The Great Betrayal (13 page)

‘If we are discovered,’ hissed Sevekai, glancing at the dragon then back at Kaitar, ‘our dark lord’s plans could be jeopardised, and I have no desire to engage the interest of the beast.’

Kaitar grinned, a faint resonance to his voice Sevekai hadn’t noticed before. ‘Then we creep softly and silently, like shadows.’

‘Like shadows,’ repeated Sevekai, eyes locked with Kaitar’s.

Slowly, the dark elves detached themselves from their hiding place and began to creep closer.

Morgrim had already
mounted the beast by the time Snorri was ready to do the same. Though he had agreed to ride upon the dragon’s back, the dwarf prince kept his distance.

‘Be careful, cousin,’ he said, as Morgrim climbed a length of white hemp lowered by the prince. It was thin and Snorri had expected the rope to snap, but it proved equal to Morgrim’s considerable mass.

‘Must be bound with steel,’ he muttered, but detected an aura shimmering off the rope.

Imladrik gestured to him, offering the saddle as one would welcome a stranger in their house. ‘Your turn, my prince.’

It was then Snorri realised he had no desire to ride this beast, to fly amongst the clouds. The very thought of it brought an unpleasant acerbic tang to his mouth, but he swallowed it down, knowing he could not be outdone by his cousin.

‘We are hall dwellers, not dragon riders,’ he grumbled, cinching his belt up and reaching for the proffered rope.

The faint tang of spoiled meat, the scent of dust and ancient fire-baked plains, quite incongruous in winter, suddenly tainted the breeze.

Inches from grabbing the rope, Snorri’s fingers seized. A second later and Draukhain reared up, its bulk smacking the dwarf onto his rump. It roared, spitting a plume of flame into the air and swinging its head around as if searching.

‘Grimnir’s teeth!’ Snorri scrambled to his feet, reaching for his rune axe. ‘Never trust an elgi! Never trust a drakk!’ he spat, ripping the shimmering blade from its sheath.

Flung back in the saddle, Imladrik was trying to steady the beast. He muttered words of command and reprimand, but in a language neither dwarfs, nor most elves, could understand.

Morgrim was pitched off the dragon’s back. He rolled, grabbing at the beast’s spines to try and arrest his fall, and ended up dumped on the ground next to its thrashing tail. An errant flick caught his helm and he staggered, trying to back away. Like Snorri, he had drawn his weapon.

Not understanding what was happening, together the dwarfs circled the beast.

Snorri’s expression was murderous as he briefly met his cousin’s gaze. There was more than a hint of self-satisfaction in his eyes.

‘You offer us safe passage on your drakk,’ he said to the elf, ‘and then it tries to kill us!’

‘Lords, please.’ Imladrik was still struggling to calm Draukhain, though his verbal goads had lessened. Instead, intense concentration was etched on his face as an entirely different war of wills played out.

‘What is he doing?’ whispered Morgrim, swinging his hammer around in a ready grip.

Snorri wasn’t listening. His teeth were clenched. ‘If dawi were meant to fly, Grimnir would not have taught us how to kill wyverns and drakk. Any creature with wings is no friend to a dawi,’ he spat.

Ignorant of the dwarfs circling him and his mount, Imladrik closed his eyes and began to sing. A soft, lilting refrain echoed across the clearing. Though the elf’s words rarely rose above a whisper, they were resonant with power and potency. Each syllable was perfectly enunciated, every string of incantation precisely exacted.

At first Draukhain resisted, reacting to whatever it was that had ignited its predatory wrath. But slowly, as the pattern repeated and Imladrik wove the dragonsong tighter and tighter around it, the beast was soothed and its head bowed. Anger still burned in the black pits of its eyes, but it was fading to embers.

When he was done, Imladrik sank a little in his seat as if his armour was suddenly heavier. When he removed his war helm, his face was gaunt and dappled with beads of sweat.

‘My sincerest apologies,’ he began, a little out of breath, ‘He has never done that before, except in battle. Something enflamed his anger, I don’t know what.’

‘Perhaps it was a hankering to taste dwarf flesh,’ Snorri chided. ‘I warn you, my meat is bloody tough!’ He brandished his axe meaningfully. ‘And my
rhuns
are sharp.’

Mortified, Imladrik put his palms together in a gesture for peace and calm. ‘Please, it was a misunderstanding.’

Snorri wasn’t about to back down. The beast had accepted Morgrim without complaint, but railed against his presence. It was a matter of wounded pride now, a sin that the prince of Karaz-a-Karak had in abundance.

‘And if we’d have been aloft when another “misunderstanding” took place? What then, eh? Cast to the earth like crag hawks pinioned by a quarreller’s bolt, left to be dashed on the rocks as a red smear.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I am dawi born, stone and steel. If you wish us dead then fight us face-to-face, you dirty, thagging elgi.’

It was a step too far. Morgrim knew it and went to say something but no words could take back his cousin’s insult.

Imladrik paled, and not from the exertions of his dragonsong. He had to bite back his anger, covering it with a low bow. His eyes glittered dangerously when he rose again, as hard as the gemstones they so closely resembled.

‘I deeply regret this, and offer apology to you both. I shall convey the same remarks to your father, the High King,’ he said to Snorri alone, ‘but you have much to learn of elves, young prince. Much indeed.’

Obeying a snarled command, Draukhain speared into the air and emitted a roar of sympathetic anger. With a few beats of its mighty wings, both dragon and elven prince were gone, lost to the cloud and the endless sky.

‘That was foolish,’ said Morgrim. He had followed the dragon’s searching gaze to a cluster of rocks outlining the clearing but could see nothing amiss amongst them.

‘Foolish was it?’ Snorri turned, but when he saw the look on his cousin’s face his vainglorious pride deserted him. He muttered, ‘Perhaps I did speak out of turn.’

‘Your words were callous, cousin, and ill-considered.’

Snorri looked to his boots, then to his half-hand. His anger, self-directed, rose again. ‘My father has said something similar to me often. Are you going to rebuke me constantly as he does, cousin?’

‘I…’ Morgrim met Snorri’s hurt gaze and knew the prince was just lashing out. The High King was a hard taskmaster, tougher on his son than even his most veteran generals. It would be difficult to bear for any dwarf. In the end, Morgrim relented. ‘No cousin, I will not. But without wings to take us back to hearth and hold, we have a long journey ahead of us. I don’t think we’ll make the rinkkaz. Your father will be wrathful, I fear.’

‘Let him,’ the prince snorted. ‘I would rather walk the road in my boots, facing urk and troll, even my father’s anger, than risk life and limb on the back of a drakk.’ He stomped off down the path, slinging his axe onto his back and swearing loudly with every step.

Morgrim decided not to reply and fell in behind him to let his cousin vent.

The return to Karaz-a-Karak suddenly seemed much longer and more arduous.

Crouched in a
thicket of dense scrub, Sevekai fought to catch his breath. When the dragon had reared up, he had fled with the others back down the ridge.

The ambush site was close by, as yet undiscovered.

Killing dwarf merchants in the darkness was something he had a taste for, but he was no dragon slayer. In truth, the creatures terrified him. Even those slaved to the will of the druchii he treated with wary apprehension. It had taken him all his willpower to stay hidden when the beast had bayed for their blood.

Verigoth was still shaking and took a pinch of
ashkallar
to calm his nerves. The narcotic was fast-acting but the tremors still remained.

‘Did it see us?’ he asked.

Sevekai shook his head, reliving the moment in a waking nightmare.

‘We’d already be dead if it had,’ he breathed. His gaze fell on Kaitar, who was watching them all impassively. ‘Are you not disturbed at all, Kaitar?’

He shrugged, as bizarre and incongruous a gesture as he could make in the circumstances.

‘We are alive. What is there left to fear?’

Numenos had taken out his blades to sharpen them and calm his shattered nerves. Though his body still trembled, his hands were steady. It spread slowly up his arms, to his neck and back.

‘Is it ice or blood you have in your veins, druchii?’ he asked, glancing up from his labours to regard Kaitar.

‘Neither,’ Kaitar answered with a laugh.

Watching the exchange keenly, Sevekai couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

Mirth changed to murder with the shifting of the breeze on Kaitar’s face. ‘We should go back and kill those two dwarfs.’

Sevekai shook his head. ‘That door is closed to us.’

‘The beast is fled,’ Kaitar pressed.

With a flash of silver, Sevekai’s sickle blade was at Kaitar’s throat. His voice was thick with threat. ‘I said no.’

Kaitar raised his hands, showing Sevekai his palms in a plaintive gesture.

‘As you wish.’

Glaring at him for a moment longer, Sevekai lowered his blade and returned it to its place on his baldric. He addressed the warband. ‘The storm is abating,’ he said, gesturing to the breaking cloud. ‘We will need fresh attire by the time the dawn breaches it.’

Before sailing to the Old World, his mind was implanted with Malekith’s sorcery. Into Sevekai’s mental pathways, he had poured memories of the secret trade routes of the dwarfs, those learned many years ago when he had befriended their High King. Snorri Whitebeard was long dead, so too Malekith’s affinity for dwarfs. Only cruelty remained, and a desire for vengeance against those who had wronged him and cast him from his rightful throne.

Sevekai felt these desires vicariously like hot knives in his mind as he sifted through the scraps of memory he needed to fulfil his mission. Failure was not something he dared countenance. Killing the dwarf lords would have garnered favour but his spine was not up to the task of returning to the clearing. An image resolved in his mind’s eye, a sheltered passageway of rock and earth, high hills and scattered forest. He had never seen the trail before yet it was as familiar to him as his own hand, or the blade he wielded with it. A second vision revealed a face: a woman, a sorceress, and a name to go with it.

Drutheira.

She was to be their overseer. Sevekai scowled inwardly, and wondered if she had requested this duty. It would not surprise him in the least.

‘We move now,’ he said.

They needed to find elves first, some asur to kill and steal from before they ambushed again or met up with the sorceress.

It would be as it was before, only this time they would be brazen and leave a survivor.

‘Follow me,’ said Sevekai, the route burning brightly like a torturer’s fire in his head. ‘We have elves and dwarfs to kill.’

Snorri and Morgrim
were skirting the foothills when the dauntless peaks of Karaz-a-Karak towered above them through mist and cloud. Monolithic ancestor statues tall as the flank of the mountain loomed into view, silently appraising the nobles with stern stone countenances.

Shading his eyes from the sun, Morgrim looked up in awe. ‘I see Smednir and Thungi, sons of Grungni and Valaya.’

Several hours had passed since their encounter with Imladrik and his dragon, but the memory of it remained – as did the burning insult Snorri felt at the beast’s sudden change in temperament. But to the prince’s credit, he kept it hidden.

Snorri followed his cousin’s gaze, then looked further across the mountain to an eagle gate, one of the lofty eyries through which the honoured brotherhood of the Gatekeepers kept watch on the upper world. Beneath and beside the chiselled portal hewn into the very mountainside were more dwarf ancestors.

‘And there is Gazul and your namesake Morgrim, at Grimnir’s side.’

All of the ancestors, their siblings and progeny were rendered as immense cyclopean statues around the flank of Karaz-a-Karak. Crafted in the elder days, they reminded all of the Worlds Edge of the hold’s importance and closeness to the gods.

With the hold in sight, the mood between the cousins began to improve.

‘More than once, I thought we were bound for the underearth and Gazul’s halls,’ said Morgrim.

‘Bah, not even close, cousin. You fret too much.’ Snorri slapped him on the back, grinning widely. He thrust his chin up, breathed deeply of the imagined scent of forges and the hearth he would soon enjoy. ‘Lords of the mountain, cousin. Both of us. Ha!’

Morgrim’s own declaration was less ebullient. ‘Lords of the mountain, Snorri.’ He looked down at his cousin’s ruined hand. ‘And with the wounds to prove it.’

Snorri sniffed. ‘A scratch, Morgrim, nothing more than that.’ When his eyes alighted on a figure waiting on the road ahead, his smile faded. ‘Oh bugger…’

‘Eh?’ Morgrim was reaching for his hammer when he came to the same realisation as Snorri. ‘Oh bugger.’

Furgil Torbanson, thane of pathfinders, stood in the middle of the road with a loaded crossbow hanging low at his hip on a strap of leather. At the other hip he carried a pair of hand axes in a deerskin sheath. In place of a helmet, he wore a leather cap of elk hide, three feathers protruding from the peak. Lightly armoured, most of his attire was rustic, woven from hardy wool and dyed in deep greens and browns as befitted a ranger.

He was not a dwarf given to saying much, but his eyes gave more away in that moment that his tongue ever would. ‘You have been missed, lords of Everpeak.’

Four other rangers blended out of the foothills. Dressed in the same manner as Furgil, they also carried various pots and pans about them. One also had a brace of conies tied to his belt, another had a pheasant.

‘Are we having a feast?’ Snorri ventured hopefully.

‘No young prince, we are not,’ said a stern, unyielding voice from farther up the road. When a hulking, armoured warrior, much larger than the rangers, stepped into his eye line, Snorri groaned. ‘Thurbad,’ he muttered, nodding to the captain of the hearthguard. ‘I take it my father sent you to bring me back?’