The Great Betrayal (11 page)

‘Don’t be too disheartened, Heg. At least you are still of the guild.’ Nadri was heading towards Merman Gate. From there, they’d travel the winding pass all the way to the upper hold gate, just above the first deep.

Heglan waited until Nadri had passed under the Merman Gate and was out of earshot.

‘I
will
make it fly, brother,’ he said beneath his breath. ‘For Dammin and Lodri Copperfist, I shall do it.’

Heglan and Nadri were already back inside the hold, through the fastness wall and more than halfway down Merman Pass when a bell tolled. It was a warning signal from the sea wall at the other side of Barak Varr.

Through the glass
lens the waters of the Black Gulf undulated like a desert of obsidian. Tiny breakers, errant spumes of white foam, exposed the lie of that misperception. In the storm darkness it appeared endless, stretching to an infinite horizon. In truth, it was vast and the Sea Hold of Barak Varr was its only bastion-port.

A flotilla of
ghazan-harbarks
, six in all, plied the gulf. A signal had roused them and together they looked for enemies.

Nugdrinn Hammerfoot perched on the prow of one of the ships, and scoured a small stretch of the Black Gulf that was lapping at the flanks of the Sea Hold. He had a brass telescope pressed to his left eye and peered hard through the lens. Three beacons were lit in the watchtowers, which meant three dwarfs had seen something approaching the gate. A warning bell was tolling, warring with the persistent ringing in the captain’s ears, but thus far the horns had stayed silent.

Cessation of the bell and the clarion of horns meant danger approached and the many defences of the sea wall would be levelled at the intruders. Batteries of ballistae and mangonels stood sentry upon the wall, as well as a hefty garrison of Barak Varr quarrellers. If the ghazan-harbarks were the hunters then the warriors on the sea wall would be the spear to slay whatever predator was lurking in the darkness beyond their lanterns.

‘Bori, bring the lamp forwards,’ he said, one meaty fist wrapped around a length of rope to steady him, one clutching the telescope to his remaining eye. The other was patched, a small oval of leather studded with the ancestor badge of Grungni.

O’er earth and sea, the great miner sees all,
Nugdrinn would often say and tap his eye-patch. In other words, just because he only had one eye didn’t mean he wasn’t watching. ‘Shine it here, lad.’ He pointed with the telescope. ‘Here. Quickly now.’

Nugdrinn had been a sailor all of his life. Born and raised in Barak Varr, there was no ship he could not sail, no ocean he dared not face. Unlike many dwarfs, even those of the Sea Hold, he was at peace with a stout hull and the waves beneath him, so whilst on the gulf his instincts could not be more honed. They were telling him something was out there, lurking in the dark.

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 of Barak Varr.

It was nothing. Yet, as the urgency and fervour fled his veins and left him cold and trembling, Nugdrinn could not shake the feeling that there had been something out in the gulf.

But the bell tolled on and no horn was heard on the rough black waters.

‘Douse the lamps,’ Nugdrinn said again, retreating back to the deck and wondering what they had missed.

Blood magic was
never predictable. It was a roiling mass of archaic forces drawn together through murder and slaughter, a hound brought to the leash but never fully at heel. Dhar, the Dark Wind, was capricious but the deeds that could be wrought through its manipulation were great and terrible. Drutheira knew her art well, however, and had practised much. She knew, as all sorcerers must, that dark magic always required sacrifice. The dead druchii warrior with her throat cut, spilling arterial crimson all over the deck, was testament to that.

Most of the blood from the corpse had been wasted, but there was enough to fill a ritual bowl in the middle of the deck. From it tendrils of ruddy smoke quested like the tentacles of some abyssal horror. They enveloped the raiding ship, occluded it from sight. Thus clouded could the dark elves pass by the watchtowers of the dwarfs and gain passage through the Black Gulf into the rivers of the Old World proper.

Two other witches, Malchior and Ashniel, completed the coven. Lesser sorcerers both than Drutheira, they channelled their mastery into her and she became a conduit that articulated the power of the whole. Sweat dappled her brow, intense concentration written upon her face as she maintained the casting all the way through the gate markers that led them north. As one the triumvirate muttered their incantations through taut, bloodless lips as the other warriors looked to the sea wall and hoped the enchantment would hold long enough for them to pass by.

At the stern of the raider ship, a dark elf stood ready behind the vessel’s reaper. The single bolt thrower would find itself quickly outmatched by the battalion of ballistae arrayed against it, so too the twenty or so warriors armed with spear and shield at the ship’s flanks. Their fate was in the hands of Drutheira and her witches.

Slowly, agonisingly so, the sea wall faded from sight and the dark elves left the Sea Hold behind them with the dwarfs unaware of them ever having been present in their waters.

Drutheira let out a pained breath, the evidence of her body’s trauma revealed in the dark flecks on the hand that she used to cover her mouth.

The others sagged, visibly drained. Ashniel wiped a trickle of crimson from her mouth, whilst Malchior staunched his bleeding left nostril with a black cloth he then secreted back into his robes.

‘
Dhar
is a hard mistress,’ he remarked, coughing into his hand. When he wiped it away quickly with his sleeve there was blood on his palm.

‘Does the sight of blood on your own skin upset you, Malchior?’ Ashniel was young and impetuous, but possessed rare magical talent. She also delighted in taunting Malchior.

‘I am perfectly sanguine, my little dear,’ he replied in a sibilant voice, a savage and murderous glint in his eyes. ‘But I would much rather it was your blood.’

Bristling at the obvious threat, she spoke through a dagger-
curved grin. ‘I could flay the flesh from your bones, here in this very ship.’

Malchior did his best to appear unmoved. ‘Ah, the boldness of youth. Such overconfidence for a whelp…’

‘Whore-killing dog!’ she hissed, summoning a nimbus of dark magic and shaping it in her talon-like fingers.

‘Cease your bickering,’ snapped Drutheira, dispelling the casting with a curt slash of her hand, ‘and know that I am a harder mistress than the Wind of Dhar.’ Her wrath faded as quickly as it had appeared, and she narrowed her eyes like a predator to its unwitting prey. ‘Save your strength. Both of you. We are not finished, not yet.’

That revelation brought a sneer to Ashniel’s blade-thin lips. Malchior tried to hide his dismay behind a viper’s charm but failed.

‘Whatever our mistress requires,’ he purred with a small bow.

Ashniel showed her acquiescence by turning the sneer into a mirthless smile. Drutheira had seen harpies with more humour and resolved to kill the little witch once this was done.

She glanced down at the brass bowl around which the coven was sitting. Together they formed a triangle with Drutheira at its apex. Crimson steam rolled off the sloped interior of the bowl and once it cleared only a residue of the vital fluid remained.

‘Vaulkhar,’ she called, as if summoning something as mundane as wine or meat, ‘I need more.’

The vaulkhar nodded and gestured to two of his crew. A third, who paled when the captain’s cold gaze fell upon him, drew his sword but was subdued before he could put up much of a fight. Disarmed, forced to kneel over the bowl, he screamed as Drutheira drew her ritual knife and cut his throat.

Blood, hot and fresh, spilled into the sacrificial vessel.

‘Communion…’ uttered Drutheira, her voice laced with power, and the three began to chant.

Bubbles rose on the surface of the dark pool as if it were boiling, but no heat emanated from within. Instead an image began to resolve as the fluid thickened. Scarred as if by fire and contorted into a rictus of pure agony, a face appeared in the morass. It had been noble once, now it was ravaged and hellish. Opening its mouth in a silent scream, the face arched back and was consumed.

The bubbling subsided, replaced by ripples, slight at first but growing with intensity as the seconds passed. A pair of tiny nubs, like the peaks of two mountains surrounded by a lake, protruded from the pool. Nubs became horns and the horns crested an ornate helm of jagged edges and bladed ornamentation. It was a barbed piece of armour, sharp and cold. Dripping with blood, its entire surface drowned in viscous gore, a head emerged from the deep red mire.