The Great Betrayal

CHAPTER TEN

The Hammer of Old

After leaving Snorri to the tender ministrations of a certain priestess, Morgrim didn’t return to his clan holdings as he originally intended. To reach the southern halls of Karaz-a-Karak, even via the mining routes, would take too long and he had no desire to face his father. Not yet.

His mind was occupied by other thoughts.

Morgrim believed in fate, he believed in a reason for everything and everything for a reason. So when Ranuld Silverthumb pronounced a great destiny for his cousin, he was certain of its fulfilment. This in turn troubled him. His concern was twofold: first at what lengths Snorri would go to in order to ensure he attained his prophesied greatness as quickly as possible and second, what that meant for him.

If he was lucky, a dwarf would live a long life; but children were rare and in order for his name to live on, his legacy to endure, it was by his deeds that he would often be remembered. Morgrim had no wife, and no aspirations to find one. He did not wish to be a general or even a king, though his position as the prince’s cousin could afford him such a title. Like his father and his father before him, he was a miner. It was a life and profession that suited him, that suited many dwarfs, but one thing about it bothered him.

How would he make his mark?

Such aspirations had never worried him before, but some of Snorri’s rampant ambition had rubbed off he supposed. Death had been close in the dilapidated halls of Karak Krum. He’d felt it like a cold breath on the back of his neck. Yes, he and Snorri had laughed about it, but Morgrim saw the look in his cousin’s eyes that mirrored his own.

Both of them could have been killed in that lonely place, left to be gnawed upon by rats. Morgrim did not want that as his epitaph. Like any dwarf, he wanted to be remembered.

Perhaps then that was why he now found himself in the Hall of Kings, standing before one of the greatest liege-lords Karaz-a-Karak had ever known.

Every previous incumbent of the Throne of Power was honoured in this echoing gallery of jewel and stone. Thorik Snorrison, slayer of the ngardruk; Gorim Ironhammer, he who discovered the mines of Gunbad and Silverspear; and Gurni Hammerfist, he who was father of Gotrek and defeated the orc warchief, Huzkalukk with only one hand. Legends all, but it was the alcove-chamber of Snorri Whitebeard that was the largest and most venerated.

An immense statue of the High King of the Karaz Ankor, rendered in his full panoply of war and hewn from flawless marble, stared out into the darkness of the deeper hall.

The Hall of Kings was a place of veneration, of quiet imprecation to the spirits of the great ancestors. Some came to beseech wisdom, others fortune and better times. Occasionally, dwarfs would speak their grudges before these effigies of stone or swear oaths of vengeance or fealty.

Morgrim did none of these things, for he did not come to the Hall of Kings on his behalf but rather he came to plead for another.

‘Tromm, High King Whitebeard,’ he uttered, bowing his head sombrely to remove his helm before taking a knee in the shadow of the cyclopean liege-lord of Karaz-a-Karak. ‘I come to you on behalf of another. Though he carries your namesake, and proudly, he does not have your temperance.’ Breathing deeply, he said. ‘Let him heed the wisdom of his ancestors. By Grimnir, he has courage but let him be brave enough to not let pride ruin a father’s love and respect. Let him find inner counsel against reckless abandon. Let him live to see his destiny realised. For this I make my oaths to the gods, to hearth and hold.’

Morgrim raised his eyes, returning the great horned war helm to his head.

Hard marble stared back at him.

The ancient king had not stirred. No magic had animated his stern countenance, which was as unyielding as winter earth. His jaw was still fixed. His fists were still clenched.

But Morgrim hoped his words were heeded anyway. Oaths made, he began to appreciate the rest of what lay inside the alcove-chamber.

Though his weapons and armour were locked away in the treasure vaults of the lower deeps, protected by rune seals and stern-faced ancestor guards, there were other artefacts of Snorri Whitebeard’s reign. Banners describing his conquests and deeds swathed each of the chamber’s three walls. Trophies of the terrible monsters he had slain were hung up on spikes of iron between them.

Some of the scaled flesh of Gnaugrak was missing, supposedly cleaved off to fashion a wondrous cloak given as a gift to one of Snorri’s vassal lords. It was said it had taken the king and over fifty of his ironbreakers to impale the dragon’s heart. On the opposite wall, the spiked head of a massive orc chieftain. Preserved in oils and unguents, the greenskin still leered, though the gums around its shattered tusks were slowly succumbing to rot. It neighboured a crushed giant’s skull and beside that was a flayed troll carcass, doused in fire-salt to prevent regeneration. Morgrim doubted that even without the salt, the beast would ever be able to re-knit its skin and bones, or grow its organs anew. Stranger things had happened though.

Bones of other creatures, griffons and shaggoths, great tuskors and iron-hided manticores, fimir and wyverns described a bloody legacy that stretched into centuries. But it was to the broken hammer, incongruous amongst the grisly trophies, that the dwarf’s eye was drawn.

‘What must it have been like to live in such days?’ he wondered aloud, reaching out for the weapon.

Its power had been drained long ago, during one of the last great battles of the age. A jagged cleft raked down the head and split the haft, evidence of where a daemon’s evil had broken it. Tentatively, Morgrim went to trace his finger down the hammer’s mortal wound, imagining it reforged before he took his hand away.

‘A different time…’

Morgrim turned sharply at the voice in his ear. What he saw standing in the entrance of the alcove-chamber, almost fifty paces away, was a friend.

A look of incredulity crumpled Morgrim’s face as he recognised the warrior before him.

‘Drogor?’

The dwarf was dressed in furs and lizard hide, a bronze pauldron over one shoulder and a helmet with a flanged crest in the crook of his right arm. On his left side was a mace, also bronze, with a heavy gem affixed to the pommel. He looked weather-beaten, his skin sun-kissed and a peaty brown, but he wasn’t old. White, wiry hair ran a ring around his balding pate and his long moustaches drooped like the exhausted tentacles of some leviathan cloud. His beard was bound in a bronze ringlet, etched with the snarling visage of a serpent. A cloak of exotic feathers cascaded down his back.

Drogor was staring intently at the statue and the hammer above it in what Morgrim took to be reverence. At mention of his name, the dwarf smiled and nodded.

‘By the ancestors, I thought you were dead!’ Rushing over, Morgrim clapped his errant friend in a firm embrace, slapping his back and shoulder.

‘I went south with my clan, Morg,’ said Drogor, coughing as Morgrim crushed the air out of him. ‘I didn’t venture north to the Wastes.’

‘Of course… I just didn’t expect to see you again.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘There’s been no word from Karak Zorn in many years, and last we heard…’

At this remark, Drogor nodded grimly.

‘Aye, there are worse things than sun and jiggers the size of your fist in the endless jungle. Ziggurats that claw at the sky, and beasts…’ He shook his head, as his gaze was drawn far away as if back beneath the sweltering canopy. ‘Like you have never before seen. Creatures of tooth and scale, of leather pinion and tusk, chitinous bone plates that repel crossbow bolts like paper darts.’

Drogor’s hand was shaking, and Morgrim clutched the fingers to steady it.

‘It’s all right, old friend,’ he said, his voice soothing, ‘you are returned to Karaz-a-Karak, but I am surprised you are back at all. How long did you travel from the Southlands to get here? How many long years has it been?’

Clans Bargrum and Zarrdum had been staunch allies for many decades, across two generations without bloodshed or a grudge made. Miners and fortune hunters, the Zarrdums had left Karaz-a-Karak over twenty years ago and gone south to be reunited with their cousins in the sunny climes of Karak Zorn.

Finding his composure again, Drogor said, ‘We were many months travelling on perilous roads. Fifty of us ventured out, our pack mules brimming with saurian gold. Of that expedition, I alone remain.’

‘What happened?’

Drogor’s expression darkened further. ‘Having survived the jungle with just under half of my father’s warriors, we reached the borders of Karak Azul.’ His eyes narrowed, remembering ‘Foolishly, we thought we would be safe in the shadow of the mountain but we were wrong. An ambush, old friend. Archers, hidden in the crags and raining steel-fanged death upon me and my fellow dawi. It was a slaughter.’

Morgrim’s jaw clenched at such perfidy. ‘Cowards…’ he breathed, an undercurrent of anger affecting his voice. ‘How did you survive?’

At this Drogor hung his head. ‘To my shame, I ran and hid.’

‘Dreng tromm… Mercy of Valaya that you lived. There is no shame in retreating from certain death.’

‘Then why is it that I wish I had died with my kin?’

Morgrim gripped the shoulder of his old friend, and exhaled a deep, rueful breath.

‘Come with me,’ he said, after some thought. ‘I must meet my cousin outside the Great Hall but then we can find an alehouse and drink to the honour of your slain clansmen.’

Nodding solemnly, Drogor said, ‘I don’t think I have ever met your cousin, the great prince of the Karaz Ankor. I much look forward to it.’

‘I warn you,’ said Morgrim as he left the alcove-chamber, ‘he takes a little getting used to.’

Drogor smiled. ‘We have time, old friend.’