Gotrek Gurnisson
The Dead Hours
(David Guymer)
From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.
Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.
But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.
Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.
The Age of Sigmar had begun.
Nieder Pedsen had been watching the drunk since before the doors had shut them all in for the night. The drunk’s hobnailed boots hung from the spectrewood stool, the iron toecaps swinging like gibbeted knights across the stretcher beam. The pale wood had been carved to resemble a human bone. Nieder was not learned enough in anatomy to know which bone, only that it looked sufficiently realistic to him. Back in the days that his thrice-great grandfather had walked as a living man, the denizens of Skeltmorr had made such objects from the real thing. The local craft shops had been famous for the things they could do with bone. But times changed. It was the way of the living to change with them.
Oblivious, the drunk snored on. His broad, bullied face lay in a puddle of ale. The table was strewn with the restless corpses of supper: empty flagons, dirty platters, intestinal loops of fried cabbage. Dried yolks clagged his orange-dyed beard and his snores rattled the cutlery. The aelf, fortunately, had left her drunken companion an hour previously. Hamnil had won the snap of the wishbone on that score, and had followed her. He was not back yet. But Nieder wasn’t worried. Hamnil was careful and thorough. Nieder didn’t expect to see him before Hysh-rise ushered out the dead hours.
He wasn’t concerned so much as disappointed.
His gaze slid to where the duardin’s axe lay on the floor under the dangling right boot. The fire bound to its uncanny metals scraped greedily at the bare stones. It had already taken off the straw, and frightened the gheist-roaches deeper into the folds of the oubliette dimensions that existed beneath the skirting boards. Black Mals had wanted to put his foot down where the axe was concerned, but there had been something in the duardin’s swagger as he had come in, caked in bone dust and strange gore, shouting for ale, food and lodging – and in that particular order – that had made the old man bite his tongue and bide his time.
Nieder wasn’t a worldly man, but he reckoned himself to be about as large as men came anywhere in the Princedoms. Traders passing through Skeltmorr were few these days, and tended to come in well-armed groups with big men as bodyguards. And Nieder had even been called on to subdue the occasional flesheater that wandered into the Bone Drake Inn with strange ideas in its head.
He eyed the drunk. And his axe.
Neither looked as though they would be dealt with easily.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Black Mals’ voice rasped like a hair shirt over ghoulflesh. His eyes were large and sunken. His skin was papery. His head was crowned with a lank string of nuisance hair. Some said it was for the colour of his hair that he had earned his name. Others, and that was Hamnil and Nieder included, suspected it was because if you cut him then that would be the colour he would bleed.
‘The size of him, though…’
‘He’s not grown any since closing time. And nor will you. Not even if you wait until the Nadir swallows the Drake with all of us still here inside.’
‘We should send for Hamnil.’
‘Hamnil will be preparing the aelf for the Tithekeeper. He’ll be busy all night.’
‘You could lend a hand, old man.’
Black Mals polished the countertop with a spirit-soaked rag, as though it were the skull of a particularly loathed ancestor for display above the privy shed.
‘He’ll wake if I have to pull him to the door,’ Nieder said.
‘Kill him here, then. But keep it clean. That axe of his has taken off the sawdust and I don’t want a mess to deal with before serving the breakfast crowd.’
Nieder frowned, then nodded to himself and eased out of his corner.
He rolled his shoulder, limbering up the stiff joint, and pulled the wooden maul from the loop strap on his belt. He weighed it in his hand. Eyeing up the duardin’s broad skull. Picking his spot. Hands of the Bone King, the duardin was even more massive up close than he had appeared from the corner. His feet may not have touched the floor, but the breadth of him was sprawled across the full width of the table.
‘Enough tiptoeing.’
Nieder started.
Black Mals scowled and went on. ‘Club him and be done with it.’
Nieder turned back to the table.
He found one bloodshot, madly inhuman eye glaring back up. ‘Club who?’ its owner slurred.
Nieder made a choking sound.
This, he promptly learned, was due to a fist the size of a corpsing shovel squeezing tight around his throat. The duardin hauled Nieder over the table and through the culinary wreckage. Nieder put up a fight, but it was like resisting a horse. The duardin drew him in until Nieder was at his eye’s level. Stale beer dribbled like saliva from the creased skin of his ruined face. His beard was a drowned mess of congealed fats and mustard stains. His eyepatch sat askew, revealing a scarred hollow underneath, and his breath was so potent that being close to it was like being held face down in a barrel of ale.
Nieder remembered the maul in his hand. He struck the duardin over the head with it.
The stranger grunted. His one eye crossed. He staggered half a step, a dent in his stark crest of orange hair, but without ever loosening his grip on Nieder’s throat.
Tingling in his face and in his fingers, Nieder lifted his maul for a second attempt.
Nieder was close to twice the duardin’s height, but when the drunkard shoved him off he tumbled the half-dozen yards to the bar and slammed into it with a knucklebone rattle of blunt knives and broken crockery. He lay there on his side, too winded and dazed to even try and crawl away.
‘Who were you calling old man?’ said Black Mals, his ancient wheeze from beyond the countertop punctuated by the bolt-snap of a breech-loading rifle. ‘It’ll be your bones for the Tithekeeper if you don’t take better care.’
The duardin stumbled as though the act of propelling Nieder so hard had upset his balance. One windmilling fist caught his table’s corner and, like any wobbling drunk groping after something solid to hold on to, he pulled it hard towards him and hauled it off the floor like a huge, two-hundred-pound shield. The handful of unbroken plates and tankards still on it crashed to the floor. It just happened to be the exact moment that Black Mals took his shot.