knew full well how much it annoyed him to be spoken to in his own language. If Thordun hadn’t known the Bretonnian for as long as he had, he might have suspected that to be his primary reason for opting for the delights of Nuln over his native Brionne, and dismissed rumours of the murder of Châtelain Rémy and the abduction of his horse and daughter as mere tavern talk. Unfortunately Thordun knew Bernard all too well. Since before the big man had stubble on his chin. Now, the man’s dense black beard was speckled silver and his hard face riven by deep lines. To the human’s eyes, Thordun would not have aged a day.

  ‘Get your men on their feet. That’s enough rest.’

  The men complained as they always did but decamped with professional efficiency, seeing first to their weapons before gathering up bedrolls and baggage packs.

  Thordun brushed grit from the doorframe he had just opened, his fingernails excavating the ancient runic marks from the stone. He shook his head sadly. A fuller grasp of the klinkarhun was not the only lesson of his father’s he had failed to heed. He started at a distant pattering, like clawed feet, seeking reassurance in the ivory-gripped brace of pistols holstered at his belt. Much as he treasured his father’s hammer, he knew which he’d prefer to have in his hands in a fight.

  ‘We’d best hurry,’ he whispered. Keeping one hand at his holster, he knelt to gather up his wide-brimmed leather hat, blowing off the grime before setting it on his head. ‘We are passing under Black Crag and the Eight Peaks. There is probably nowhere in the Old World more dangerous.’

  ‘Black Crag?’ Bernard asked, eyeing the ceiling as if goblins might spring from it in ambush. ‘Isn’t this where we were headed for?’

  ‘Karak Azul first. We need the king’s consent if we are to claim his reward.’

  ‘This prize of yours better be worth it,’ Bernard muttered.

  ‘It will be. I promise you that. Kazador is wealthy as only dwarfish royalty can be.’ Thordun’s eyes unfocused, his fears momentarily forgotten at the vision of the mountain of gold that would be his. Theirs, he grudgingly corrected himself. ‘Even with half his wealth split ten ways, all the kings of men will be paupers beside us.’

  Bernard grinned, readjusting the flail that was wrapped under his left arm, prodding into his armpit despite the stained padding of old wool.

  ‘In that case, mon vieil ami, lead on.’

  Chapter Two

  It had been so long. Aside from the immense granite columns that lent the lair its name, little remained of the City of Pillars that was familiar. This had been a glorious place once, its beauty the envy of a beauteous empire, and the great pillars stood eternal testament to that lost grandeur. They extended far beyond what Sharpwit’s clouded vision could report, towering hundreds of feet above the petty masses and skaven shanties like uncaring gods among their flawed creations. They were bones of constancy within a decaying husk of change.

  Sharpwit could not see well, but he could smell the sour musk of fear as it seeped from ten thousand glands. The rancid stink had permeated the very stones, infecting the air where it hung like a maleficent presence, perhaps later even to condense into nebulous clouds of dread that would rain down on the seething masses in a twisted parody of natural cycles. The City of Pillars offered no hiding places. Every crawlspace, every cranny, was a battlefield that had been contested for three thousand years and showed little sign of being won any time soon. It was a place where death came from the walls, the ceiling, from up between a cautious ratkin’s own footpaws, as often as it ever did from a foe that could be smelt, heard or fled. The goblin warlord Skarsnik loved ambushes and trickery, and his cunning, allied to the brute strength of his sometime ally Gorfang Rotgut, had left a trail of corpses and terror halfway to Skavenblight. The dwarfs were troublesome too, as if these skaven hadn’t woes aplenty. The descendants of those who once ruled this mountain were fortified in the upper levels and, now emboldened by warriors and armaments from Karak Azul, continually sought to reclaim more of what had once been theirs.

  And then there was the Headtaker.

  He did not need his sight to see the haunted looks in these skavens’ eyes.

  Sharpwit stood in the midst of it all with the whimpering excise-rat and the three albinos around a hole in the ground, right in the pulsing black heart of the City of Pillars. He twisted round to take in the teeming multitudes of Skavendom and tried, with some difficulty, to imagine what kind of masochistic imbecile would choose to lair in a place so exposed. A pair of heads had been staked into the bloodied gravel by the entrance, their leaking fluids crusted around the swollen wood. The rats’ muzzles were frozen in snarling rictuses, brown fur coming away in clumps. Their eyes had dulled to a pinkish white, and Sharpwit shifted nervously under their unseeing attention. He took another tentative sniff of the air with its reek of dank fur and old death and grimaced. He had the unpleasant sensation that these two were Queek’s idea of guards.

  And it was working. He was quite happy to let Razzel explore the warlord’s burrow alone.

  As he thought of the grey seer, Razzel scrambled on all fours up the angled shaft. He snarled angrily, beating grime and dark scabs from his fur with the flat length of his staff, raising a hellish cacophony from the bells and chimes that clamoured from its idolatrous head. ‘Where is Queek?’ he squealed. ‘If not here then where does he hide-cower from the Horned One’s prophet?’

  The grey seer snapped his claws and gestured at the albinos. The warriors leapt to obey, dragging the protesting excise-rat between them and depositing him roughly at their master’s feet.

  ‘You say-squeak this is Queek’s lair,’ Razzel said. ‘Then where is Queek, hmmm? Maybe Queek is invisible. Maybe he skins himself and hide-hide under those bone-skulls.’

  ‘Queek’s trophies? You did not… paw-touch?’

  ‘I speak-squeak now,’ squealed Razzel.

  The excise-rat trembled, four paws buried in the dirt. He raised one to rub tears from his eyes. ‘Queek-Warlord, he… he hate-hate when others paw his trophy-prize.’

  With a snarl, Razzel extended a claw towards the snivelling ratman. Sharpwit took a measured step back as the grey seer chittered secret words. A gust of wind disturbed the seer’s horn chimes, the brass cylinders tinkling madly as black laces of power traced around the sorcerer’s arm like a mesh.

  The excise-rat clasped his paws before him and wept. ‘Most wisest of prophets, please save-spare–’

  Whatever the skaven had hoped to express was swiftly forgotten as dark magic arced from the grey seer’s outstretched paw. The skaven screamed as power enveloped him like a fly in a web. The spell ignited in green sparks and his fur caught alight, green-black flames spreading rapidly to engulf his entire body. The unfortunate ratkin shrieked and convulsed, wr
ithing in the dirt, but there was no extinguishing those sorcerous flames. He continued to jerk even as fur gave way to flesh and then to bone, which itself crumbled into dust. In just a few seconds, the excise-rat had been reduced to a scattering of ash and the dying echo of his screams.

  The grey seer cackled as he kicked the mound of cinders into the passing masses. The clanrats lowered their eyes and bared their throats as they passed. Only the oblivious press of ratkin at their backs prevented them from grovelling in unrestrained obeisance right there. Still snickering, Razzel turned to face Sharpwit, evidently content to have inflicted as much pain as possible on just the one skaven – for now.

  ‘I do not think the guard-rat squeaks lies. I believe this is Queek’s home-lair.’

  Sharpwit nodded low, bowing and scraping. This was not the time for a show of pride, not while the seer’s eyes still burned with warpfire. He did not want to learn what the seer would have done had he believed the excise-rat was lying. ‘Yes-yes, most attuned of divine servants. Agreed, this is a most odd-strange place for a warlord’s burrow but, from what I hear-squeak, Queek is a most odd-strange warlord.’

  The grey seer’s paw swept the watchful heads that flanked the passage to Queek’s lair. ‘Our first two message-rats. Do you not recognise them, Old-thing?’

  Sharpwit peered closer, but without their distinctive musk to aid his failing vision, they could have been anyone.

  ‘Queek will pay for this… this… this sacrilege.’ The seer held out his free paw and shook his head. Sharpwit suspected he was talking to himself now. ‘In striking the paws of the Horned Rat, he strikes at the Great One himself. It shall not be tolerated!’ At last the seer began to settle down, returning his paw to his staff. ‘That condemned soul must return here eventually. We wait-stay.’

  Sharpwit bowed in acknowledgement of the grey seer’s divine wisdom as Razzel squeaked at one of the albinos to fetch his palanquin. An expression that was almost relief crossed the stern warrior’s muzzle as he was granted permission to flee the seer’s twitchy impatience.

  Convinced that the stormvermin had the right idea, Sharpwit edged back, keeping the seer’s back firmly within his narrow circle of clear vision. When the swirling mass of furry bodies swallowed him and snatched the grey seer from view, he heaved a sigh of relief, the weight of Karak Eight Peaks itself seemingly lifting from his shoulders. He would make his excuses later, once the grey seer had calmed down.

  A hurrying skaven blundered into his side, causing him to squeak in alarm. He raised one crutch, ready to exact vengeance on the careless rat’s hide, but the coward-meat was already on his way, hunched low beneath a worm-eaten crate of rotten fruit. Bloated flies droned hungrily in its wake as he hurried through the press. Sharpwit cried out again as another heedless clanrat bundled into him from behind, shoving him aside and tramping on his tail as he steamed by.

  Ten years ago these lowly vermin would not have dared lift their sycophantic muzzles in his presence, much less knock their bodies against his as though he were just another worthless clanrat. He snarled angrily.

  He had called this place home once. The urge to taste it again was overpowering. But it was foolishness; it would not make him young again. He blinked myopically at the shadowy vastness that filled his sight. Stallholders and scrap-peddlers hung their wares from poles above their burrows where passing shoppers might sample their scent. The smell of cooking meats, spice, warpstone and stale urine permeated the space, mingling with the musky scent of the ratmen like a noisome perfume. Among the bustling masses, fat, sharply dressed skaven with sleek fur squeaked over the noise of the crowd and each other. Sharpwit squeezed by. His darkly glowing maw and rich attire served largely to discourage blundering paws. Sharpwit sensed the calculation behind every pair of eyes, considering his weakness. He coughed loudly, making a deliberate show of spraying the surrounding clanrats with bloody sputum. He smirked as the watching skaven slunk away, wary of whatever terrible contagion it was that blighted him. Infirmity had its uses.

  He bit and shoved his way deeper into the under-city, starting suddenly as a brown paper bag was thrust under his snout. It was clutched in the paws of a gritty-furred creature who gave the bag a hopeful shake. Sharpwit peered inside. It was filled with earthworms.

  ‘Super-secret warpworms. One warptoken for them all if you not squeak-tell how Cripkit smuggles them from Clan Moulder quarter.’ The seller took one between thumb and foreclaw and let it dangle as though it were a prize catch. ‘Worms burrow for warpstone. Double your outlay. No-no, treble! Yes-yes?’

  Sharpwit shooed the charlatan away with the snap of a crutch across his shins and barged past to where a bored-looking piebald slouched against one of the monolithic pillars. The skaven bore a clapboard sign with words in poorly rendered Queekish and a faded arrow, pointing towards the promise of all the cave fungus a skaven with two warptokens could eat.

  Sharpwit limped by and ducked beneath an awning, the tanned orc-hide faded with age and maltreatment. Smoke lingered under the low roof like a drugged serpent, coiling around mouldering wooden joists as it slithered languidly for fresher air. He coughed chestily. The space beneath the faded canopy was crammed with skaven, clustered around a bar constructed of a scavenged sheet of pressed tin across a pair of barrels. Rats scuttled across the surface without a care, their tapping claws a strangely appropriate corruption of music. The skaven drank flat ale from leaking flagons, baring fangs to defend cracked pipes stuffed with maggot-infested pipe-weed from their jealous fellows. It was as if some crazed artist had stared into the eye of Chaos and rendered a perversion of dwarfish life. The product of a naïve god that sought to undo the work of entropy and restore this world to how it had once been. But now the ratmen ruled as thanes and kings, supping ale and smoking tobacco as they squatted in the husk of the great civilisation they unwittingly sought to emulate.

  The bar-rat looked up from the stein he was polishing with an oily rag. He was a stocky black-furred bruiser with a squashed nose, a torn ear and an eyepatch. He set down his cloth on the bar and shot Sharpwit an evil look, implying the old skaven should either pay for something or get lost.

  Sharpwit glanced warily over the bar-rat’s shoulder at the heavy clay kiln from which belched the smoky aroma of roasted meat – no doubt stuffed with the last poor rat that couldn’t pay his tab. Struck with a sudden desire to get back to Grey Seer Razzel, Sharpwit scurried back into the open.

  He lifted his nose to the musk-ridden air, inhaling a lungful of the familiar scents before hacking it all back up in a fit of coughing. He smacked his spasming ribs as the attack passed. He sniffed again. The acrid odour of fear musk had grown palpably more intense, spreading like ripples in a disturbed pond through the densely packed skaven. The strains of angry voices filtered through the chittering horde. One of them was the familiar squeal of Grey Seer Razzel, but the other he did not recognise. It was unusually deep for a skaven and cold as a dark night on the Chaos Wastes.

  Sharpwit’s blood turned frigid.

  He was here.

  ‘Please, your majesty. All we request is understanding.’

  Kazador sat motionless as a stone-carved ancestor as he regarded the envoy of King Belegar. ‘My understanding, Hrathgar of the Hammerhand clan, is that Karak Eight Peaks is pledged to offer no fewer than five hundred warriors, yet you arrive here with a mere fifty. And this, despite increasing exports from our armouries while asking nothing in return bar support in this.’

  ‘With respect, our defence pact was agreed when the Eight Peaks could command such forces. Fifty warriors is all King Belegar can spare and commensurate with our… temporarily… diminished circumstances. My king believed this fair–’

  ‘Fair,’ Kazador spluttered, rising unsteadily from his throne and the thick pile of skins thrown over its seat. He started down the steps of its high dais, catching himself before he’d taken his second step. The glittering crown of Karak Azul rested uneasily on a furrowed brow. Tired grey eyes regarded
an unkind world from the haggard depths of sleeplessness and sorrow. He sank back into the coarse furs. ‘Shall I tell you of fair?’

  Hrathgar stayed silent, head bowed, his grey beard scooped into his hands lest it brush the furs covering the king’s floor.

  Kazador scowled, as much at his own loss of temper as at the visiting dwarf’s impertinence. He felt the disapproving looks of the assembled thanes on him as he sank back into his throne. More engine of war than seat of kingship, the high-backed edifice was wrought wholly of iron. Some holds flaunted their prosperity with grand thrones of gold and silver, encrusted with a dragon’s hoard of precious stones so that they glittered like stars in an open sky. Not so the Iron Peak. The might of Karak Azul had always lain with its ironsmiths and weaponmasters, and the throne of its kings reflected that ancient balance of power. Banded knots of matt grey alloy wrapped its frame, inscribed with tiny, masterfully rendered runes extolling the ageless triumphs of Karak Azul.

  Kazador’s fingertips traced the depressions where nails had once been driven, where a proud prince’s mind had been torn from this world. His fists closed over the arms in a wrathful grip, and Kazador was thankful his ancestors had not bequeathed him a throne of gold. The soft metal would have yielded long ago before the strength in his arm and the grief in his heart. The skill still existed to repair the wounds inflicted on his throne, but Kazador lived as truly as any dwarf could by the old maxim: Never forget, never forgive.

  Kazador sat back, reclaiming his hands and his self-control. He crossed his thickly muscled arms over his thick snow-white beard and shifted his gaze from the dwarf of Karak Eight Peaks to the frail old form of Loremaster Logan. The ancient dwarf’s salt and pepper beard was wrapped around his waist three times over, a pair of half-moon quartz spectacles sitting unevenly on his crooked nose. He stood beside the Iron Throne behind a marble lectern on which rested the open pages of Karak Azul’s Book of Grudges. The loremaster held a stylus in one liver-spotted hand, the instrument hanging motionless above the blank page as he followed the king’s exchange.