Realm-Lords, page 23
‘Clearly,’ Phalcea said, ‘you had allowed your defensive instincts to lie fallow too long. Relative safety softened you.’
‘You were unequal to the challenge,’ Serath said with finality. ‘’Tis a wonder you’ve lasted as long as you have in such an alien place… a place not your own.’
Ferendir looked to the duardin. The two leaders – the female, Geralla, and the male, Jalgrim – now glared at his companions, clearly struggling to keep their tongues still and silent lest they lose what little safety and aid they had managed to acquire. The rest, though not so visibly troubled, simply kept their eyes down and their mouths shut, sure that their leaders would – for better or worse – handle the situation.
‘They surprised us,’ Geralla finally said, slowly, as if explaining something to a thick-headed child.
‘The vigilant are never surprised,’ Serath said stonily. ‘All possibilities are considered, hour after hour, day after day, and all eventualities planned for.’
Ferendir threw a look at Desriel, then at Luverion. The loreseeker was so deeply involved in the healing of that youthful duardin’s magical wound that he could expend no energy, no attention, on the present argument. Desriel, meanwhile, was concentrating hard sewing up that long, bleeding gash on Geralla’s lower leg. Were they really going to let Serath and the others speak to these poor, miserable duardin so brusquely?
‘Perhaps if your weapons were of finer make,’ Taurvalon offered, ‘or the mettle of their users more hard-proven in the field–’
‘In any case,’ Serath added, ‘your losses and humiliation are, no doubt, sufficient to teach you a lesson. With luck, it shall not be the last lesson you ever learn.’
‘And what lessons have we learned?’ Ferendir spat.
Serath rose the moment his former supplicant spoke. ‘What did you say?’
Ferendir rose to meet him. He stood squarely, facing Serath unafraid, only the crackling fire between them.
‘I asked what lessons we had learned,’ Ferendir said. There was no bitterness in his voice, no reproach, no anger. It was a simple question, born out of his own sudden realisation that Serath’s apparent contempt for these unfortunate duardin could just as easily apply to their own lost temple brothers and sisters. ‘Were our own folk not caught unaware? Surprised? Ravaged and slaughtered to the last – save the three of us, here, who remain?’
Serath levelled a finger coldly. ‘You know not of what you speak, supplicant.’
Desriel rose now. ‘He knows precisely of what he speaks,’ the Stoneguard said. ‘And it is his right to speak, because he is no longer our supplicant but our comrade.’
Serath’s cold gaze pivoted to Desriel. Though his fury was clear, to anyone who knew how to mark it, he stood stone-still and his voice never rose above a soft murmur.
‘You dare take his side in this?’ Serath asked.
‘I take no sides,’ Desriel said. ‘There are no sides, only lessons. Days ago, when our temple still stood and our temple family still lived, I might have spoken to these duardin as you have, Serath – haughty, dismissive, sure that I, a child of Lumineth, knew so much more than they. But Ferendir is right in this. When the enemy found our people, they were unprepared for what beset them, and they paid the ultimate price. And it was not because they were weak or foolish or because they lacked vigilance – it was because the enemy was more cunning, more cruel, and driven towards their desires without the compunctions and self-imposed limitations that give our lives purpose and meaning. I wager these poor folk suffered just as we did, and therefore, they have more in common with us than we ever, before this moment, could have imagined.’
Serath studied his long-time friend and partner in sullen silence. After a moment, he swung his dread gaze towards Ferendir. Finally, he looked to the huddled duardin, studying each of them in turn as if they were beggars bearing alms bowls and asking for scraps. No doubt the duardin saw nothing in Serath’s face but cold, implacable indifference, but Ferendir could read his master well, and he knew what impatience and irritation he felt in that moment, even if no one else did.
And strangely, it made Ferendir feel purposeful, powerful.
Finally, Serath sat back down again and leaned on the haft of his stone mallet. He lowered his eyes to the flames of the cookfires and stared.
‘Perhaps,’ he said quietly, ‘my judgements were too hasty, my opinions ungracious.’ He sighed, raised his eyes and speared the two duardin leaders with a fell glare. ‘We will help you, if we can.’
‘Very well, then,’ Metorrah interrupted. ‘They are worthy of our help – what help have we to give?’
‘We are giving it,’ Luverion said, his spellcraft still struggling to burn the taint of Chaos magic from the young duardin’s arm.
‘No, this is not enough,’ Desriel said, finally knotting the gut twine he had employed to sew up Geralla’s leg wound. He raised his eyes to meet Geralla’s wondering gaze. ‘We need you to take us back there.’
‘Take you back there?’ Jalgrim breathed. ‘You’re mad, aelf.’
‘I am inclined to agree,’ Phalcea said. ‘We’ve been right on Ezarhad’s trail, Desriel – our magic and their wake of destruction make tracking them easy. Why should we be so interested in overtaking them now?’
‘Because we may catch them unaware,’ Desriel said. Ferendir could hear that his master was struggling to sound reasonable – almost amiable – but there was a subtle, low-key tremble in his voice that made it clear enough – to Ferendir, anyway – that Desriel himself was not entirely sure about this course of action. ‘If they have stopped long enough to ruin the camp and plunder its provisions, they may not be expecting us to come upon them.’
‘Or they may already be gone,’ Taurvalon said.
‘A possibility,’ Desriel admitted. ‘But it is a chance worth taking.’
‘And I suppose you expect us to lead you back there?’ Jalgrim asked.
Desriel looked to the gruff duardin. ‘I would hope so, yes.’
Jalgrim hawked and spat. ‘Do not take this wrongly, aelf, but I would sooner drink molten gold. The six of us barely got away from those fiends with our lives, and now you would ask us to return? To offer ourselves up?’
‘We can protect you,’ Desriel said.
‘I doubt that,’ Geralla said sadly. ‘I mean no offence, good aelf. But you did not see them.’
‘We would offer our aid and you would insult us by refusing?’ Serath asked.
Jalgrim stood, swayed for a moment, then settled himself. ‘Aye, that,’ he said with a curt nod. ‘I will not put my folk in danger. Not when there are so few of us.’
‘I’ll go,’ the young duardin being healed by Luverion chimed in. ‘I’m not afraid – not any more. Mother and father were left behind. They might still be–’
‘They are not!’ Jalgrim barked, wheeling round on his youthful companion. ‘Anyone not here with us, right now, is dead and gone! That is the truth of it, and I’ll not have you spreading false hopes among us!’
The young duardin, face a mask of grief and suffering, never let his gaze waver. He met Jalgrim’s burning glare with quiet assurance, still holding his poisoned arm out for Luverion’s ministrations.
‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But I will guide them, nonetheless.’
‘Very well, then,’ Serath said. ‘It is decided.’
‘Is it?’ Metorrah asked. ‘How did that happen? We went from refusing aid to forcing it upon them in the space of a breath.’
‘Desriel speaks aright,’ Serath said curtly. ‘This may be our best chance to overtake them. Even if they’ve already gone, their sojourn at the home of these dispossessed delayed them. We are closer upon them now than we’ve ever been. If we can stop them here, now, in the mountains, before they ever reach their destination–’
‘We can end this!’ Desriel finished.
Ferendir understood the implicit message buried in his masters’ sudden enthusiasm.
If we can stop them here, now, in the mountains, before they ever reach their destination, we can end this… and, just possibly, give meaning to all that we’ve lost, all that can never be recovered…
Luverion finally withdrew his hand from the young duardin’s wound. It was still raw – pink in some places, angry red in others with ample subdermal flesh and drying blood still present. But the foul purple glow in the angry wounds beneath the dermis was gone. The youth was only nursing a physical wound now, not a magical one.
‘We must wash and bandage that,’ Luverion said softly, as though no conversation at all were taking place around him.
‘Do it quickly, then,’ Serath said. ‘We depart forthwith. There’s not a moment to lose!’
To Ferendir’s great surprise, Jalgrim ultimately decided to be their guide, ordering the wounded youth and the rest of his charges to continue their journey westwards towards Xintil, where they could start again. The chieftain seemed to take no pleasure in sending his people away while he stayed to march back into danger, but Ferendir could also recognise in the short, stocky fellow the mark of all good leaders – the ability to sacrifice one’s own best interests for the sake of a larger goal, and the related ability to undertake that sacrifice with a minimum of fuss or complaint.
In no time, the eight of them – Ferendir, his six companions and the duardin – were under way.
They marched all through the night, their path taking them up steep slopes and through dense forests before finally bending eastwards through a narrow pass between low peaks towards a hidden valley of sorts, locked behind high, stony walls in a forgotten cleft between the mountains. By the time the first tentative glow of the coming dawn began to paint the sky in more brilliant colours, they had emerged from the pass into the vale proper, and the mining camp that the duardin once called home was clearly visible beneath them, huddled against the mountainside on a wide, rocky promontory overlooking sharp hills that all declined down to the river winding across the valley floor below.
They crouched among close-packed rocks and boulders on a ledge below the pass, peering down towards the silent mining settlement, trying to tease out the present situation and its relative safety.
‘I see no movement,’ Taurvalon said, peering through a long, telescoping spyglass that he had produced from a satchel on his belt. He handed it to Serath. Ferendir’s master peered through the implement for a time, surveying the scene below them.
‘Bodies,’ Serath said. ‘Dozens, grimly arrayed…’
Ferendir well knew what that meant. Time and again they had seen the vile handiwork of the Slaaneshi hordes, great and small – their penchant for creating horrid, haunting works of art from those they slaughtered, arranging their corpses and hacked-off extremities in strange, unsettling patterns and poses to make of them foul trophies to their fouler appetites. Ferendir stole a glance at Jalgrim and saw that, at Serath’s pronouncement, the duardin had lowered his face. If Ferendir was not mistaken, he saw the subtle glimmer of tears on the dwarf’s ruddy, pockmarked cheeks.
‘Taurvalon is correct, though,’ Serath said. ‘There is no movement. The camp is abandoned.’
‘Can we be certain of that?’ Phalcea asked. ‘This could be a trap.’
Serath lowered the spyglass. ‘Aye, it could be… but we will not know that until we spring it.’ He looked to Desriel. ‘Who shall it be, old friend?’
Desriel rose. ‘Let it be me.’
They waited. The time required for Desriel to clamber silently down the rocky slope, make a cautious, half-hidden approach to the settlement and finally emerge into the open for all to see far below them seemed interminable to Ferendir. He kept expecting to see a flock of birds wing from one of the copses of trees that swallowed his furtive master during his approach, or suddenly hear a shout of alarm, the exultant war cry of their Slaaneshi enemies as they raced from cover to spring the attack.
But nothing came. The world remained silent, marked only by the sighing of the mountain winds and the even, steady breathing of his eager companions.
Finally, after what felt like endless hours, they saw a lone figure move slowly, cautiously, from the cover of the trees onto the bare, broad promontory. There were a number of buildings down there – small, huddled duardin dwellings, storehouses and places of artifice, all arranged in a vaguely semicircular pattern around a sort of central square before the yawning mouths of their several mine shafts sunk into the hillside. It was the square before those buildings and the broad, empty space before the yawning mineshafts that lay littered and bedecked with the bodies of the dead. It was into that space that Desriel now moved, clearly on edge and searching on all sides for signs of their enemies.
Ferendir watched, his breath catching in his throat. Desriel was alone down there, exposed, too far from the rest of them if any danger should present itself. His master gripped his diamondpick hammer tightly and turned slowly, carefully. He seemed to be studying every building and corn-crib around him, seeking some sign of hidden dangers or lurking treachery. Ferendir realised he was holding his breath. By conscious will, he exhaled, long and slow, then gulped air like a thirsty man in a desert.
Desriel stood, still and alone, in the corpse-littered square below. Finally, he stood straight and raised his hammer cross-wise over his head.
That was the signal. All clear.
‘Come,’ Serath said, clambering out of hiding. ‘Let us see what awaits us.’
Ferendir was shocked at how quickly they all climbed down the hillside, threaded a path through the close-cropped trees and finally arrived in the settlement’s square. The bodies were, as he had feared, arrayed in the most horrible and evocative of attitudes, some in parodies of everyday activities, others as grim trophies claimed with pride, still more dismembered and rearranged into savagely beautiful geometric patterns and mandalas made all the more horrifying for the clarity of the artistry deployed to create them. There was evidence of fire and immolation – piles of wind-blown ash and the stench of smoke and charred wood – but all the fires were long extinguished. Clouds of flies buzzed above the dead, crawled over their staring eyes and licked at their coagulating blood.
It was a scene from a nightmare. The silence did nothing to assuage its horrible nature.
Jalgrim, their duardin guide, kept his eyes down, as though he were afraid to look upon the frozen, slack faces of the dead around him – family, friends, loved ones. No doubt he knew the name and history of every single corpse littering the square and the surrounding buildings.
Ferendir remembered their own walk through the ruined precincts of the temple and shuddered.
‘Too late,’ Taurvalon said as he studied the scene. ‘Clearly, they’ve left us behind.’
‘Thankfully,’ Desriel said.
Ferendir glanced at Serath. His hard-faced master looked as close to furious as he could imagine – eyes narrowed, mouth set stonily, nostrils flaring as he struggled to control his ragged breathing.
Luverion was moving slowly, aimlessly, among the dead. He struck a strange attitude as he went, arms outstretched and hands splayed wide, as though magically dowsing or trying to sense something hiding just below the surface of what they could touch and smell and see.
‘There is such a taint on this place,’ he said quietly, almost to himself. ‘Foul and ancient… bitter as gall and soot… and… something else.’
Desriel took notice of those words. ‘What else?’ he demanded.
Luverion turned fully around, raising his hands to the level of his eyes. It was as if he were reading the wind itself as it buffeted against him and whipped around him. Finally – suddenly, in fact – he lowered his hands and his eyes snapped open.
‘You were right,’ he said to Desriel. ‘It’s a trap.’
Ferendir felt a cold shudder run through him. No… impossible! It was so silent! So still!
Then he heard their war cries and saw the writhing, loping bodies all come streaming from the three open mouths of the mine shafts sunk into the hillside.
One moment, they were alone in a village full of only the dead – the next, they were swarmed and surrounded by the Hedonites of Slaanesh.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For an instant, Ferendir recalled the feelings that rose up within him when, just days ago, he and his masters went to the secret vale that should have been the place of his trial and found instead a roving band of Slaaneshi invaders awaiting them. There had been nine of the foul daemons that day, and seeing them, knowing they surrounded and outnumbered them, had made Ferendir feel as powerless and helpless as he had ever felt. Even though his masters had protected him, and they’d won out in the end, the fear and sense of hopelessness that had assailed Ferendir in those moments, when he knew not if the next movement, the next breath, might be his last, had felt like some foul, soul-burning venom.
Now, he stood among comrades, outnumbered once again. There were dozens of them, pouring out of the mines and swarming in all directions to confuse and surround their little band. They dived and struck and briefly charged before making hasty withdrawals, but Ferendir knew they were not yet ready to attack in earnest. These were baits and taunts – a show of force and a taste of the slaughter to come, nothing more. The Hedonites took great delight in showing their strength, displaying their foul, sharp talons and their needle teeth and their lithe, slim bodies built for the twin engines of pleasure and pain.
‘Back to back!’ Serath ordered, planting his feet and holding his stone mallet high and ready. ‘Form a circle, now!’
