The Great Betrayal (5 page)

As Snorri’s booted feet hit the ground, Alkhor’s sobbing turned into derisive laughter.

‘
Foolish little creature
,’ it burbled and tugged at the edges of the wound the dwarf had made. From within the rotten ropes of intestine, the sacs of pus and putrefying organs, a welter of tentacles burst forth. One wrapped around the High King’s arm, the other pinned his leg. A third quested for his neck but he swatted it with his rune hammer before it could strangle him.

Each of the tentacles was swathed in sharp teeth that champed and gnawed at Snorri’s armour. Slowly, they began to drag the dwarf into Alkhor’s gaping maw.

Rising in the
saddle, Malekith put the bloated lord firmly in his sights – along with Snorri entangled in the daemon’s intestines, losing his fight for survival. Malekith was about to even the odds.

Digging his feet into the stirrups arrested the elf’s descent and the dragon pulled up sharply, its long neck angling downwards and nostrils flaring. Trails of smoke extruded from the corners of its mouth, carried away on the breeze.

‘I hope that armour of yours is impervious as you claim…’

Inhaling a deep, sulphurous breath, the dragon unleashed fire.

Flames roared hungrily
across the daemon’s wretched body, burning away pestilence and purging rot. Clods of fat, festering slabs of skin sizzled and spat. Alkhor squealed as the tentacles rippling from its stomach were reduced to charred meat, writhing like headless vipers.

‘
Htarken…
’ it pleaded, but the feathered sorcerer did not appear.

‘So that is your name,’ the elf prince muttered.

The daemon pulled away, its tattered wings beating furiously and spewing gouts of filth in its desperate attempt to escape. Slowly, Alkhor began to rise. Its body was still smouldering, shrinking as the dragon fire consumed it.

Snorri swung and missed. He cursed the daemon’s cowardice, hurling vengeful insults as it fled.

Malekith flew his dragon low and into the dwarf’s eye line.

‘Are you hurt, old friend?’

Snorri looked rueful, but otherwise uninjured.

‘Only my pride. Killing that thing will salve it.’

A feral smile turned the corners of Malekith’s mouth as he set his gaze on the fleeing daemon. Spurring his mount, he was about to pursue when he had to pull up sharply to avoid a burst of incandescent light exploding in front of him. Blinking back the after-flare, the elf saw a figure emerge from the sudden luminance. Clad in varicoloured robes, held aloft on feathered wings, Htarken barred Malekith’s path.

The elf reacted as quick as thought but his thrown spear evaporated into mercury before it could impale the daemon. Its outstretched claw and swiftly spoken incantation was enough to destroy the weapon. Htarken returned its talon to the folds of its robes, yet made no motion to attack.

All the while, Alkhor was escaping. Thinking quickly, Malekith turned to the lord of the eagle riders who had just arrived from on high.

‘Prince Aestar,’ he said, thrusting his sword in the plague daemon’s direction, ‘slay that thing!’

Nodding grimly, Prince Aestar soared through the clouds after the daemon, his brothers close behind. Malekith was left to face Htarken.

He would not be alone. A conclave of three Sapherian mage lords rose up beside the prince on pillared coruscations of gold.

‘You are finished, daemon.’ He gestured to the valley below where the hell-hosts were slowly dissipating, their mortal followers fleeing with the dissolution of their immortal allies. ‘Chaos has been defeated.’

‘
Has it?
’ Htarken spoke with a hundred different voices at once. Some were not even voices at all. They were the crackle of fire, the howling of the wind or the breaking of wood. They were cries of slaughter, pleas for mercy and the gibbering laughter of the insane. Birds, beasts, dwarfs and elves all collided in an unsettling union that put the prince’s teeth on edge.

Malekith grimaced as the sound of Htarken’s ‘voice’ echoed in his mind. Like a cancer, it sought to take root and destroy him from within.

‘
Change,
’ said the daemon, with the prince reeling, ‘
is inevitable. Even with all your many gifts, the heritage of your bloodline, you cannot fight entropy.
’

Malekith wondered why the mages had not yet banished this thing, and then he realised they were transfixed. Seized by a sudden palsy, they trembled as all the horrors of change were visited upon them. As the minds of the mages died, so too did the pillars of fire holding them up.

Htarken had them now, bound to puppet strings. And they danced, they jerked and spasmed until they exploded into transmuted globs of flesh and flailing limbs. They were loremasters of the White Tower of Hoeth and the feathered sorcerer had vanquished them as if they were nothing more than apprentices.

‘
Fate is mine to manipulate,
’ said the daemon. ‘
I have seen yours, elf. Would you like to know it?
’

Malekith was about to answer when a terrible pain seized his body. He convulsed, clutched at his skin.

His dragon mewled in fear and confusion.

‘I am…’ Malekith tore off his helm, ripped at his gorget and cuirass, ‘on fire! Isha preserve me!’

‘
All endings are known to me. Every skein of destiny is mine to behold. I see past, present and future. Nothing is occluded. Your doom has c–
’

Agony lessened, the fires in the elf’s mind faded to embers.

As he opened his eyes, Malekith saw a rune hammer lodged in Htarken’s chest. The daemon clutched at it feebly, arrested in its sermonising.

A gruff voice called from below.

‘You’ll find it hard to speak with dwarf iron in your gut.’

Relief washing over him like a balm with the dissipation of Htarken’s sorcery, Malekith nodded to his friend.

Snorri was not done. He outstretched his hand and the hammer’s haft began to quiver. As if snared by an invisible anchor the daemon came with it, drawn down by the runecraft of the weapon, unable to remove it from where it had impaled its ribs and chest.

‘
I am master of fate…
’ Htarken was weakening, his many voices becoming less multitudinous with every foot he descended. ‘
I see all ends… I see…
’

‘Bet you didn’t see this, hell-spawn,’ Snorri snarled through gritted teeth. The daemon was almost in front of him. He readied his axe in one hand, drew in the hammer with the other.

Htarken was weeping… no,
laughing
. Its spluttering mirth paused for agonised breaths and to spit ichor from its mouth. The hood fell back in its pain-wrecked convulsions, a savage parody of what it had done to the mages, revealing a grotesque bird-headed fiend. Narrow eyes filled with pit-black sclera glared over a hooked beak.

‘
I am oracle, architect and thread keeper…
’ it gasped, every second bringing it closer to the bite of the dwarf’s axe. Htarken coughed, its laughter grew deeper and its struggles ceased. ‘
Your doom is certain, you and your pathetic races. Chaos has come and already a change is upon you. Feel it warp your bones, the very course of your bloodlines. It will shape the future and I will be there to witness it. Htarken the Everchanging shall stand upon the ashen corpses of you all and exult. Doomed…
’ it cawed, eyes widening in a sudden fervour. ‘
Doomed, doomed, doomed, doom–
’

‘Elfling!’ Snorri cleaved the raving daemon with his axe as Malekith plunged Avanuir into its heart.

Htarken screamed a thousand times all at once as it was cast back into the abyss. An inner fire consumed it, possessed of chilling heat that made the elf and dwarf recoil.

In a flare of light, the last gasp of a candle flame before its air has run out, Htarken was gone and left only colourful ash motes in its wake.

Malekith felt his
heart beating hard in his chest like a drum. His arm was shaking where he held Avanuir and he had to lower it to keep from dropping his sword.

‘Isha…’ he breathed and turned to the dwarf.

Snorri was on one knee, holding himself up with his axe as his chest and back heaved up and down.

A shaft of sunlight blazed down from the sky, lancing through the bloody cloud that was slowly turning back to white. Snorri looked up into it and let the warmth bathe his face.

Malekith took off his helm to wipe the sweat from his brow. He smiled.

Snorri was nodding.

‘Good,’ he said, licking the dryness from his lips.

With their leaders banished or fled, the hell-hosts were dying. The lesser daemons were gone, the beasts and thralls were slowly being destroyed by the triumphant armies of the elves and dwarfs.

Snorri sighed as if a heavy burden had been removed from his shoulders and tramped wearily up the stone steps of his throne where he sat down heavily.

‘Thus ends the threat of Chaos to the Old World,’ he said. ‘We have followed in the footsteps of our ancestors, of Grimnir and Grungni and Valaya.’

‘Of my father Aenarion and Caledor Dragontamer,’ said Malekith as his dragon bowed low to let him leap from the saddle and be at the dwarf’s side.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, the lords who had challenged darkness and cast it back to hell.

‘You look tired,’ said the elf.

Snorri slumped against the throne.

‘I am.’

Still clutched in one hand, his rune hammer drooled black smoke from a cleft in its head. Malekith knew the weapon’s name was
Angazuf
, which Snorri had told him meant ‘sky iron’. In banishing the daemon it had been ruined.

Snorri looked sad to see its runic strength diminish; the hammer was older than some hold halls.

‘What else has been lost to this fight, I wonder?’ he uttered, suddenly melancholy.

Around them the battle was ending. With the defeat of the Chaos hordes, order was returning. Life would return in time, but this would forever be a tainted place. For the touch of Chaos is a permanent taint that cannot ever be entirely removed.

Above them, Karag Vlak was quiescent, its anger spent like that of the dwarf king.

Around the mountain and before it, elves and dwarfs lay dead in their thousands.

But it was for his friend that Malekith’s eyes betrayed the most concern.

There was rheum around Snorri’s eyes. Age lines threaded his face, gnarled skin and lesions showed on his hands. Like his rune hammer, he was broken. The elf wondered just how much this last fight had taken out of the dwarf, how badly Alkhor had really wounded him.

‘Don’t look so afraid, I am not dead yet,’ growled the king.

Silent as statues, his thronebearers and hearthguard were grim-faced.

Malekith smiled, though it was affected with melancholy. He looked around at the battlefield, at the dying and the dead.

‘We have paid a great price for this,’ said the elf, finally answering the dwarf’s question. ‘Here we witness the passing of a golden age, I fear.’

He watched the elves and dwarfs as they fought together to cleanse the battlefield of the last remnants of resistance. Some had already begun to celebrate victory together and exchanged tokens and talismans. For many, it would be the last time they would see one another.

So different and yet common purpose had formed a strong bond.

‘But perhaps we can usher in a new one. Either way, let us hope this is an end to hell and darkness.’ He added, without conviction, ‘To war and death.’

‘Aye,’ Snorri agreed, ‘it is the province of more youthful kings, I think.’

Malekith nodded, lost in introspection.

‘I had expected more joy, elfling,’ said the dwarf. He leaned forwards to clap Malekith’s armoured shoulder. ‘And you say that we are dour.’

The elf laughed, but his eyes were far away.

‘We should feast,’ he said at last, returning to the present and leaving his troubles for now, ‘and honour this triumph.’

‘Back at Karaz-a-Karak, we will do just that, young elfling.’ Some colour had returned to the dwarf’s cheeks at the prospect of beer and meat. ‘And yet you still seem moribund. What is it, Malekith? What ails you?’

‘Nothing…’ The elf’s eyes were fixed again on a dark horizon, his mind on the remembered fire that had ravaged his body. It felt familiar somehow. ‘Nothing, Snorri,’ he said again, more lucidly. ‘It can wait. It can certainly wait.’

CHAPTER ONE

Rat Catching

The tunnel was
dank and reeked of mould. Darkness thicker than pitch was threaded with the sound of hidden, chittering things. Far from the heat of the forges, here in the lost corridors of the underway, monsters roamed. Or so Snorri hoped.

‘Bring it closer, cousin. I caught a whiff of their stink up ahead.’

Morgrim held the lantern up higher. Its light threw clawing shadows across the walls, illuminating old waymarker runes that had long since fallen into disrepair.

‘Karak Krum,’ uttered the older dwarf, his face framed in the light. A ruddy orange glow limned his black beard, making it look as if it were on fire. ‘The dwarfs there are long since dead, cousin. No one has ventured this deep into the Ungdrin Ankor for many, many years.’

Snorri squinted as he looked at Morgrim over his shoulder.

‘Scared, are you? Thought you Bargrums had spines of iron, cousin.’

Morgrim bristled. ‘Aye, we do!’ he said, a little too loudly.

Two dwarfs, standing alone in a sea of black with but a small corona of lamplight to enfold them, waited. After what felt like an age, the echo of Morgrim’s truculence subsided and he added, ‘I am not scared, cousin, merely thinking aloud.’

Snorri snorted.

‘And who do you think you are, oh brave and mighty dawi, Snorri Whitebeard reborn?’ said Morgrim. ‘You have his name but not his deeds, cousin.’

‘Not yet,’ Snorri retorted with typical stoicism.

Grumbling under his breath, Morgrim traced the runic inscription of the waymarker with a leathern hand. There was dirt under the nails and rough calluses on the palms earned from hours spent in the forge. ‘Don’t you wonder what happened to them?’

‘Who?’

‘The dawi of Karak Krum.’

‘Either dead or gone. You think far too much, and act far too little,’ said Snorri, eyes front and returning to the hunt. ‘Here, look, some of their dung.’

He pointed to a piled of noisome droppings a few inches from his booted foot.

Wrinkling his nose, Morgrim scowled. ‘The reek of it,’ he said. ‘Like no rat I have ever smelled.’

Snorri unhitched his axe from the sheath on his back. He also carried a dagger at his waist and kept it close to hand too. Narrow though it was, he didn’t want to be caught in the tunnel’s bottleneck unarmed.

‘Make a point of sniffing rats, do you, cousin?’ he laughed.

Morgrim didn’t answer. He glanced one last time at the runic marker describing the way to Karak Krum. Passed away or simply moved on when the seams of gold and gems had run dry, dwarfs no longer walked its halls, the forges were silent. Merchants and reckoners from Karaz-a-Karak had brought tales of a glowing rock discovered by the miners of Krum. It had happened centuries ago, the story passed down by his father and his father before him. It was little more than myth now but the stark evidence of the ancient hold’s demise was still very real. Morgrim wondered what would happen if the same fate ever befell Karaz-a-Karak.

Snorri snapped him out of his bleak reverie.

‘More light! This way, cousin.’

‘I hear something…’ Morgrim thumbed the buckle loose on his hammer’s thong and took its haft. Leather creaked in the dwarf’s grip.

From up ahead there emanated a scratching, chittering noise. It sounded almost like speech, except for the fact that both Morgrim and Snorri knew that rats could do no such thing.

Morgrim turned his head, strained his ear. ‘
Grobi
?’

‘This deep?’

In this part of the underway, the tunnel was low and cramped as if it hadn’t been hewn by dwarfs at all. Such a thing was impossible, wasn’t it? Only dwarfs could dig the roads of the Ungdrin Ankor that connected all the holds of the Worlds Edge Mountains and beyond. And yet…

‘A troll, then?’

Snorri looked back briefly. ‘One that talks to itself?’

‘I once encountered a troll with two heads that talked to itself, cousin.’

Snorri shot Morgrim a dubious look.

‘No. Doesn’t smell right. Can tell a troll from a mile away. Its breath is like a latrine married to an abattoir.’

‘Reminds me of Uncle Fugri’s
gruntis
.’

Snorri laughed, and they moved on.

A larger cavern loomed ahead of the dwarfs, unseen but with the shape and angle of the opening suggesting a widening threshold, the scent of air and rat together with the sound-echo hinting at a vaulted ceiling. Dwarfs knew rock. They knew it because it was under their nails, on their tongues, in their blood and ever surrounded them.

It was not merely a cavern ahead of the two dwarfs, where the tunnel met its end. It was large and it was a warren infested with rats.

Snorri could hardly contain his excitement.

‘Are you ready, cousin?’ He brought up his axe level with his chest and clutched it two-handed. There was a spike on the end of it that could be used for thrusting, a useful weapon in a tight corner. For the last mile the dwarfs had been forced to stoop, and the prospect of standing straight was abruptly appealing. At least, it was to Morgrim.

‘As ready as I was when you defied your father’s wishes, slipped your retainers and dragged me along on this rat hunt.’

‘See,’ Snorri explained, inching closer to the cavern entrance, ‘that’s what I like about you, Morgrim. Always so enthusiastic.’

Snorri touched a finger to the talisman around his neck, muttered, ‘Grungni…’ and peered around the edge of the tunnel.

Several large rats were gathered in the middle of a vaulted chamber. It might once have been the old entry hall to Karak Krum. Gnawing frantically at something, chattering to one another in high-pitched squeaks and squeals, the creatures seemed oblivious to the presence of the dwarfs.

‘Are they wearing rags?’ Morgrim was so incredulous he shone the lantern closer.

‘
Hsst!
’ Snorri hissed, scowling at his cousin. ‘Douse the light!’

Too late, Morgrim shuttered the lantern.

One of the rats looked up from its feast, fragments of calcified bone flaking from its maw as it screeched a warning to its brethren.

As one the others turned, snarling and exposing yellowed fangs dripping hungrily with saliva.

Snorri roared, swinging his axe around in a double-handed arc.

‘Grungni!’

The first rat fell decapitated as it lunged for the dwarf, its head bouncing off the slabbed floor and rolling into a corner. At the chamber’s edges it was dark, so dark the dwarfs could not see much farther than the glow of the lantern.

Snorri cut open a second, splitting it from groin to sternum and spilling its foul innards, before Morgrim crushed a third with his hammer. He battered a fourth with a swing of the lantern, the stink of the rat’s burning fur enough to make him gag as it recoiled and died.

‘Two apiece!’ Snorri was grinning wildly, his perfect white teeth like a row of locked shields in his mouth, framed by a blond beard. The heritage of his ancestors was evident in the sapphire blue of his eyes, his regal bearing and confidence. He was prince of the dwarf realm in every way.

Morgrim was less enthused. He was looking into the shadows at the edge of the chamber. It was definitely the old entry hall to Karak Krum. Mildewed wood from thrones and tables littered the floor and a pair of statues venerating the lord and lady of the hold sat in cobwebbed alcoves against the east and west walls, facing one another. Sconces, denuded of their torches, sat beneath the statues, intended to illuminate them and the chamber. They were all that stood out at the periphery of the hall, except for the glinting rubies now floating in the darkness.

Morgrim cast the lantern into the middle of the chamber where it broke apart and flooded the area around it with firelight. Scattered embers and the slew of ignited oil illuminated a truth that Morgrim was aware of even before he had unhitched his shield.

‘More of them, cousin.’ He backed up, casting his gaze around.

Snorri’s bright eyes flashed eagerly. ‘A lot more.’

The dwarfs were surrounded as a score of rats crawled from the darkness, chittering and squeaking. To Morgrim’s ears it could have been laughter. ‘Are they mocking us?’

Snorri brandished his axe in challenge. ‘Not for long, cousin.’

His next blow cleaved a skull in two, the second caving a chest as the rat reared up at him. Snorri killed a third with a thrown dagger before something leapt onto his back and put him on one knee.

‘
Gnhhh…
Cousin!’

Morgrim finished one off with a hammer blow to the jaw, and broke its back as it fell mewling. He then kicked ash from the sundered lantern in the snout of another, before using his shield to batter the rat that was clawing and biting at Snorri’s back.

Scurrying and scratching rose above the din of blades and bludgeons hitting flesh, the squeals of dying rats.

‘Bloody vermin,’ Snorri raged, throwing another rat off his arm before it could sink its teeth in.

A score had become two score in a matter of minutes.

Morgrim smashed two rats down with his shield, staved in the head of a third with his hammer. ‘There are too many. And big, much bigger than any rat I’ve ever seen.’

‘Nonsense,’ Snorri chided. ‘They are just rats, cousin. Vermin do not rule the underway, we dawi are its kings and masters.’

Despite his bullishness, the prince of Karaz-a-Karak was breathing hard. Sweat lapped his brow, and shone like pearls on his beard.

‘We must go back, get to the tunnel,’ said Morgrim. ‘Fight them one at a time.’ He was making for the cavern entrance from whence the dwarfs had first come, but it was thronged with the creatures. A mass of furry bodies stood between them and the relative safety of the tunnel.

‘We can kill them, Morgrim. They’re only rats.’

But they were not, not really, and Snorri knew it even if he would not admit this to his cousin. Something flashed in the half-light from the slowly fading lantern that looked like a hook or cleaver, possibly a knife. It could not have been armour, nor the studs on a leather jerkin – rats did not wear armour, or carry weapons. But they were hunched, broad shouldered in some instances, and some went on two legs, not four. Did one have a beard?

‘The way back is barred, we must go forwards,’ said Morgrim, the urgency in his tone revealing just how dire he thought the situation to be.

Reluctantly, Snorri nodded.

The two dwarfs were back to back, almost encircled by rats. Eyes like wet rubies flashed hungrily. The stink of wet fur and charnel breath washed over them in a thick fug. Chittering and squeaking wore at the nerves like a blunt blade working to sever a rope.

‘Remember Thurbad’s lessons?’ Snorri asked. A slash to his cheek made him grimace but he cut down the rat who did it. ‘Little bastard, that was a knife!’

Morgrim’s voice suggested he was in no mood for an exam.

‘Which one, cousin? There are many.’ He kept the rats at bay with his shield, thrusting it against the press of furred bodies trying to overwhelm him. His hammer was slick with gore and he had to concentrate to maintain his grip, thankful for the leather-bound haft.