He had kindled a fire in the deep vaults. Then he had watched it grow, rippling out into every corner of the dawi empire until it became a roaring inferno. The Lords of the Dwarfs had been roused from their torpor. No dissenting voices had been raised, no old grudges had been unearthed, no rival claim to the leadership of this anger had emerged. They were united in slow, cold fury and the rock itself rang from their ironshod treads. A dozen armies already marched; more would follow.
The time had come.
First hundreds came, then thousands, then tens of thousands. His own host snaked along the ice-bitten road to Karaz-a-Karak and down towards the forest-lands of the elgi who had brought such hatred upon their own heads.
Morgrim Bargrum, kin of the High King, cousin to the slain Snorri Halfhand, the Uniter, the one they were already calling the Doom of the Elves, stood on a high spur of rock and watched his army grind its way west.
The sky above him was leaden and bloated with rain. Lightning flickered across the northern horizon, broken by the massive shoulders of far peaks. Dull light glinted from chainmail, from axes, from the tips of quarrels and from the iron of the great standard poles.
Morgrim rested on his axe-handle, his chin jutting and his beard spilling over his crossed hands. His bunched-muscle arms, each one tattooed and laced with scars, studs and iron rings, flexed in time with the tramp of boots. His heavy helm sat low on his brow, pocked with precious stones and draped with a curtain of fine mail.
Like all his kind, he was hard, angular, solid, immovable. The cross-hatch rune zhazad had been daubed on his forehead in his own blood, now dried a dark brown by the chill mountain wind. His eyes glittered darkly under the shadow of furrowed brows. His boots were planted firmly, locked against the stone as if one with it.
The host was immense. Not since the days of forgotten wars had so many of the dawi marched under one banner. Many of them had torn their beards, ripping hair from flesh in savage mockery of what had been done to the ambassadors in Ulthuan. Many more had painted their armour plates with blood, just as Morgrim had done. Dwarf blood was thick. It dried fast, cleaving to steel like lacquer. Even as the rain fell, coursing over hunched shoulders in runnels, those bloodstains remained vivid.
Morgrim watched his regiments creep down towards the lowlands. He watched the tight squares huddle together, ringed with shields and toothed with speartips. He watched grim formations of longbeards, roused from their lethargy by the anger he had birthed. They marched slowly, their grey eyes fixed unwaveringly on the horizon, their lips unmoving. He watched smaller formations of bulkier warriors covered from head to toe in thick plates of gromril, clanking like infernal machinery. He watched hammer-holders stride down the causeway, each one thronged around a great lord of battle. He watched heavy battle standards swinging among them, all adorned with the runic emblems of holds picked out in gold and bronze.
It was just one army of many. More would follow, gathered together in the booming halls of deep fastnesses and sent forth into an unsuspecting world.
All of this Morgrim watched in silence. It was not an army of containment, or of exploration, or of defence. It had no other purpose than destruction.
In my name, cousin, he mouthed silently. You will be avenged.
The time had come.
‘Tromm, lord,’ came a throaty voice at his shoulder. Morgrim did not need to turn to see who it was.
‘Tromm, Morek,’ he said, all the while watching the host march on. It would be many hours before the vanguard cleared the foothills, and many more hours before the rearguard passed his vantage. ‘Have you come to summon me down?’
‘Summon you? I would not dare.’
The Master Runesmith was far older than Morgrim. His beard was flecked with grey like the down of a hunting peregrine, and his eyes were sunk deep into leather-tough skin the colour of burnished copper. He carried an ancient runestaff topped with gromril and wore master-crafted armour of interlocking plates.
‘Look out on them,’ said Morgrim, his voice as gruff and spare as a drakk’s exhalation. ‘Look at what we have done, then tell me: what does your heart say?’
Morek did as he was bid. He cast his deep-set eyes over the slowly moving host. It looked like a river of molten iron creeping down the flank of the mountains. As the light began to fail and the shadows lengthened, the iron darkened.
‘It says that this thing cannot be stopped,’ Morek said. ‘It tells me Halfhand did not die in vain. He saw through the elgi — even his father did not see so clearly. They set this fate in motion, they shall bear the pain of it.’
Morgrim grunted. He could feel the dull thuds of a thousand footfalls, echoing up through the stone beneath his feet.
We have made the mountains tremble.
‘I did not want this,’ Morgrim said, his voice low and dark, as it had been ever since Snorri had died. ‘Let the records state that.’
‘They will.’
‘But now it is settled, I feel the blood of the ancients grow hot within me.’
‘As do we all.’
Morgrim bared his teeth — a tight, warlike grimace, one that made the lined skin of his face crack and flex. ‘My axe thirsts.’
Morek glanced at the blade. Its runes were inert. ‘It has not been proved yet.’
‘You made it. It will answer.’
Morek hawked a gobbet of spittle up and spat on the ground. ‘And Drogor?’
Morgrim’s expression briefly faltered. ‘What of him?’
‘Where is he? None have seen him for months.’
‘I care not.’ Morgrim found the mention of Drogor an irritant. He did not want to be reminded of that baleful presence, one that had hung around his cousin like the stench of carrion. There had always been something strange about Drogor, though it had been hard to say quite what it was. His eyes had been… dull.
‘He came from nowhere,’ said Morek. ‘Now he returns to nowhere, and no one, it seems, wishes to speak of it.’
‘I never liked him,’ said Morgrim dismissively. ‘Snorri listened too closely to him. Those who remain are pure.’
Morek pursed a pair of cracked lips. ‘That they are — for now. But beware: your armies will hold in one piece only as long as their anger remains. You must bind your thanes strongly until they can face the enemy. Even Gotrek struggled to control them, and while he remains grieving he cannot help you.’
‘Fear not,’ growled Morgrim, his slab-heavy face glowering under the sky. ‘They sought a leader, one who would deliver their axes to the elgi. With Snorri’s passing, that is all I live to do.’ His lips twisted into a half-snarl then, disfiguring features that had once been mild-tempered. ‘I will permit the elgi to leave these shores, if they choose the path of sense. But if they stay to fight, then I swear by Grimnir I will choke them all in their own thin blood.’
Morek nodded sagely.
‘That would be worth seeing,’ he said, his voice thick with relish.
Imladrik stood before the Council of Five. They regarded him with a mix of wariness and awe. At least, four of them did; the fifth didn’t lift her eyes from the floor.
‘So here we are together,’ said Aelis, clasping her hands. ‘At last.’
Imladrik regarded her coolly.
She thinks I should have made this Council my priority. Let her think away; the world has changed, and they will have to get used to it.
‘My apologies for the delay,’ he said. ‘You’ll understand I had many things to detain me.’
The chamber around them was deep in the Old City, down in the heart of the first colonists’ settlement. The stonework was more refined than in the Tower of Winds, the wood more cleanly carved, for it had been raised in a more carefree time when the thought of war between close allies would have been impossible to conceive.