Taker Of Skulls(64)

The dwarf and the sorceress looked at each other and then at him. The dwarf shrugged. Karnea smiled.

They passed cables of living flesh that ran from huge bladders of some leathery material. When Kormak looked closely he could see that the bladders had vestigial eyes and were living creatures themselves, some form of grossly mutated goblin. Clutching the walls were other goblin-like creatures, with massive bloated stomachs and breasts. They looked like certain ants he had seen in a broken hill, whose bodies had been turned into great receptacles to hold food for their kindred.

As had happened so often in the past, when he was confronted by the work of the Old Ones, he felt an oppressive sense of the vast, alien strangeness of their knowledge. They had forgotten more than men had learned in all their history, and they had bent that knowledge to many awful purposes.

Graghur looked like the meanest of monsters but it was a shape he had chosen for himself when he could look like anything he wanted. Here was proof of the depth of his knowledge and the power of his magic. He had created these pits in which monsters were being born and Kormak had no idea why. He might have been creating an army or simply probing the secrets of life, the way some alchemists did. When Graghur died all this knowledge would be removed from the world. So much had been lost already and Kormak had been responsible for some of the destruction. If he lived he would be responsible for more.

Even if he won, he would not change the fact that compared to Graghur he was an insect. To the Old Ones, he was like one of those biting flies that spread the plague. He felt very small. That was one of the reasons he enjoyed slaying the Eldrim.

Somehow he did not feel like telling Karnea that.





They made their way across the huge chamber, moving slowly, treading quietly. Kormak saw the distant shadowy figures of several great goblins hauling barrels to the pools and dumping their contents into the murky fluid.

He wished they had half a dozen good bowmen. He could have killed all the goblins swiftly, but ranged weapons were not something dwarves were good with. They seemed to rely on war engines and explosives. Explosives they had but those would only give away their position to the sharp-eared goblins.

They passed another pit. This one held a less well-developed inhabitant. It did not have any skin as yet, merely muscle and vein. It looked as if it had been flayed alive. It did not move. Perhaps it was dead or dormant. They moved beyond one of the huge bladder creatures. Its stomach expanded and distended. Something pulsed through the flesh cable leading from it to the nearest pool.

Ferik wrinkled his nose. His beard twitched, tendrils writhing. “I smell Utti,” he said.

Kormak looked at him astonished. The dwarf must have a nose like a bloodhound. “How can you smell anything over this stink?”

“How can you not?”

“You can lead us to him?”

“Yes. Given time.”

“And the fact we will have to find our way through an army of goblins.”

Ferik let his beard touch the floor. “There are several hundred. They took a lot of casualties at the gates of the Dwarfhold. Graghur has not had time to breed more.”

“That’s all right then. The ten of us should be more than enough to see off a mere few hundred,” Kormak said.

“I like your attitude, man,” Ferik said. Kormak wondered whether the dwarves had any word for irony in their language. “But we will need to be cunning and strike by stealth. I catch a whiff of the Eldrim now. He is ahead of us, I am guessing in the great central chamber. It is the heart of the mine. I used to play there when I was a lad.”

They passed another pit. In this one was a monstrous goblin centaur, a hybrid of Yellow Eye and a great dire wolf. It looked awake. Its eyes glared back at him ferociously and it began to reach out. A huge hand emerged from the fluid. Kormak stepped back, readying his axe.

The monster dragged itself up and out and gave a great gurgling cough, spraying fluid through the air, splattering everything nearby. It snarled revealing shark-like teeth and reached for him with long sharp claws.

“So much for being stealthy,” Ferik said. He lashed out at the monster with his axe. Boreas leapt forward, hitting it with his hammer and over-balancing it back into the pit. Kormak could see some of the great goblins looking around, attracted by the noise.

Sasha cursed, raised her stonethrower and fired a runestone at them. The explosion hurled the goblins through the air, garments alight, flesh torn. One of them tumbled into a pool. The fluid bubbled and another massive figure erupted from it, something that looked like a monstrous goblin body with the head of an octopus. It grabbed a goblin and dragged the screaming creature towards its maw.