‘No, I am the loyallest servant of the council!’ retorted Gribnode.
‘Stop-cease, halt!’ squeaked Skribolt. ‘This is too much!’ Unable to get anyone to listen to him, he began to crank the handle of his warp-lightning generator.
Throttlespine was tensed for a leap when the sound of fighting came from outside.
‘Stop-stop!’ squeaked a stormvermin beyond the door. ‘Many-much council leaders exercise deep and important thinkings. Go aw–’ The guard’s order was cut short. The sound of armoured bodies clattering off the walls took its place. A terrifying roar had them all looking at each other, and struggling to control their fear glands.
A single blow felled the plank door so hard it hit the flagged floor with a bang like a cannon shot. On the other side was the largest rat ogre any of the council members had ever seen, even Grand Packmaster Paxrot of Clan Moulder, and he knew his rat ogres very well. The four-armed behemoth doubled over to squeeze its bulk through the doorway. Following the monster came Grey Seer Thanquol.
‘Thanquol?’ said Skribolt, his hand slowing on the warp-lightning crank, then speeding up again. ‘You are banished!’
‘Good-good, all still here? I bring news from the Council,’ said Thanquol, who was puffed up and obviously very pleased with himself.
This proclamation was most stunning to Great Warlock Skribolt, whose claw still churned the handcrank on his warp-energy generator. His muzzle twitched as he grasped for what to say.
‘Yes-yes, after so much incompetence,’ and here the grey seer paused to look at Skribolt, ‘I am to be in charge. Any disputes can be directed to my bodyguard, Boneripper.’ At this, Thanquol nodded at the hulking beast stood snarling behind him, surveying the gathering with hate-filled eyes.
‘But that is not…’ Skribolt started to say, but the grey seer cut him off.
‘My new bodyguard, Boneripper,’ said Thanquol. ‘The old one was mostly dead,’ he added dismissively. ‘This one better. Now that the element of surprise is gone-lost,’ Thanquol continued, ‘I feel it is time to switch tactics. My plan is to–’
At last Skribolt found his tongue. ‘Enough! No more! Halt-stop!’ said the Great Warlock, the last words coming out perhaps more shrilly than he had wished. ‘On whose orders were you gift-granted authority? Why-tell was I not informed?’
Skribolt was standing, lightning wreathing him as his whirring contraption sucked in the winds of magic. All the other skaven – warlords, a top assassin, and a master moulder – took a step backwards away from the two.
When a voice spoke from the shadows all turned, finding a terrible sight. The blackness strained with life, and an awful shape moved there. Such was the power inherent in it that several of the lesser warlords let their musk glands loose.
‘On our authority, Great Warlock!’ said the shadow. The room went black, lit only by dancing chains of lightning. A long, elegant claw reached out, snuffing out the sparks between Skribolt’s backpack conductors. In the blackness a single terrifyingly evil eye radiated green over them, holding them each in its turn, leaving none in any doubt that his most treasured schemes had been exposed, digested and dismissed as the work of fools.
As suddenly as it appeared, the blackness was gone. The war council was alone again.
‘What do you bid-command, O great and exalted leader Thanquol?’ intoned Warlord Throttlespine, bowing low. The rest of the skaven followed suit, although they did subconsciously shuffle away from those who had befouled themselves.
Thanquol had already surmised that Throttlespine was the smart one, yet it was gratifying to be proven correct. Nodding his head slightly in acceptance, Thanquol began again. ‘As I was squeal-saying, my plan…’
PART THREE
Eternity's End
Autumn 2527
TWENTY-FOUR
The King’s Head
The world had changed.
No longer could the dawi count the mountains as their own. They teetered on the brink of extinction.
Thorgrim Grudgebearer ground his teeth together. The Dammaz Kron lay under his hand. It had glutted itself on woes, growing thicker faster than at any other time in the High King’s remarkable reign.
He stared at the Granite Gate two hundred feet away. Massive twin doors of stone, imposing despite being only half – and it was exactly, precisely half – the height of the tall, vaulted corridor they barred. The gates shuddered under an impact from the far side: a quiver in the stone so small that only a dwarf, stone born and stone master, could see. Bands of runes carved into the gates glowed intensely with inner blue light, their magic striving to keep the gates whole and closed.
The skaven were coming. As sure as Thorgim’s chin wore a beard, they would get through. The ratkin had burst every defence, arcane and otherwise, that the dawi of Karaz-a-Karak had thrown up.
Thorgrim thought on the horrors that afflicted his people.
Karak Azul overthrown.
Karak Eight Peaks lost a second time.
Zhufbar swarmed by an endless tide of vermin.
Barak Varr pouring smoke from its great dock gates, the pride of the dwarf fleet broken in the sea before it.
The holds of the Grey Mountains overcome and lost in three horrific nights of bloodshed.
Karak Kadrin poisoned.
Karaz-a-Karak besieged for years now, cut off on all sides above and below. The streams of refugees pouring into the dwarf capital from other kingdoms had given Thorgrim much anguish. At a time when he thought his dream might be fulfilled, that the lost realms of the Karaz Ankor would be reclaimed, it had all come to nothing. The fleeing dwarfs brought with them tales of proud strongholds cast down, and not only in dwarf lands. Many dwarfs of the diaspora had fled back to their ancestral homeland from human cities – their habits and speech strange; some of them even trimmed their beards! – telling of similar woes beyond the mountains. But what was more horrifying than the incoming flood and the dire tidings they brought was that it had stopped. No dwarf had come into Everpeak for months.
Tilea, Estalia and Bretonnia ashes. The Empire devastated. The moon cracked in the sky, invasion from the north, and ratmen swarming from everywhere.
‘We stand alone,’ he said into his beard, his unblinking stare locked upon the door. It shuddered again.
‘The runes will not last, my liege,’ muttered Hrosta Copperling. A runesmith, but a mere beardling compared to the likes of Kragg the Grimm and Thorek Ironbrow. Their kind would never come again into this world. Hrosta was loyal and dedicated to his task, but his store of knowledge was paltry.
Thorgrim did not grace Hrosta’s obvious statement with a reply, but continued to stare at the Granite Gate.
Forty feet wide, fifty tall, the gate was a lesser portal of Everpeak. Leading onto a once-safe and well-travelled section of the Ungdrin Ankor, it had become, like all the other many gates into the mountain, yet another way for the skaven to attack them.
‘Thaggoraki,’ Thorgrim growled. He thought of what he had seen from the Rikund, the King’s Porch at the summit of Karaz-a-Karak. The endless seas of enemies, whose bodies stained the roads leading to his kingdom brown. There were so many of them, more than there had ever been before.
‘My king, I implore you to return to the Hall of Kings,’ said Gavun Tork, the most venerable of his living ancestors.