Honourkeeper Page 18

  Hegbrak’s voice boomed like thunder, echoing across the battlefield as an arcing bolt of lightning was unleashed. It surged from the Anvil of Doom, crackling ferociously before it smashed into the oncoming horde that had been spared the arrow storm. Norscan bodies were flung into the air by the sheer destructive force of the blast, and a great smear of scorched earth and broken men was left in the wake of the terrible lightning.

  Blinking back the afterflare, Bagrik searched the rampaging throng of warriors for the Norscan shaman. But before he could find him, a bestial cry rang out from the northern flank where the elven knights were fighting.

  The bondsmen had crumbled against their attack, and fled all too easily before the rampant elves. The scattering Norscans revealed a bulky mass shawled with a crude tarp of stitched leather that had been previously obscured by the now fleeing warriors. Ropes tethering the mass were released and a gargantuan war mammoth reared up in front of the elves, trumpeting its fury.

  Locked onto their inexorable course, the elven knights had no room to turn. Some tried to arrest their charge but were pushed forward by the warriors behind them or unhorsed in the carnage and trampled. Others rode harder with fatalistic abandon, their lances goring the flanks and chest of the mammoth. Colliding with its unyielding forelegs was like hitting rock, and the elves unable to twist aside crumpled against it, their dragon armour useless against such an immoveable force.

  The mammoth howled in pain, swinging its tusks in a rage, stomping madly with its hooves. Further screams rent the air as chariots smashed like kindling against the beast or were upturned by its flailing tusks and snout. Knights, unhorsed in the suicidal charge, were crushed to paste, the gore of their bodies dripping from the mammoth’s bloodied feet as they rose and fell.

  Belatedly, a horn bearer tried to restore some order but the beast was running amok, the stabbing knights failing to even slow it, the denseness of the mammoth’s furry hide repelling all but the most ardent of blows.

  As they swarmed like confused insects around the creature, smashing into one another or being carried off by their terrified steeds, the bondsmen returned. The Norscans had regrouped and thundered into those knights and chariots that still retained some sense of coherency in the gruesome melee.

  ‘Grungni’s oath…’ Morek breathed as he watched the slaughter from afar with detached horror. The anguished cries of the elves further down the line arrested his attention, tormented by the sight of their kinsmen being slain. Morek was more concerned with the fact that their northern flank was collapsing. Only the Ellyrian horsemen were kept in reserve, and their feeble efforts would not break the deadly grind in which the knights were mired. Even as they rallied to loose another flight of arrows, the Norscans unleashed more berserkers, who chased the Ellyrians down even as they were pummelled by slings and javelins.

  Morek felt a tremor jolt him as it rippled down the line.

  The elves were moving. Fast.

  ‘Hold!’ cried the hearth guard captain, ‘Hold!’ he implored them, but the dwarf’s voice was lost in the madness.

  Black, like sackcloth, volley after volley from the archers, quarrellers and machineries blanketed the sky. The Norscans were almost upon them now. Soon they would be too close to the allied battle-lines to risk a further barrage. Green fire flared intermittently, as the unseen shaman wrought his magicks, searing arrows to dust and fracturing stone. Hegbrak advanced in the face of it, keeping pace with Morek’s slowly marching hearth guard. Lightning arcs crackled from the anvil with every strike of the runemaster’s hammer. His face was set in a grimace of concentration, sweat lathering his beard as he shouted the rune rites with fury.

  Still the elves moved forward, faster and faster, the spearmen eager to close on the foe so they could vanquish it and go to the aid of the beleaguered knights. Still Morek held the line, bellowing at his charges to keep pace and stay together. Haggar’s voice added to that of the hearth guard captain, and the other dwarf leaders followed their example.

  ‘Keep formation,’ Morek cried, again and again, watching the approaching Norscan hordes, knowing that the time was nearing when they’d clash. He ducked, as the stone throwers flung a low barrage. Their deadly shadow had made them seem closer than they actually were and he reddened at his foolishness. Arrows and bolts followed swiftly and the eldritch flames of the Norscan shaman rose again to immolate them. Only this time a tapering smoke exuded in their wake, growing and coiling into a thick roiling mist. Clinging to the ground, the mist surged across the plain at a frightening pace, easily faster than the Norscans, and engulfed the foremost elves.

  Strange shapes coalesced in that mist as it billowed into a rising fog. Morek’s dwarf eyes discerned the lithe bodies of elf females, writhing within the bilious soup. The elf spearmen, ensnared by the tendrils of smoke, were seemingly beguiled. They cried out names in elvish – Morek could only assume they wailed for their loved ones – and more came forward, all of them dropping their weapons to the ground.

  As the mist slowly dispersed, the dwarf saw the spearmen held in the embrace of the ethereal maidens of the mist, their expressions soporific as they became utterly enamoured.

  ‘Valaya preserve us,’ he gasped in awe and terror.

  The line was breaking. Bagrik could see it as plain as the bulbous nose on his face. Impassioned by the plight of their kin, the elf spear regiments in the refused flank had increased their pace; some were even running in order to close with the foe more quickly. Elven captains, the hunter in particular, shouted orders of restraint – Bagrik saw his dwarfs do the same – but it was as if a sudden urge had possessed the elves and forced them into desperate action.

  ‘Is this discipline?’ the king barked to Ithalred, who stood stony silent, a nerve tremor in his jaw suggesting his anger.

  Slowly, but inevitably like a fraying rope whose threads could no longer bear a weight, the formation fragmented. Closely banded regiments drifted apart almost unconsciously, like floating islands in the grip of a turbulent sea. Where before there was harmony and cohesion, now there was disparateness and disorder working its way insidiously into the refused flank. A staggered formation of elven spear regiments jutted from the wavering line of iron and bronze like silvered teeth slowly being extracted from a giant maw. As they were drawn into the sorcerous mist, the elves became further stretched until even the individual units devolved into a ragged and incoherent mass.

  The dwarf line tried to hold, but that only exacerbated the problem, as the elves pulled away and holes started appearing in the allies’ wall of armour.

  ‘Follow them, Morek,’ Bagrik urged beneath his breath, seeing the danger for what it was. ‘Damn the elgi!’ snarled the king, heedless of Ithalred’s presence and thumping his fist on the side of the throne. ‘Damn them!’ he cried.

  Morek grimaced as he felt the taint of dark magic gnawing at his resolve. One of the hearth guard alongside him drifted forward out of his rank as the dwarfs’ slow march brought them closer to the fading mist and the elven sirens dwelling within. Morek cuffed the warrior across the side of the helmet to bring the hearth guard to his senses.

  ‘Back in line,’ snarled the captain. Then Morek held his eyes shut for a moment as he tried to banish whatever sorcery was trying to affect him. When he opened them again, the glamour had lifted and he saw the maidens for what they truly were – foul daemons; female, but with their bodies perverted.

  Wrists ended in claws. Pallid, scaled flesh, supple, but gelid and moist, shimmered with aberrant lustre. Their heads had crests or long tendril-like hair that thrashed and coiled in a serpentine fashion. Bent-backed legs ended in talons and the daemonettes’ mouths were black like tar pits, filled with tiny spine-like teeth.

  The acquiescent elves saw them too, but their horrified realisation was much too late as the daemons tore them apart with tooth and claw, gorging on their necks or eviscerating their bodies with perverted glee. Those elves following in the wake of their slain kinsmen at first recoiled,
but at Korhvale’s urging found their courage and fell in to the attack.

  Morek could hold his forces no longer. The Norscans were almost upon them and the daemonettes were slashing the elves to ribbons. A second wall of spears charged in, the hunter at their head. Through the spraying blood and the frantic flash of blades and battered shields, Morek could just make out Korhvale as he strode into the daemon ranks, his double-bladed axe swinging like a pendulum.

  The hearth guard captain growled in anger. Their carefully laid plans were tearing apart like parchment in the wind. But just as he was about to give the order to attack, the reverberating hoot of warhorns erupted to the south coming from the direction of the extreme flank of the army.

  From amongst a clutter of scattered rocks, those eroded by time and weather from the mountain, there came a ragged band of Norscan horsemen. Draped in furs, their sloped brows and muscled bodies daubed in tattoos and festooned with bronze rings and spikes, the warriors hollered and cried out as they rode their brutish, snorting steeds bareback. Wielding hooked chains, long-handled bronze axes and flint-tipped spears, the Norscan cavalry were heading straight for the raised slope and the allied missile battery with deadly intent.

  Morek was caught in no-man’s land – halfway between reaching the elves and halfway from the beleaguered missile troops on the top of the slope. Even as he watched the elf archers, those troops at the outermost edge, trying to reform and face their attackers, he knew with stomach-churning certainty that they would not be able to redress their ranks in time. Without the bulwark of the refused flank to protect them, the archers were easy meat. A lightly armoured formation like that, caught to its flank and unable to bring its bows to bear would crumple against a determined cavalry charge, even one as ragged and undisciplined as the Norscans.

  Morek had thought the mountains impenetrable. Yet somehow the northmen had found a passage through it and used that knowledge to outflank them. It was galling to think that these debased heathens had outmanoeuvred them. The allies would pay for their hubris with blood.

  Yelling their feral war cries, the Norscans crashed into the unprepared elven archers. A paltry few were struck from their beasts by a futile scattering of arrows before the slaughter began. Irresistible, the Norscans ground through the elves like a plough through wheat, cutting off heads and flinging spears and axes with abandon. Bloodthirsty hounds, running with the Norscan horses and snapping at their hooves, fell upon the wounded eagerly, their wild eyes flashing as their maws became stained with gore.

  Unable to weather the terrible attack, their ranks in disarray, the elves fled for their lives and the slow erosion of the missile battery began.

  In that fleeting moment that heralded the arrival of the Norscan cavalry and the subsequent butchery of the elf archers, Morek imagined the entire back line crumbling like paper before a flame: quarrellers slain, war machines destroyed, the rear echelons of the entire allied army suddenly imperilled. The dwarf looked to Haggar but even in the brief lull of raging battle, he was too far away to be called. Morek turned to his sergeant.

  ‘Narvag, take half the hearth guard and march them back to our lines,’ he growled, even as the dwarfs were starting their advance towards the stricken elves battling the daemon horde.

  ‘Captain?’ Sergeant Narvag asked in obvious bemusement.

  ‘Look to the rear!’ Morek snapped, turning Narvag’s head forcefully so he could see the Norscan horse and their continuing rampage, the dwarf quarrellers now bearing the brunt of their murderous attention.

  ‘At once, my lord,’ he responded quickly, ordering the horn blower to indicate the break in formation whilst shouting further instruction to the regiments now suddenly under his command.

  Two cohorts, fifty strong each, separated from the dwarf throng and started their resolute march back to their lines and the now bloodied rise.

  Morek’s unyielding line of bronze and iron was weakened but there was nothing he could do. Drums pounding, horns blaring battle orders, the dwarf formation thinned to fill the gaps left by their departed brethren and Morek, with fire in his heart, pressed onward.

  So close to the foe now, the black, soulless eyes of the daemonettes glistening wetly, the lesser northmen bearing down in their wake like wild dogs, there was but one thing for the hearth guard captain left to do.

  ‘Khazuk!’ Morek bellowed, ordering his warriors to charge.

  The dwarfs tromped rather than ran, their heavy suits of iron and gromril armour clanking noisily. With the gathered momentum of the rear ranks, Morek’s hearth guard fell upon the daemonettes with all the fury of Grimnir, even as the other dwarfs arrived in line alongside them, preparing to meet the onrushing Norscans.

  Grunting, Morek took a blow on his shield, the claw of the daemonette nearly slicing right through it.

  Valaya, they are fast… he thought as he was battered back. But the dwarf was not to be denied and clove the daemon in two, the runes on his axe flaring bright as they tasted its unnatural flesh. Black ichor drizzled from the wound like rotting syrup before the creature sloughed away and dissipated into the ether. A second daemon came at the hearth guard captain and he was nearly undone but for an armoured dwarf getting in its way. The daemonette eluded the warrior’s clumsy strikes, its body undulating like a snake, before beheading the dwarf with a savage snip of its claws.

  The dwarf’s sacrifice was all that Morek needed. Still revelling in the kill, licking the blood lasciviously from its claws, Morek cut the creature in two, its waist spilling away from its lower body as it collapsed into a pool of ichorous sludge. With each daemonette slain, a puff of soporific musk exploded into the air, dulling the senses and slowing the body. The dwarfs held their breath against it and pressed on. The elves, too, had now reformed their ranks and were thrusting with their spears to deadly effect, impaling the screeching daemonettes before cutting off their heads.

  The elves were swift and skilled, though the daemonettes matched them for pace and dexterity. Where the dwarfs relied on their resilience to bring them through the battle, the spearmen attacked in a silver blur, darting left and right, parrying thrusting, fighting together as one perfect engine of war. The daemons, though deadly, were few in number. Together the elves and dwarfs slew every wretched one of them in a few frantic minutes, but the cost was high. Dwarf and elf dead littered the ground. Sweating, some warriors still shaken from their efforts, the allies closed ranks. They barely had enough time to catch a breath before the Norscans charged them, axes flailing.

  ‘Lock shields!’ Morek cried, above the rumble of the battle.

  A thousand dwarfs ramming their shields together rose in a metallic clatter. A similar cry echoed from the elven quarter, and they lowered their spears, forming a deadly forest of sharpened silver death.

  Like a foul wave of sweat, brawn and brute savagery, the northmen smashed against the dwarf shield wall or rushed the elven spears. At first it was a massacre as the northmen broke against a well-drilled line of bronze and iron or became impaled on silver spear tips, but their sheer masses quickly told as the front ranks of the allies were torn into, screaming elves and dwarfs brought down by crude axes or dragged out of their protective formations and butchered.

  A burst of arterial spray resonated in Morek’s ears as it struck his helmet, painting the faceplate red. He finished the bearded Norscan with a blow to the chest, ripping out his axe afterwards in a shower of bloody flesh chunks. A second came at him; a powerful hammer blow to the dwarf’s pauldron sending spikes of hot pain all the way up his arm. Morek grit his teeth and smothered it, punching the northman in the mouth with an armoured gauntlet, shattering his jaw. Jabbing his axe blade in the warrior’s stomach Morek despatched him, before cutting the arm off a third and burying his weapon in the fallen Norscan’s head. The agonised scream was loud but brief. The battle whirled around him, a blur of red-ruin and metal-edged death. A dwarf to Morek’s left fell, a spear lodged through the eyehole of his helmet. Another hearth guard from the
rank behind filled in the gap. Another dwarf nearby was slain, his fate unknown to Morek. The rear rankers came forward again. And slowly, so slowly, the line narrowed.

  ‘Uzkul a umgal!’ cried Morek, rending and slaying as his muscles burned with effort.

  Death to men! The words echoed in his mind. Another foe looking jealously upon the riches of the Karaz Ankor, another enemy to wear away at his race, another that possessed all the savage barbarity of the greenskins, but who seemed united in their purpose of calculated destruction.

  The stink of blood was filling Morek’s nostrils. Hot fluid sloshed in his heavy boots. The dwarf was not certain if it were his or that of the foe. The clamour of battle had become an ever-present din, gnawing at his resolve all the while it persisted. Warriors fell. Swords and axes flashed. Carnage churned the once fertile fields of the plains, weighing down the flowing grasses and staining them crimson.

  For all the careful planning, for the subtle tactics argued and refined, it had become little more than a melee. Survival was all that drove Morek now, that and the desire to reap as many dead as his axe could take. Ahead, in the growing darkness of a building storm, he thought he saw the flash of lightning from Hegbrak’s anvil. It was followed by the roar of some beast that haunted the suddenly benighted field – the sabre-tusk baying in fury at the will of its terrible master.

  In the madness as he carved and cut and hewed, Morek thought he discerned the aged standard of the longbeards thrust alongside the banners of the runesmith, together the venerable dwarfs having forged their bloody way through the Norscan ranks in order to bring the chieftain and his elite warriors into battle.

  The runesmith’s silhouette appeared in the flare of light, tearing back the layers of darkness that now suffocated the field only briefly. Another figure was outlined in the azure flash, one far larger than Hegbrak and astride a beast that seemed dredged from the depths of the world. Two great warriors, dwarf runesmith and Norscan warlord clashed and the ground shook with the fury of their thunder. As soon as it had come, the lightning flare died away and Morek could no longer see the epic confrontation.