The Clan Moulder war-leader leaned in close to Skarsnik, both of them grimacing with hatred and effort. With a flourish, Skarsnik disengaged, flinging Grotoose’s sword arm wide. Skarsnik reversed the prodder, sending the weighty ferrule on its base driving into Grotoose’s flabby stomach. Air exploded from the skaven’s mouth, and he doubled over. Skarsnik stepped in, but Grotoose was shamming. As Skarsnik approached, Grotoose slammed his sword hilt into Skarsnik’s head, and again. Driven back, Skarsnik stumbled, his feet fouled in the chain attaching Gobbla to him.
Grotoose loomed over him, blotting out the pale sky.
He raised his sword. ‘Now you die-die!’
Grotoose never landed his blow. Gobbla came from the side, a bolt of crimson death, teeth snapping. He swallowed the claw leader of Clan Moulder whole.
Skarsnik got to his feet and patted his pet. ‘That was close! That was too close,’ he muttered. ‘Good boy, Gobbla.’
Gobbla burped.
Skarsnik took a moment. The stormvermin and rat ogres had been driven back, the flow of battle moving away from him. Annoyingly, the stormvermin’s boss was still alive and kicking, but he was on the defensive. ‘They don’t need us no more, come on. We got some strategising to do,’ he said. His speech was peppered with bastardised Reikspiel and Khazalid words he used for concepts Orcish lacked the capacity to express. He led his pet back to his vantage point to begin said strategising.
He extended his telescope again. The battle was much as it was before. Then he saw something he had never seen, a blurring shadow that leapt all over the battlefield. One instant it was in one place, in another elsewhere. A disk of metal whirred out from this darkness, curving through air and flesh alike without interrupting its course. It banked around and flew back to its starting point, being snatched out of the air by a huge clawed hand.
‘That’s weird,’ said Skarsnik. ‘That looks a bit like one of them…’
Gobbla whined. Skarsnik looked down.
‘What’s wrong, boy?’
Gobbla’s nose snuffled. He looked up into Skarsnik’s eyes with his one good one.
‘Gobbla?’
A dribble of blood collected at the corner of the squig’s mouth. Skarsnik knelt down, concerned. A squelching sound came from Gobbla’s innards. Skarsnik put his ear to the squig’s side.
Gobbla whined again.
A knife burst through the top of the squig’s skull. Gobbla’s eye rolled back into his head, and the squig collapsed, deflating. His bulk wobbled and shook, and the knife cut downwards.
‘Gobbla!’ screamed Skarsnik.
Grotoose hauled himself from a long slit in the squig’s side. His skin was blistered from Gobbla’s potent stomach acids, fur falling out in clumps. Half his face had been melted off. Groaning in pain, he dragged himself away with fingers whose flesh came away from the bone as he scrabbled at the rock.
Skarsnik looked on in speechless horror. Grotoose raised a head with eyes that had been burned to whiteness.
‘I first Clan Moulder beastmaster in Eight Peaks,’ he said thickly. ‘It take lot more than stupid red-ball, fungus-thing to kill me.’
His face contorting with rage, Skarsnik raised the prodder high and drove it down through Grotoose’s back so hard it shattered the stone beneath. Grotoose shuddered, as if he’d still planned on getting up, before he finally realised he was dead.
‘Gobbla,’ said Skarsnik, in a small voice. The battle forgotten, he dropped his prodder and fell to the squig’s side. The squig sagged in on itself, its capacious body pooling like a half-empty wineskin. Skarsnik knelt and hesitated, eyes surveying this most cruel ruin as if he could bring it back to wholeness by wishing it otherwise.
It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Gobbla was dead, his small, faithful brain leaking out through the hole in the top of his head.
Skarsnik laid both hands on the leathery hide of his closest companion.
‘Gobbla,’ said the Warlord of Karak Eight Peaks, with a catch in his throat. ‘Gobbla!’
Queek dodged another thunderous blow from the wyvern, tripping on a half-buried lump of masonry as he did. He was panting heavily, bleeding down one arm from a lucky spear-thrust.
‘Getting tired, incha, little rattie?’ rumbled the orc. ‘You’re a tasty fighter, that’s what they all say. Down in the Badlands they say that. That far away. Yeah, that’s right. Ain’t you proud?’ The orc laughed. ‘Broken Toofs, my tribe. We heard that all right, we heard all about da Headtaker.’ He widened his eyes in mock fright. ‘But I reckoned it was all bluster, all talk. Load of nonsense. No rat going to outfight an orc every day of the week like what they say you can, though I see you got a couple of blackies up there on your spikes. Idiots, they are. No fun in them. I ain’t one of them snaggle-toothed stunty slaves. I’m a free orc – you’ll never beat me.’
Queek kept his distance from the circling wyvern. He spat on the ground. Let the orc talk himself into an early grave. The ones with the big mouths always spoke too much, leaving themselves open to Queek’s mightiness.
This fight had gone on too long. If he didn’t finish it soon, the green imp might win!
How to end it? How to end it? Queek burned inside.
‘My name,’ said the orc, ‘is Krolg Krushelm! You hear that, now. I wants you to be thinking it when I guts ya! I’m a real greenskin, not like this sneaky little git here. No wonder you ain’t been beat yet. As soon as I’m done with you, I’m taking that cave runt down. It’s about time the Eight Peaks had a real boss.’ Krolg spurred his mount.
The wyvern roared, spraying Queek with foul-smelling spittle. The tail swiped down, jaws coming at him from another angle, Krolg’s spear from a third.
Queek had the measure of his opponents. A good fight, a fine challenge. A pity to finish it.
He ducked the sting, batted the spear tip aside with his sword, rolled under the wyvern’s head, sprang to his feet and, with a powerful swing, buried Dwarf Gouger in the wyvern’s eye. The spike on the pick punched through the soft eyeball and the thin bone at the back of the socket with ease.
The wyvern bellowed in agony and spread its wings. It wrenched its head back from the source of its pain. Queek kept tight hold of Dwarf Gouger’s haft, letting go only when the time was right. As he arced through the air, Krolg’s mouth formed an ‘o’ of surprise below his twisting body.
Krolg was still wearing the expression when his head toppled from his shoulders and rolled into the dirt.
Queek landed on his feet in a crouch, a gleeful smile on his lips.
He waited until the wyvern’s death throes had ceased before retrieving his favourite weapon.
‘Boss! Boss!’
Skarsnik heard the words only dimly. His entire attention was fixed on the dead Gobbla, his hands still pressed into his gradually sinking flesh.
A hand grabbed him. ‘Boss!’
Skarsnik whirled round and snarled into the face of Kruggler.
Kruggler took a step backwards, both hands raised. ‘Boss! Now ain’t the time. Don’t let them see you like this, boss. The lads need bossing, boss! What are we going to do?’
Skarsnik shivered. The skin around his eyes felt tight. A strange emotion he’d not felt before… Nah, nah, that wasn’t right. Once before, long ago, when Snotruk had killed Snottie, his loyal companion in his lonely days as a runt. Hollow like, all empty inside, like nothing really mattered any more.
He shook it off, but it clung on, clamping around the quivery bit of meat inside his chest like it would crush it with cold, cold ice.