The Great Betrayal (4 page)

The slain monster staggered back, not quite realising it was already dead, and fell off the rock to the earth below.

Spreading its wings, the dragon unleashed a deep-throated bellow that prickled the High King’s beard.

‘No need to shout.’

‘Hope there are no hard feelings, old friend,’ said the prince with a wicked smile.

Snorri glowered at the beast, but his wolfish grin returned quickly. ‘Consider that one I owe,’ he said. ‘Our friendship is worth more than the stolen scalp of some shaggoth.’

The dragon growled in empathy and Snorri laughed despite the beast’s formidable size and presence.

Malekith muttered a heartfelt greeting to his mount that Snorri didn’t catch. As he approached where it was perched on the edge of the rock, the dragon lowered its serpentine neck so the prince could stroke it.

Snorri frowned, then sighed. ‘Another of your customs I cannot fathom, elfling.’

Ignoring him, Malekith swung up onto the saddle and looked down. ‘We’ve lingered long enough,’ he said, nodding towards the smoke-choked battlefield. ‘Our warriors have need of us, old friend.’

Through the murk and the carnage, the elves and dwarfs were fighting hard but their strength was finally waning. A last effort, a determined push that looked chaotic from above, widened the fissure in the daemons’ ranks a little farther. Beyond it there lurked the lords of the host.

‘The sorcerer is mine,’ snapped Malekith, before proffering a gauntleted hand to the dwarf.

Snorri declined.

‘I can make my own way,’ he replied. Sheathing his axe, he began to swing his hammer above his head. The lightning rune engraved upon it started to glow, and the heady aroma of the forge filled the air. ‘Step back,’ he warned.

Malekith and his beast obliged, watching the hammer’s arc grow wider and wider.

The dwarf frowned in consternation.

‘Why so grim-faced?’ asked the elf prince, as his dragon sent a belt of flame over the north edge of the rock. A cacophony of screeching told them the beasts climbing up it had been destroyed.

‘Because I
hate
being storm-borne…’

Snorri smashed the hammer into the earth. A flash of lightning, a dense clap of thunder and the High King was gone, carried off by the power of the hammer’s ancient rune magic. Just a patch of scorched earth was left behind, a tiny circle where the dwarf was kneeling.

‘Always with another trick beneath your beard, eh, old friend?’ Malekith chuckled to himself. ‘Ride the lightning,’ he whispered, kicking his heels into the dragon’s flanks. With a single beat of its huge wings, the elf prince soared skywards. His mount screeched a final curse at the encroaching hordes as they reached the flat summit of the Fist of Gron too late.

Elf and dragon breached cloud and smoke, ascending to the higher heavens. Below, glimpsed through a greying fog, the rock was overrun. Like an anthill swarmed by its denizens, the Fist of Gron was engulfed as a red sea rose up to claim it. The anguished hell-cries of the teeming masses followed him all the way back to the elven battle line.

III

High King Snorri
Whitebeard emerged at the edge of the battle through a jagged tear of light. Tendrils of lightning still played across his pauldrons and rivulets of power spilled over his breastplate as the magic he had employed was slow to dissipate.

The cohort of five hundred hearthguard who greeted him tried not to appear shocked at his sudden arrival, for the elder rune on the High King’s hammer was slaved to his throne, the earthing point for its magic. Only half hiding his smile, enjoying the little piece of theatre, Snorri ascended the stone steps of the immense throne awaiting him.

An artefact from an ancient age, forged when the ancestor gods still roamed the deeps of the world, the Throne of Power was unique. It bore the Rune of Eternity, believed to have been inscribed upon its high back by Grungni. The dwarf name for it was
Azamar
, a rune so potent that nothing in existence could destroy it.

Fifty paces ahead of the High King were the backs of the gronti-duraz
lumbering alongside the warrior clans and brotherhoods. Another hundred paces beyond them were the daemons and one of their masters. Snorri eyed the bloated lord with vengeful relish just as the stone-clad giants began to part, letting him through.

‘Thronebearers.’ The High King’s voice was a deep rumble as he spoke to his retainers. ‘Bring me to war.’

‘Khazuk!’ Grunting with effort, four burly dwarfs lifted king and throne aloft. Singing their deathsongs, they began to march.

The hearthguard fell in beside them. Thanes borne on their own war shields ordered their clansdwarfs to gather around the king’s throng as he passed them, flanked on either side by the gronti-duraz. Snorri nodded to them, though the creations of metal and stone could not respond.

Vagrumm, his standard bearer, bellowed above the din of tramping boots and clashing shields to announce him.

‘For Karaz-a-Karak! In the name of the ancestors and the High King!’

‘Khazuk!’ the throng replied.

A last bulwark of mail parted before the High King, the vanguard of the dwarf army hearing their liege-lord’s return and rejoicing. Their ranks bowed aside only to reform again behind the hearthguard as slowly they reached the front where the fighting raged.

No sooner had he joined the front, than Snorri was immediately embattled.

A daemonic tallyman flung itself at the High King but was cut in half before it could land a blow. Rotten viscera sizzled on the ground but turned into mist where it touched the Throne of Power, the rune of Azamar flaring brightly. Another daemon was smashed asunder by the thronebearers as they pushed against the horde, trying to throw them back.

Hearthguard were hacking great inroads into the daemonic ranks, whilst the other thane-kings wrought similar carnage on either side of the king’s throng.

It was wide, a two-hundred-foot hammer-head driven deep into the heart of the enemy. With Snorri leading them, the dwarf advance was inexorable and devastating. His sheer presence, and the innate resistance of the dwarfs, seemed to drain the creatures of Chaos, and as the fell magic drenching the plain waned, so too did the corporeal bonds binding the lesser daemons to it. Plague-infested corpses began to dissipate, cast back into the Realm of Chaos. Sloughing away, burning down to bone and ash, dissipating into smoke, hundreds of daemons surrendered to instability and were banished.

The tide turned.

Like an armoured plough scything a field of pestilential wheat, the dwarfs slew every Chaos beast that came before them until the High King was face-to-face with the bloated lord himself.

Alkhor chuckled at this reckoning. The bloated lord was many times larger than Snorri and towered over the dwarf until its shadow eclipsed the entire Throne of Power. It seemed to relish the fight to come.

Snorri was only too happy to oblige. Feet braced either side of his ancestral seat, he stood up to level his axe at the daemonic prince.

‘Now you are mine.’

IV

Malekith flew low
across the daemon ranks, his dragon spitting fire. Since leaving the Fist of Gron, he had made straight for his war host and the feathered sorcerer they fought against.

A hideous clutch of hell-spawned creatures spat tongues of iridescent fire at the elf prince but their aim was poor and he evaded the barrage. Issuing a mewling challenge, half plea, half roar, the beasts snapped their malformed jaws in frustration.

The dragon snarled back, despising the foul stench of the hell-spawn.

‘Burn them,’ Malekith whispered.

Liquid sulphur drooling from the dragon’s snout burst into flame and streaked across the battlefield to engulf the Chaos beasts. They recoiled, reduced to little more than a dark silhouette amidst all the haze and smoke. Against such fury, the spawns’ charred remains capitulated into ash. What remained of their mutated bodies sank into a heap.

One of Malekith’s lieutenants, Klarond, saluted. They had been struggling against the monstrous spawn until the prince of Nagarythe’s timely intervention.

‘For Anlec and King Bel Shanaar!’ roared Klarond, stabbing his sword into the air. The cheer from his warriors drew a sneer to Malekith’s lips which he hid well before soaring back into the sky.

As he ascended he was met by Glarondril of Caledor. A host of dragons circled with the prince, the other nobles of the mountainous realm.

‘I see no daemon lord, Malekith,’ said Glarondril, an edge to his voice.

Malekith ignored the thinly veiled slight and instead surveyed the battlefield.

‘It is here somewhere.’

His eyes narrowed, alighting on the dwarf throng where the king fought his own daemon lord. Many of the hearthguard lay dead around his feet, and one of the king’s thronebearers could no longer fight.

Turning his gaze back to the dragon host, Malekith gestured to a trio of eagle riders that had just joined the flight.

‘My lords,’ he said, recognising again Prince Aestar as he addressed them, and glancing darkly at Glarondril, ‘come with me.’

Malekith arrowed out of sight a moment later, piercing the cloud layer in seconds. Avian shrieks behind him told the elf prince that Aestar’s eagle lords had followed.

The dwarf king looked beleaguered.

‘I am coming,’ he said, and urged his dragon to fly faster.

V

Ropes of mucus
drooled from the bloated lord’s mouth. Its teeth were blackened nubs, rotting in the gum. Its breath was beyond foul, and rose from its maw in a noisome gas the dwarfs fought hard to ignore. Worst of all was the daemon’s laughter. A hideous chuckle burbled from its lips, echoed mockingly by the crows perched upon its shoulders and fluttering around its corpse-like body. Alkhor was laughing when its jaw distended to impossibly wide proportions and it unleashed a stream of filth.

Snorri brandished his hammer and a shield of lightning sprang up to protect the king and his charges. The deluge seemed unending, a veritable torrent of puke and acidic bile from the very pit of the daemon’s stomach. It spat and crackled like cooking fat against the runic shield, burning to smoke and sulphurous vapour that clung to armour, skin and hair. Merciful Valaya was by Snorri’s side, as the foul slop ceased at last and the High King was left alive and miraculously unharmed.

The hearthguard fighting either side of the throne were not so fortunate. Dwarfs died in their droves, their armour melted, skin and bone rendered down to nothing, sloughed away by the disgusting miasma. Above the fading screams the stentorian tones of Haglarr Grudgekeeper, he who had served the High King for centuries, could be heard recording each and every name and the reckoning that would follow.

‘Heed that, beast,’ snarled the High King, ‘your infamy shall be remembered. I shall reckon it here and now. You’ll burn for this.’

Lashing out savagely, Snorri carved a notch into Alkhor’s plague sword. The daemon’s bulk belied its swiftness as it parried the High King’s axe and the runes upon it flared in anger at this denial of their power. A blow like that should have snapped the daemon sword in two, but the wretched weapon was ensorcelled. Rusted and pitted with serrated teeth, the glaive looked ancient and broken but was far from it. Encrusted with aeons of filth, Snorri knew just by looking at it that the slightest cut from the weapon’s blade would fill its victim with a cornucopia of disease. Flesh would blacken, bones would crumble and organs liquefy until all that remained was a soup of corruption.

Seven brave dwarfs had already succumbed to that fate. Many more had been devoured by the daemon, swallowed into its belly. With every morsel, the bloated lord swelled until it had become a behemoth of utter foulness.

Shouting his defiance, Snorri was determined it would grow no further.

A chip of tainted blade came loose like a rotten tooth as the dwarf yanked out his axe. He swung the rune weapon around, circling the plague sword. Snorri went to attack again when an unholy swarm spilled from Alkhor’s widening mouth and engulfed him.

Bloated flies, the daemon’s host of tiny familiars, crawled over his eyes and armour, scurried into his beard. They bit his skin, buzzed in his ears. Suffocated, blind, Snorri spat out a wad of insects trying to burrow into his mouth and uttered an invocation.

‘
Zharrum!
’

Lightning arced from the haft of his hammer, drawn into a thunderhead that wreathed the king in a furious storm.

A shriek of agony, louder than the storm, split the air. It took a moment for the High King to realise it had come from the fly swarm, speaking with one voice as they burned and died. The enchanted fire had lifted the malaise, and Snorri shook the insects from his beard, brushed them hurriedly from his armour and breathed again.

Alkhor loomed, mocking the dwarf with its gurgling laughter. Its plague sword was raised for a cleaving blow. Blinking away the filth crusting his eyes, Snorri thrust upwards with his rune hammer and crafted a lightning bolt from the storm that speared the daemon’s bloated chest.

Mirth became pain, the face of the daemon contorting as rune fire devoured and purified its flesh. It staggered then slumped, legs giving way to agony and bringing it within striking distance of the High King.

‘I said you would burn!’ Snorri roared, and slashed Alkhor open like a boil.

A slew of foulness erupted from the wound in the daemon’s stomach. Half-digested corpses, chunks of armour and cloth, scraps of corroded leather and the remnants of skeletons eroded by the daemon’s intestinal acids spilled out.

‘Don’t touch it,’ warned the High King, and his retainers stayed back.

Alkhor staggered again. Unable to regenerate, the daemon clutched its wound, spitting bile and curses at the dwarf who had hurt it. Pathetically, it began to sob.

Unfurled from its back, a pair of tattered fly-like wings started to beat.

But Snorri wasn’t finished with it yet.

‘Closer, filth,’ he growled, stepping down from his throne, ‘so I can take your ugly head.’