The skaven squealed in terror, exposing his neck and spreading his arms. Queek had lost interest and walked away. ‘And you, rest of you! Why beard-things not dead?’
‘It stupid beard-things fault!’ said Skrikk. ‘Not mine, oh no. Seventy thousand slaves we sent…’
‘Thaxx say one hundred thousand!’ said Thaxx.
Skrikk shrugged. ‘Skrikk count, Thaxx lie. Terrible, terrible shame. And I thought him so loyal. No doubt great and fiercely intelligent Queek can see to the traitor-meat squirming beneath loyal-fur.’
‘Thaxx Redclaw the most loyal–’ began Thaxx.
‘No squeak-tellings! Beard-things!’ snapped Queek so loudly Skrikk flinched.
‘They are not killing the slaves quickly enough, grand one,’ said Grotoose. ‘They have chosen good spots for defence and cannot be dislodged. Our slave legions can attack on narrow fronts where they are easily slain. This is not the way to beat them.’
‘You tell Queek that stupid-meat beard-things, with their slow and stupid minds, are outwitting the swiftest thinker-tinkers in all of the Under-Empire?’
The assembled skaven looked at one another and pointed fingers. Queek squeaked loudly, stopping the accusations and counter-charges of incompetence before they could begin.
‘Enough, enough! Enough with slaves and weak-meat! Send in the clanrats. Call in the stormvermin. Kill the beard-things. Kill them all dead-dead!’
‘What of orders?’ said Thaxx. ‘What of Lord Gnawdwell’s commands?’
‘I do not care. Queek general here – where is Gnawdwell?’
‘In Skavenblight?’ ventured one.
‘Yes-yes, whereas Queek the Mighty here. We will win. Nothing else is important. We will destroy. Queek will show the whole world that Queek is the mightiest, the best, the most deadly! We will see what Gnawdwell says about orders then.’
The messengers bowed several times and rushed away. The clanlords and potentates of the City of Pillars attempted a more dignified exit. Queek’s long mouth split in a hideous grin and he waved his paws at them. ‘You too, hurry-scurry! Queek not like sluggards. Loyal Ska tell sluggards what Queek thinks of slow-meat.’
‘Queek does not like them,’ said the giant stormvermin, ‘and I don’t like them either.’
‘Boo!’ shouted Queek, making as if to leap into their midst, and away they fled spraying fear musk, much to Queek’s amusement.
The chamber was empty bar the patter of retreating paws and the smell of fear. Queek snickered to himself.
‘You see, Ska? This is why Queek is so great.’
There came no reply. Ska was thankfully brief in his praise of Queek. All the bowing and scraping and insincere flattery that characterised skaven social interaction the warlord found tiresome, but Ska usually said something.
Queek’s nose twitched. Something was wrong. A smell of old fires, rubbish and hot warpstone made him sneeze. The light leached from his surroundings, leaving everything grey. Ska was unmoving, frozen in position. He called for his guards, but they did not come.
Movement in the unmoving world caught his eye. He did not turn to it, not immediately. Something big was in the corner.
He spun around, leaping into the air and twisting his entire body. Dwarf Gouger leapt into his hand, and moved in a blurred arc impelled by all his weight and speed. His serrated sword came up next, aimed directly at the vitals of his giant ambusher.
Queek crashed into the stone. The creature was not there.
‘Oh ho! You are as good as they say. But mighty Queek could be the mightiest of all mortal skaven, and he still would not catch me.’
Shadows boiled all around him, darting like swarms of flies over the marshes. Queek hissed and made feints and jabs, but the darkness moved away from him, slipping around his weapons like water.
‘Who-you?’ he cried. His fur bristled with a fear he would not allow himself to feel. For the first time in years, his glands clenched. ‘What you want with Queek?’
The darkness ran together and parted for an instant, affording the warlord a glimpse of a masked, rodent face, ten feet in the air, topped with three sets of horns, two straight, one curved. The ends of them were twisted into the runic claw-mark of Clan Eshin.
‘I am Lurklox, Shadow Lord of Decay, one of the twelve above the twelve. And what I want with you, strutting warlord, is your victory.’
EIGHT
The Hall of Pillared Iron
In the Hall of Pillared Iron, King Belegar took counsel. Between the thick iron columns that gave the place its name, venerable dwarfs of many clans crowded around low tables layered with maps. The hall had been built with the same attention to detail and pride with which the ancestors had built everything. Each of the room’s sixty-four column capitals had been wrought in red iron to resemble four straining longbeards holding up the roof. The remainder of the columns were inscribed with runes inlaid with precious minerals, most picked out by rapacious greenskins, but in the more inaccessible places electrum, silver, polished coal and agate still glittered, a reminder of the hall’s former glory.
Despite the care and craft of its making, the Hall of Pillared Iron was a foundation, a utilitarian room intended to support the finer citadel halls above. The metal in its walls and pillars allowed the citadel to reach its great and graceful height without compromising its efficacy as a fortress.
That had been then. The upper chambers were mostly toppled by centuries of war and earthquakes, among them the magnificent Upper Throne Room, whose wide windows and fine art made it the mirror to the Great Throne Pinnacle in the Hall of a Thousand Pillars in the first deep. Unique in all the dwarf realms, at the height of the Karaz Ankor the twinned thrones had represented Karak Eight Peaks’s mastery of the worlds under sky and under stone. Of these two hearts, one was rubble and the other had been occupied by a succession of foul creatures.
So low had the dwarfs of Karak Eight Peaks sunk that the Hall of Pillared Iron was their greatest hall. Magnificent though it was, as grand as Belegar’s throne looked when viewed down its aisles, the Hall of Pillared Iron was a support. Might as well call a single stone block all the temple. Belegar had refused to have it completely restored, lest the dwarfs of Karak Eight Peaks forget why they were there, and become content with scraps.
Drakki was speaking, addressing his king and his advisors. Brunkaz Whitehair, the oldest dwarf in the hold, was beside him. His beard was so long it looped three times in a complicated plait about his thick gold belt.
‘At Bar-Undak the Norrgrimlings are taking casualties. The endless stair is being overrun, half the Zhorrak Blue Caps are dead. Valaya’s quay has fallen, our warriors there falling back to the base of the citadel.’
‘The Undak?’
‘Still running clear,’ said Drakki. ‘But how long will that continue? The thaggoraki poisoned the river once – now we’ve lost the quays at the headwater, they could easily do it again.’
‘Buzkar,’ swore Belegar. He looked from map to map, searching for a sign of hope, some weakness in the enemy he could exploit, some dawi strength he could call upon.
He spread his hands over a portion of the map, caging it protectively in his fingers. ‘Kvinn-wyr still holds strong. So long as we hold the mountain, our people will have somewhere safe to stand. We’ve got the gyrocopter eyries at Tor Rudrum. As long as we have them, we can stay in touch with the other holds. Above all, the citadel is safe. Perhaps it is time to abandon the first line of defence and make our next stand at the Hall of Clan Skalfdon,’ said Belegar. He pointed to a great hall in the first deep below the citadel, three quarters of a mile from the collapsed east halls, where many lines of communication intersected. ‘Beat them back there and they’ll think twice about trying to crack the hold.’