The dwarfs had descended into the lower workings after it became clear that something was preying upon their miners. No survivors had reached the halls of Karak Grazhyakh, leaving the exact nature of the predator unclear. Loremasters and greybeards had speculated on everything from night goblins to a basilisk. It was surprising that none of them had considered skaven as the culprits. Perhaps if they had, the punitive expedition they sent into the mines would have been larger.
Leaping across the residue of his splattered foe, Kurgaz was thankful for the elders’ lack of foresight. Skaven were a cringing, cowardly enemy. They never revealed themselves unless they felt certain of easy prey and a quick kill. Much larger an expedition and the foul vermin might never have stirred from their hidey-holes.
That was something no dwarf worth his beard would have liked.
Drakdrazh ploughed into a second ratman, a bulky brute in scraps of plate and chain. To its squeal of horror was added the shriek of shorn metal as its body was obliterated. Steam now rose from the runes carved into the hammer, black blood boiling as it splashed across the letters.
‘The Hammer of Doom is upon you!’ Kurgaz roared. There would be at least a few of the scuttling vermin who understood what he was saying. They could take his war-cry back to their burrows, a horror story to tell their pups in the dead of night.
The dwarf’s bellow and the utter havoc visited by his hammer cured the skaven of their desire for battle. When they had swarmed out of the mine shafts and tunnels in their hundreds, they had smelt easy prey. Just a few dozen dwarfs in a lonely gallery, a place they could easily surround and isolate. Honourless vermin, they had no compunctions about engineering a massacre.
Now, however, it seemed they were the ones courting a massacre. Glands clenched, spilling the musk of fear into the air. Frightened squeaks dripped past shivering fangs. Those ratmen closest to the tunnels and shafts quickly deserted the gallery. As the first fled, the rest quickly followed. Rodent shrieks echoed through the mine as some of the vermin threw themselves down open shafts in their mindless terror, hurling themselves and those climbing below them to an ignominious doom.
Growling their own battle-cries, the other dwarfs charged the retreating skaven. Scores of the beasts were cut down before they could desert the gallery, hacked to pieces by dwarfish axes and battered to paste by dwarfish hammers.
Kurgaz stepped away from the mess of pulp that had been the last enemy to fall before him. He glanced around, but there were no ratkin within his reach. He spat at the fleeing vermin in contempt. Lower than greenskins, these filthy skaven. At least an orc had the spine to stand and fight. There was no glory in a battle like this, victory against such an easily routed foe rang as hollow as an elven promise.
The dwarf swung Drakdrazh onto his shoulder, grunting as its weight pressed down on him. He wondered if the weapon shared his disappointment, his frustration that the fight was over before it was properly begun. A runeweapon had a spirit all its own, a divine spark pounded into it by the runesmiths who forged it. How the hammer must lament the fall from ancient glories to the culling of slinking ratkin!
‘Victory, Kurgaz!’ a sallow-bearded dwarf warrior shouted, sprinting towards the champion. Blood dripped from the warrior’s torn ear and there was a gash in his forearm where a skaven spear had pierced him, yet he seemed to give small consideration to his hurts, gripped by the jubilation of victory. ‘The skaven will think twice before they defile Grungni’s Tower again!’
Kurgaz scowled at the younger dwarf’s enthusiasm. ‘They turned and ran before the fight could even start,’ he cursed, kicking the rodent mush at his feet.
‘The honour is yours, Kurgaz,’ the warrior told him. ‘If not for you, the ratkin might have overwhelmed us. Broken out into the upper workings.’
‘What honour in slaughtering vermin?’ Kurgaz shook his head and patted the haft of his hammer. ‘They were unworthy of Drakdrazh.’
At that instant, a loud report echoed through the gallery. Kurgaz staggered as he was struck from behind, the shot slamming into him with such force that his mail was shredded by the impact. Acrid smoke and a torrent of blood rose from the wound. The dwarf took a stumbling step, then slammed face forwards onto the floor.
The dwarf warriors clearing out the last knots of lingering ratmen looked up, stunned to see a lone skaven dangling from one of the ventilation shafts. The creature was suspended by ropes, hanging upside down above the gallery. Clutched in its paws was the lethal bulk of a jezzail, smoke rising from its muzzle. Before any of the dwarfs could react, the verminous sniper slung its gun across its back and scampered back up the ropes, a chitter of sadistic amusement drifting down as it made its retreat.
‘The filth has shot Kurgaz Smallhammer!’ The shout echoed through the gallery almost as loudly as the shot had. In a matter of heartbeats, a ring of grave-faced dwarfs surrounded the prostrate form of their hero. They stared at the horrible wound in Kurgaz’s back, at the smouldering hole that had burned its way through layers of chain and leather to strike the flesh within.
One of the dwarfs, an old veteran with flecks of silver in his crimson beard, lifted Kurgaz onto his side and pressed his ear to the hero’s chest. ‘Take him to the stronghold!’ he called out. ‘Take him to his father while there is still breath in him!’
Solemnly, the dwarf warriors lifted their champion from the cold floor. Many of them had never seen a skaven jezzail before, but all of them recognised the corrupt nature of Kurgaz’s wound. The triumph of only a moment before was gone, stolen by this cowardly act that condemned a bold hero to an inglorious death.
The fortress-like facade of the temple of Ulric dominated the Ulricsmund, the flanking watchtowers and central spires rising far above the cluster of chapels, archives and rectories that crouched in the shadow of the main sanctuary and the Great Tower. The temple had been constructed in the earliest days of Middenheim’s founding, built by Wulcan, first to bear the title of Ar-Ulric. Dwarf architects had lent their expertise to the construction, affording it a brooding solidity not seen in human designs. In those bygone days, when the summit of the Ulricsberg was yet dominated by unexplored forest, when the Teutogens were but a primitive tribe of hunters, the temple had acted as refuge as well as sanctuary, it walls built to defy the assaults of beastmen, goblins and giants.
There was still a martial feel to the temple complex, something that was only natural given that Ulric wasn’t simply a god of winter and wolves, but of warfare as well. Knights of the Teutogen Guard stood duty before the great oak doors of the temple and patrolled the parapets of its walls. Many of the wolf-priests wore breastplates of steel or bronze as part of their clerical regalia. Upon the walls of the sanctuary, interspersed with the pelts of wolves and the skulls of giants, a wild profusion of swords, hammers and axes were displayed in places of honour, wooden placards announcing the deeds of each weapon. Where the image of Ulric was represented in human rather than lupine form, he was always depicted with his great axe, Blitzbeil.
As a Sigmarite, Brother Richter found the overall effect disturbing. Sigmar too was a god of war, but for his followers warfare was a sombre, brutal affair. It was grim necessity. The Temple of Ulric gloried in war, revelled in it, extolled it as a virtue in and of itself. For the Sigmarite, war was a means to defend civilisation. For the Ulrican, war needed no excuse. It was an elemental force as powerful as the sea and the forest, as vital and omnipresent as life and death, luck and fate.