Grombrindal, p.31
Grombrindal, page 31
She wanted to laugh, but found that she couldn’t.
It was an outrageous thing to believe. And yet the truth stood in front of her.
‘Azkaharr?’
‘Long ago,’ the white-glowing duardin said, in a voice that sounded exactly like Azkaharr’s and, by some strange magic, like Gromrhun’s and Wyram’s too, ‘the duardin were set onto separate paths. It’s made all of you strong, but now…’ He gestured at those around him. Everyone, Dunrakul, Kharadron and Fyreslayer alike, had set aside their differences to stare at the myth, the Ancestor, that had come to stand amongst them. ‘Now’s the time to walk a different road, to be strong together as you once were.’
‘Who… are you?’ said Brigg.
‘I think you know.’
Brigg shook her head as though to reject it. ‘Then why come in disguise? Why couldn’t you just tell us of the danger and what we needed to do?’
‘You think your father would’ve listened?’ The duardin turned to Kurrindorm. ‘And yours?’ A glance at Ael. ‘And as for you…’ He chuckled.
Ael licked her lips as though it would help words slide out. None came.
‘No,’ said the White Duardin. ‘That’s not our way.’
‘You think that just because I choose not to pray, I wouldn’t listen to what a god had to say if he walked into my study?’ said Ael, finding the words she’d been looking for.
‘I’m no god.’
‘You could have told us,’ Brigg said again, barely above a hiss.
‘I could.’ The duardin nodded. ‘I could give a thirsty duardin a beer.’
By some runic trick, he did indeed immediately fashion one, drawing a pewter tankard embossed with a golden rune from under his cloak. A strong, hoppy smell rose from the golden-brown liquid it contained. Turning away, he passed it to one of the Auric Hearthguards, muttering a ‘Thank you kindly, lad’ as the Fyreslayer cupped it with great reverence between both hands. The warrior was too awestruck to even think of drinking it.
‘I could do that. But Valaya, instead, chose to teach you how to brew and I’d say that’s worked out more-or-less all right. Wouldn’t you?’ He laid a hand across Kurrindorm’s shoulder and squeezed it in what was so plainly a gesture of farewell that the duardin all around who had been hanging on his every utterance moaned in despair. ‘You’ll do all right.’ He gestured to the duardin crowded over Grimnir’s Forge. ‘You’ve all you need to weather this storm right here.’
‘But the ogors–’
The White Duardin shook his head. ‘The Everwinter is a curse that’s almost as old as mine. Beyond even the Maker’s power to undo, I’d be prepared to wager. Not that it’s Grungni’s way to mend that which others might learn to fix for themselves. Sjarpa’s an old lad, and he’s got a head on his shoulders. For an ogor. I remember him well from the last time I was here, in Kogrun’s time. I’ll help you deal with him, but, as I’ve said, he’s not your real enemy here.’
‘He seemed to think Grimnir’s Forge could help him,’ said Ael.
‘Grimnir’s Forge hasn’t burned at its hottest in a thousand years. The lore of how to do it long lost.’ The White Duardin glanced again to the Forge, where runesmiters, aether-khemists, engineers and even a few Ironweld journeymen huddled under blankets. He turned to Brigg and winked. ‘Or so they say.’
‘Vengeance will be his. When our foes are great, he will return. When the foul creatures of these worlds bay at the doors, he will take up his axe once more and his ire shall rock the mountains.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Strahl Aelsson and the crew of the Bokram had by some miracle, if he believed in that sort of thing, made it out of Arik’s Pass and all the way to the bottom of the Outer Stair without encountering serious opposition. They had shot their way through a few bands of Kruleboyz and gluttons, most of whom they had found wandering in small groups, lost in the snow, and into the old fortress itself. Most of it was buried under ten feet of snow and Strahl barely recognised it any more. The first thing they had tried to do was follow the stair to the Gate of Throngs, but the snow was too deep and the cold had become too severe even for their arkanaut suits to resist. Captain Helmensson’s navigation instruments had lost every landmark and they had been forced into the shelter of an old artillery bastion.
It was somewhere between the fourth and fifth tiers. Strahl was as sure of that as he could be.
The fortification had been so hastily abandoned, and so long ago, that a flame cannon still sat rusting at the embrasure. Strahl wasn’t at all surprised to note that it was the exact same design of weapon that the Dunrakul were using today.
The doors had been wooden and were long gone. Snow blustered inside, piling up in a mound on the floor which had since been brushed everywhere and turned to freezing slush by the Kharadron hurrying inside. A rank of corroded storage trunks sat at the back of the room. An opening, similarly doorless, led to what might have been a guardroom. A faint warmth was emanating from it.
If it was a guardroom, then chances were there was a flue there, sealed behind a grille, conveying heat from Grimnir’s Forge. Brigg had shown him several that had been widened into tunnels, used by the Dunr Lodge to come and go over the long centuries during which the Gate of Throngs had been occupied by their enemies. But he had no idea where any of them emerged and the chances of just stumbling onto a concealed Fyreslayer entrance were surely too remote to entertain.
As it was, the heat he felt was barely discernible, even with instruments, and Strahl wondered if it wasn’t the vague warmth of a memory, a sense of Brigg and his mother on the other side of a hearth grille, rather than something real he could share.
While he stumbled in the general direction of the guardroom, acute hypothermia sending his thoughts into tighter and tighter spirals and marvelling giddily at the failure of his distant kin to innovate a better design of cannon, Helmensson was ransacking the storage trunks. Looking for cannon fuel, Strahl supposed. Anything that might burn. The captain thumped the lid of the last trunk and cursed. At the same time, a group of three arkanauts busied themselves pitching a foil tent, laying down bedrolls, banking the snow up in the doorway and rigging up a set of thaumic heaters. One of them detached from the group and approached Strahl. He made a grab for the aether-gold canister that Strahl had stubbornly hauled all the way from the crash site on the slim chance that he’d be able to give it to his mother.
‘No,’ Strahl protested, and pulled it out of the arkanaut’s hands.
‘We need it to fuel the heaters,’ the arkanaut said, and made another go for it.
Strahl stumbled back towards the guardroom door, dragging the heavy canister along with him. The arkanaut made to follow him.
‘Leave it,’ said Helmensson wearily, looking up from the empty storage trunks.
‘But, captain–’
‘Just leave it.’
The arkanaut turned his head, some understanding passing between him and his captain, a cypher, known only to the skyfarers of Barak-Zon, encoded in the cold glitter of snow-reflected light on a helmet’s lenses. Whatever was said or intuited, the arkanaut reluctantly backed down.
‘If Mistress Ael still lives, then maybe she’ll find the aether-gold with our frozen corpses and pay out our share to our kin in Barak-Zon,’ said Helmensson.
With the arkanaut returning to assist his crewmates with their emergency shelter, Strahl felt the last of the stubbornness he had been holding onto desert him. He slumped back, sliding down the wall, and hugging the aether-gold canister from the Bokram to his chest. They were both as cold as each other.
Helmensson squatted down beside him, as if to say something reassuring, but the sound of something large and angry moving around outside drew his attention back to the entrance. Reluctantly abandoning their heat shelter, a pair of Ael’s Grundstok Thunderers took up crouching positions either side of the doorless opening and sent rapid-fire pulses of aethershot flickering out into the snow.
Whatever it was bellowed in frustration and rattled the stonework with arrows.
Strahl watched the door. Perhaps it was the cold-fever creeping up on him, but he would have sworn to the spirits of his own dead parents that he saw a white-bearded duardin in a mail coat and a cloak nod casually to the busy Grundstok fighters and step inside. Shivering gruffly, the duardin drew his cloak in about him and stomped the snow off his boots. A grin progressed slowly across his tired face as he caught Strahl’s gawping stare, and then glanced approvingly towards the arkanauts’ foil tent and thaumic heaters.
‘The Maker would approve, I reckon,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Whether you care for his approval or not.’
Strahl reached out. His hand was weak and it wavered in his vision. This time, the elder grasped it firmly.
Strahl almost wept as the fresh stamina that ran through the old duardin and into him brought pain back to his arm.
‘On the eight skies and all their riches,’ he heard Helmensson mutter.
Feeling more lucid than he had in a day, Strahl realised that he was not imagining things. The White Duardin really was standing over him, and Helmensson and his crew could see him too.
‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
With great solemnity, and without exactly answering, the White Duardin unbuckled his cloak at the collar and threw it over Strahl’s shoulders. Whatever enchantments had been woven into the tattered fabric, they crackled like a low and comforting flame. Strahl felt the thin ice encrusting his armour begin to melt. Condensation faded from his helmet lenses.
‘Why…?’ Strahl managed to say. ‘Why me?’
The duardin shrugged. ‘Why not you?’
‘You could be helping Helmensson and his crew.’
‘I’m helping you all, lad.’
Strahl looked puzzled.
It must have shown through his lenses, because the White Duardin chuckled. ‘Duardin. They never change, do they? A Fyreslayer would sell his life and say it was for honour. The Dispossessed would do the same for their oaths and their precious grudges. A Kharadron… well, he’d call it contractual obligation, but what’s the difference really? Nothing but words, I say.’ He laughed again. A great plume of vapour came out of his mouth. He shivered, folding his muscular arms around his chest. His skin, Strahl noticed, was starting to goose bump.
‘You’re cold,’ said Strahl.
‘It is bloody cold.’
‘But you’re cold.’
‘Ahhh.’ The elder nodded as an understanding of Strahl’s problem dawned. ‘This is the Everwinter, lad. Sigmar himself would go blue if he were compelled to stand out there in naught but his woollens.’
Strahl’s firm inclination was to shrug off the duardin’s magical cloak and return it to its proper owner. It was too fine a thing for him. An orphan ward of the Union of Conservatories and Associated Compassionate Enterprises. An endless source of disappointment. For some reason, simple Kharadron gold-greed perhaps, sensing the profound value of the object draped over his shoulders and drawing it closer, he did not return it straight away. With the wall against his back for support and feeling returning to his bones, he pushed himself back up and to his feet.
The White Duardin’s lips hooked up in an appraising smile, finding something halfway sound in what he saw and making Strahl feel foolish for doubting his worth. It was a warm, self-effacing sense of foolishness, as if the emotion could be shorn entirely from the feeling of shame that ordinarily went with it.
Failure, that smile took pains to say, could be an excuse to punish or it could be an opportunity to learn. Sometimes it could be both, given duardin of good intent.
‘I need your help,’ the duardin said. ‘You and your guns. Consider the cloak a down payment.’
Strahl swallowed. A myth had come in from the cold to ask him for a favour and he had paid for it in advance.
He didn’t know what to say.
‘We’ll freeze out there,’ said Helmensson, his usual brash air chastened by the aura of semi-divinity, like a gas lamp turned down low rather than one blown out altogether.
The White Duardin nodded sadly. ‘Aye. You’ve got it worse than your kin holed up in Grimnir’s Forge right now, that’s for sure. But, with that being the way it is…’
He turned back to Strahl. The smile he was still wearing was no longer mirthful, nor was it even comforting, but for all its grim resolve it was oddly heartening all the same. As though, with two dozen half-frozen arkanauts united in common purpose, there was nothing they could not do. Whatever he meant to ask for, Strahl did not think he would be able to say no.
‘What do you say about going in for a pound?’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘BREAK!’ Sjarpa yelled, as the thundertusk mashed its head into the gates.
Warding runes flared. Hardwood groaned. Unnatural frost clawed through the blackwork and the support frame buckled. Vibrations shook through Sjarpa’s belly, fatty rolls wobbling against the cracked leather of his seat.
‘IT!’
With a collective roar, mouths packed with snow, fourteen dismounted beastriders of the Thunder Hand fought a tug-of-war to draw the shaggy monster back along the ice.
‘DOWN!’
They let go, and this time it was the thundertusk pulling all fourteen of them forward as it lowered its head and slammed its horns into the duardin gate with another spasm of runic magic.
It was taking too long. The door needed to come down now.
Reins hanging over one wrist, Sjarpa drew his arms round his chest and pulled them in tight. The hairs on the backs of his arms stood on end. The flesh was dimpled by goose bumps. His fingers were numb.
A Blizzard Speaker of the Winterbite Mawtribe was cold.
Sjarpa closed his eyes and let out a sigh. The eruption of freezing breath made his thundertusk grumble in alarm.
Warmth. He could almost remember what it felt like. He had wanted all the Mawtribes to feel it too. Maybe then they would understand, like he did, that there was more to life than filling their stomachs and see the importance of The Way. Far from the reach of Baergut’s curse, safe in the bowels of the Fire Crown, they would have been able to wait out the Everwinter. He would have found the last of the duardin’s living rulers, the Kharadron Magnate, and had her write for him the words that would give power over those who came after her: the magic duardin words of a contract that would forever say that Korgrun and Borja had a peace and that the Mawtribes would have shelter in the Fire Crown. Now, everyone who had ever disagreed with that ambition or needed regular reminding of it was dead and few of the Mawtribes were left. For the second time in his life he was at the threshold of the Fire Crown, and he found he didn’t care much about those things after all.
He wanted to wade into the fires of Grimnir’s Forge until the pins and needles of sensation came back to his skin.
Only the door stood in his way.
There were no defenders left, and Sjarpa regretted that. A little hot oil, in particular, would have been welcome. He would have showered under it. He would have turned his face to the ramparts and invited his ogors to join him, mouth open, and guzzled under it.
‘BREAK!’
The fourteen released their thundertusk again.
Sjarpa bared the blunted yellow icicles of his teeth as the doors splintered and the runes cut into them faltered. If he was cold enough to shiver then it was ten times as cold as it needed to be for steel to shrink and become brittle.
The Everwinter would break the duardin’s gate. Long before it broke the Beastclaw.
With a snarl, Sjarpa commanded the ogors back. Bulging muscles pushed thick rolls of straining fat as the ogors hauled their thundertusk from the gate. Gnoblars hurried in with tools. The shivering greenskins stuck tiny crowbars into the upright crack that the thundertusk had forced between the doors and levered furiously.
‘You want a jack for that.’
Frowning at the unfamiliar voice, Sjarpa turned.
There was no one there.
‘Down here, lad.’
He looked down.
The duardin stood level with his mount’s knees, leaning wearily across the head of a big two-bladed axe and watching the gnoblars with a professional interest. His beard was as thick and white as a fur coat, but the nose that poked through it was a cold-blistered, red bulb. Sjarpa felt his brow furrow in confusion. He wondered if Kolram had come back from the grave to avenge his own killing. The beard was longer. The axe was bigger. But there was a resemblance there if you looked for it. Obviously, it wasn’t a real duardin. If it was, he’d have more to show for the cold than a chapped nose.
‘Are you a spook?’ he asked.
The duardin shrugged. ‘After a fashion, I suppose.’
‘I know you.’
‘We’ve met before, lad. Aye.’
Sjarpa growled. ‘I’m old enough to remember Baergut Vosjarl. I’m no one’s… lad.’
The duardin spook tutted and looked up. ‘Bit of advice, lad. Let’s not turn this into a who’s got the biggest father contest, eh?’
Sitting up in the saddle, making himself a few inches taller, Sjarpa looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the odd duardin that was speaking with him. They were all too busy with the gate, with their irascible battering ram, with stopping the gnoblars from running away and ensuring Borja Kragnfryr was drawn up the last bit of slope to the gatehouse. No one was looking at him just then.
