The Great Betrayal (2 page)

Taking a moment to look around, he realised the battle was perched on a dagger’s edge. A heavy toll had been taken of the enemy, but they were numerous and their will bordered on fanatical.

Lifting up the faceplate of his dragon helm, Thurgin’s eye was drawn upwards to a vast shadow approaching him and his warriors from out of the sun. Not one of the throng of Karak Izril so much as flinched.

‘We have the east flank,’ he called out. An elven dragon rider, leading his scaled host, answered with a clenched fist and a broad, warlike smile.

Glarondril landed gracefully and bowed in the saddle to the thane-lord of Karak Izril. So too did his beast.

‘Well met, Thurgin son of Brak.’ He wiped the ichor from his sword before sheathing it. Behind him, almost twenty thousand dragons lowered their heads in respect to their allies. Each of their riders, every one of them a prince, nodded.

The dwarfs slammed their fists against their breastplates, raising a mighty clamour.

‘High prince,’ answered Thurgin, thumping his own chestplate and the angular rune engraved upon it. ‘I am always glad to see the Master of
Drakk
and his host.’ He gestured to the mound of sundered daemon corpses strewn around them. They were ugly creatures with hell-red skin, hooves and coiling horns that jutted from canine skulls. Foul steam rose off their broken bodies as the slow dissolution of their natures rendered them down to nothing but essence.

‘I am especially glad,’ Thurgin went on, ‘when his intervention crushes my enemies so gloriously and hands us a piece of the field to hold on to.’ He gestured to the slain host littering the ground for a hundred feet or more in front of them.

Glarondril regarded the daemon corpses with disdain.

‘We had best make the most of our good fortune then,’ remarked the elf, already spurring his mount.

‘Indeed…’ Thurgin turned his eye northwards where the bulk of the daemons festered and gibbered. ‘Those two fiends won’t kill themselves, now, will they?’

Even in the distance the leaders of the horde were easy to discern as they towered above their vassals: the feathered sorcerer and the bloated lord. Each was a prince of daemons with the innumerable hosts of Chaos at their command.

As the daemons retreated on one corner of the battlefield, they swelled in another. Thurgin saw them, the bulk of the cavalry he had butchered, the remnants left by Glarondril and his dragons, gathering around the Fist of Gron. And on that flat spur of rock was High King Snorri Whitebeard and the Elf Prince Malekith, alone and besieged by hell.

II

A sea of
red-skinned death surrounded the king of the dwarfs and the prince of the elves. Though the Fist of Gron was over a hundred feet across, they could see the creatures capering and undulating below them because the horde stretched so far back onto the plain. Had they both stood in the middle of the flat, featureless rock that capped the Fist, Snorri and Malekith would still have seen them.

As it was they stood at either end, close to the edge, as determined warriors would defend a wall during a siege. But it was the braying, the animalistic moans and lascivious promises emanating from beneath them, that told the nobles their enemies were climbing up to fight them.

‘They are eager,’ shouted the High King, clashing his hammer and axe together in a challenge.

‘Try not to be as keen, old friend,’ the elf prince replied. ‘They are coming.’

Snorri and Malekith faced away from each other, but each knew that their counterpart was smiling.

This was the war to end all wars, the final battle against the daemons and the power of Ruin. Here, history was being made. Malekith and Snorri were its architects. But although legendary, this was not the first time that Chaos had challenged for mastery of the Old World.

Long ago the hosts of Chaos had come from the north. An icebound, unforgiving land, the north was thronged with feral tribes and great primordial beasts. These creatures were the first amongst the servants of Ruin, the denizens of the glacier caves and frost-bitten valleys quick to bend their knees in worship. Succour was granted without mercy, their bodies reshaped into horrific forms, just as their souls were cast to damnation. Through a great gate, from a hellish netherworld where all the laws and fabric of nature were mutable and perverted, Chaos spilled into the mortal realm.

Its essence had bled into the lands beyond, turning trees into claws, rivers into arteries of blood and natural beasts into abominations. Like shadows, wisps of half-seen smoke or nightmares witnessed in periphery, the daemons marched alongside these beasts. On leathery pinion, on hoof or claw, slithering on their bellies the monstrous horde had swept across the Old World devouring all before it. Bloated on corruption, swollen with mutation, it could not be allowed to endure.

Grimnir was the most warlike of the dwarf ancestor gods. Legend told that he had closed the Chaos Gate himself and been doomed by the very deed. Left behind by Grimnir’s sacrifice, his fellow deities Grungni and Valaya passed from the mortal realm and went back into the earth, never to be seen again. But even the might of the ancestors could not prevent the canker of Ruin escaping. Disaster was averted, destruction of all life forestalled for a time, but Chaos lived. It bred and permeated the very cloth stitching reality together. It became pervasive, an invisible stain that would only spread with the passing of millennia.

Statues and memories were all that remained of the ancestor gods now. Even their lesser children were dust, with only scant temples to remember them. Such numinous beings could not exist forever and so it fell to their scions to try and rid the world of Chaos…

Snorri Whitebeard unleashed a bolt of lightning through the haft of his hammer. It sparked and cracked with all the fury of the ancestors, luminous and burning. A tide of hell-spawn that had come crawling over the lip of the flat rock where he made his stand was sent reeling. Blackened and smouldering, the creatures pitched over the edge and did not return. Sulphur-stink tainted the air as they were banished, the unreality of this place the only thing keeping them from dissipating immediately.

It had been a verdant valley once, the rich volcanic soil of the mountain giving life to acres of forest. All that had changed with the coming of Chaos. A blasted landscape, scorched black and seized in the grip of a half-frozen waste, was all that remained.

A mire of corpses piled up around the foot of the rock, putrefying with the taint of Ruin. From the steaming carcasses that were dried to husks and broken open by the baleful sun further abominations arose. Dewy eyelids blinked and nictitated in the light. Tentacles, claws and fleshy protuberances burst from skin-taut bodies eager for transformation. Carapace, chitin and malformed bone swaddled beasts already overrun with corruption that advanced against the elves and dwarfs.

These were the spawns of Chaos, hell-ravaged abominations birthed by fell sorcery of the darkest kind.

Uttering a cry to Khaine, the elven war god, Malekith speared a basilisk through its gullet. Viscous ichor spewed arterially from the wound. Mercury-swift, the elf prince leapt forwards and decapitated the beast without pause with his blade, Avanuir. Its dead, collapsing mass crushed several lesser beasts and swept many others to their doom as it fell.

Hundreds more of the wretched creatures now littered the rock where the lords of the dwarfs and elves made their stand. Daemons of every malformed persuasion and aspect had fallen beneath their weapons.

With a grunt, Snorri kicked a corpse over the edge. If they allowed the bodies to accumulate both elf and dwarf would soon be slipping on tainted entrails. Malekith’s dragon had not borne them here just to die ignominiously for no purpose.

‘’Tis thirsty work,’ remarked the dwarf in a moment of rare respite. Snorri licked his lips, smiling at the elf prince who hurled his spear into the belly of a bloated troll. Fire ignited along the haft, immolating the beast.

‘We’ll toast our victory later,’ Malekith replied, pointing to the southern edge of the rock where a horde of glaive-wielding beasts had just appeared. It was like an ever-lapping tide, with Snorri and Malekith acting as breakwaters. Horned and cloven-hooved, heat bled off the daemons’ muscled bodies in a gory steam. Malign intelligence flickered in their pit-black pupils. It warred with a terrible, consumptive rage.

Attracted by the scent of power emanating from the dwarf and elf, the daemons came on in droves. Eight became sixteen then over twenty as more and more of the daemons wanted to taste the flesh of true heroes. Like sharks drawn to blood, an insatiable hunger motivated them.

‘
We are the devourers…
’ they said as one in a horrible collision of voices patched together from a thousand different shouts of anger and wrath.

Grinning wickedly they began to circle the lords, beckoning them towards death and damnation with the tips of their hell-blades. Loping between the bloody daemons were brass-collared hounds, bigger and more brutish than any normal canine and with a vaguely reptilian aspect.

In seconds, the edges of the flat rock were festooned with daemons and the lords were surrounded.

Snorri backed up, snarling with wrath palpable enough to make the abominations pause.

‘
We shall feast upon your mortal soul…
’ promised the daemons. A hound leapt at the dwarf with an echoing roar.

But it would take more than a daemonic dog to fell the High King. ‘Then chew on this,’ he said. Silver fire flared, too fast to truly see, and the hell-beast was cut in half.

‘Tasty?’ asked Snorri, brandishing the head of his gore-stained axe at the other monsters.

Three more hounds sprang after the first, but were swiftly struck by a flight of pearlescent arrows. Every shaft was a heart shot.

Snorri only half turned, giving Malekith a sidelong glance.

The elf nodded to the dwarf, lowering his bow and stowing it to draw Avanuir.

‘That’s a debt I’ll have to repay now,’ said the High King. Snorri grinned at the elf, showing two rows of crag-like teeth within the forest of his long beard. ‘We stand before the world’s ending, elfling.’

Malekith gave the dwarf a wry glance, but his attention was partly on the daemons advancing across the Fist of Gron. He lost count after fifty, and was acutely aware he had retreated several paces. Elf and dwarf were almost back to back.

‘You sound almost pleased.’

‘Aye, think of the saga it will make. Immortality awaits!’

Malekith didn’t sound convinced, ‘Not if there is no one left alive to write it, and all existence has come to an end.’

‘Good point,’ the dwarf conceded. ‘Let us hope not then.’

Snorri eyed the daemons as he would dung upon his hobnailed boot, swallowing back a bitter taste in his throat at their stench. A cage of iron-hard, blood-red monsters surrounded them and its bars were tightening.

‘We need room to fight,’ he muttered, then hefted both his rune weapons and beckoned to the daemons. ‘Come on then!’

In one gnarled fist the dwarf had a gromril axe, its face etched with three angular runes. In the other he had a hammer, a lightning bolt embossed upon the head in gold. Thick links of gilded mail swathed his broad, muscular body. His arms, dark from the forge and the earth, were bonded with torcs and vambraces. A red, fur-trimmed cloak fell from slab-like shoulders armoured with pauldrons fashioned into the faces of ancestor gods. He wore no helm, for he wanted his enemies to see his fury, but carried a crown upon his brow instead. Runes inscribing every inch of his armour shimmered. Flawless rubies, verdant emeralds and pellucid sapphires studded every ring and bracelet.

I am the High King
, they said.
I am Lord of the Dwarfs and my vengeance is terrible. Behold! For your doom has come.

Snorri beat his chest with a clenched fist.

‘Khazuk!’

It was not meant as a challenge, but a death sentence.

The daemons heard neither but attacked as one, hounds and masters both. They were a crimson tide, of rage, hate and a desire to end all things.

Snorri cried out to Malekith as the daemons rushed them, ‘Hold on, elfling!’ and brought his rune hammer crashing down on the rock with all the potency of a lightning bolt.

Tremors rippled from the point where the dwarf had struck, cracks jagging outwards in an ever-expanding crater of sundered earth. Stone split, sending teeth of razor-edged rock into the daemons, scything into hellish flesh and spilling their tainted ichor.

Malekith was fast as quicksilver, darting between the spears of rock thundering out of the ground, running ahead of the quake. He weaved around the lazy blow of one daemon, severed the head from another. A third he impaled, before swinging the twitching corpse around to bludgeon three more. Destruction from the dwarf’s hammer rained around him, but did not touch the elf. Not one scratch.

Avanuir took a heavy toll, almost acting as an extension of the elf’s will and fury. Not to be outdone, the dwarf king weighed in with his axe, smashing into anything that had survived his first titanic blow.

Howling, bleating, furious, the daemons were slaughtered.

A heavy pall of dust engulfed the survivors, their balefire eyes the only thing visible at first. The storm presaged a seismic crescendo, an aftershock of power that cast the rest of the bloody daemons back over the edge of the rock. They fell screaming, raging before being dashed to paste or impaled on the upraised blades of the monsters below.

Malekith was crouched down, his head bowed. He held on to his spear haft, using it to anchor him to the rock until the storm had passed. With the tremors fading, he rose to his full height again.

The elf prince was as impressive as the dwarf.

A long coat of ithilmar mail draped his lithe but honed body. Nearly twice as tall as the High King, his face was thin and pale but noble. There was wisdom in his eyes, born of the esteemed bloodline of the greatest
asur
, but coldness too that the dwarf did not fully understand. At times, it bordered on cruelty. Angular, almost almond-shaped, the elf prince’s eyes were concealed behind a tall, conical helm that left only his mouth visible. A mane of griffon hair cascaded from the peak and ran the length of Malekith’s back.