As the dwarf army approached, a horn echoed from the walls, and Felix could see stout figures carrying long-guns marching to their positions behind the crenellations. Torches flared to life above them, revealing dwarf crews readying catapults and trebuchets and kettles of boiling lead. The horn was answered by another, followed by cries and commands from within.

A white-bearded Thunderer in well worn chainmail climbed onto the battlements above the gate, his finger on the trigger of his gun. "No closer, by Grimnir!" he bellowed, when the head of Hamnir's column had come in range. "Not until you announce yourself and your purpose!"

"Hail, Lodrim!" called Hamnir. "It is Prince Hamnir Ranulfson, and I've brought six hundred brave dwarf volunteers. Have we leave to enter?"

The Thunderer leaned forwards, blinking myopically. "Prince Hamnir? Is it you? Valaya be praised!" He turned and shouted over his shoulder. "Open the gates! Open the gates! It's Prince Hamnir, come with reinforcements!"

With a creaking of winches, the portcullis went up and the drawbridge came down. Both showed signs of recent battle, but also fresh repair.

Even before the bridge had thudded to rest, a dwarf was running across it, arms outstretched. "Hamnir!" he cried. "Prince!"

He was tall for a dwarf — almost four and a half feet, and powerfully built. His receding brown hair was pulled back in a club, and bright white teeth flashed through a thick beard that spilled down his barrel chest to his belt.

"Gorril! Well met!" said Hamnir, as the two dwarfs embraced and slapped each other's backs.

"I am relieved to see you alive," said Gorril.

"And I, you," replied Hamnir.

Gorril stepped back and bowed, grinning. "Come, prince, enter your hold, meagre human surface hut though it may be." He turned to the cluster of dwarf warriors who stood in the castle door. "Away with you! Prepare Prince Hamnir's quarters! And see if you can find beds for six hundred more!"

Hamnir turned and signalled the column forwards, then strode with Gorril through the gates and into the castle's courtyard, as Gotrek and Felix, Thorgig and the rest marched in after. The yard was crowded with cheering dwarfs, and more were pouring from every door, all hailing Hamnir and the new troops.

"You made it unscathed?" asked Gorril as they pushed through the crowd of wellwishers.

"Some trouble with orcs as we left Barak Varr," said Hamnir. "Nothing since." He looked at Gorril hopefully. "Any word of Ferga?"

"Or my father?" asked Thorgig, urgently.

Gorril's brow clouded. "None. I'm sorry." He gave Thorgig a sympathetic look. "You and Kagrin are the only dwarfs of the Diamondsmith clan to have escaped. Many died in the defence, and your father is believed to have locked the others in his hold. They may still live, though food will be growing short."

Thorgig clenched his fists. "I should be with them. If they are hurt..."

"You can't blame yourself," said Gorril. "You held your position as ordered, and then there was no going back."

"Then I should have died."

Hamnir laid a hand on the young dwarfs shoulder. "Easy now. If the worst has happened, at least we will have opportunity to avenge them." He looked around at the cheering crowd and nodded approvingly at Gorril. "Thorgig told me you were sending for aid. It seems you were successful."

Gorril made a face. "Not so many as we could have wished. The other holds hadn't many dwarfs to spare. Too many gone north." He shrugged. "But let's leave that for tomorrow, aye? Tonight's for feasting!"

He turned to the crowd. "Set the board, you layabouts. Your prince has come home!"

There was a great cheer and axes and fists were thrust in the air. But as Gorril led Hamnir toward the keep, two dwarfs pushed forward.

"Prince Hamnir," said the first, a hammerer with a braided red beard. "As leader of this throng, we ask you to dismiss the dwarfs of the Goldhammer Clan, who have dishonoured the good name of the Deephold Clan by denying my great-great-great-grandfather the rightful command of his Ironbeards in the battle of Bloodwater Grotto, fifteen hundred years ago!"

"Don't listen to him, prince," said the other dwarf, a broadshouldered miner with jutting blond eyebrows. "We are guilty of nothing but common sense. A troll had his great-great-great-grandfather's arm off at the shoulder before that battle. What was my great-great-great-grandfather to do? A general must think of what is best for the battle. We — "

Two other dwarfs pushed in front of the first two. "Prince, you must hear us first!" cried one, a burly, black-bearded ironbreaker. "Their paltry dispute is nothing compared to the feud that exists between we of the — "

"Enough!" roared Gorril, waving them all away. "Will you badger the prince before he has his helmet off? Hamnir will hold council tomorrow and hear grievances then. Surely grudges that have stood for a thousand years can wait one more day."

The dwarfs grumbled their displeasure, but stepped aside.

Gorril rolled his eyes at Hamnir. "It has been like this since the others began to arrive. All want to help. None want to work with anyone else."

"It never changes," said Hamnir. Gotrek grunted, disgusted.

"Tell me what happened," said Hamnir. "Thorgig and Kagrin told us what they knew when they came to Barak Varr, but their stories were a bit... confused."

The feast was over, and Hamnir, Gorril, Gotrek and Felix, and a handful of the survivors from Karak Hirn were gathered in Baron Rodenheim's private apartments, which had been set aside for Hamnir, to discuss the coming action.

Despite Gorril's words, it hadn't been much of a feast, as supplies were low, but the dwarfs had done their best, and none at the head table had wanted for food or ale. Felix had had an uncomfortable time of it, for the dwarfs, being handy with their tools, and unwilling to suffer the indignity of trying to use human-scale furniture, had sawn down the legs of all the tables and chairs in the keep's great hall so that they better fit their short, broad frames. Felix had eaten his dinner with his knees up around his ears, and his back ached abominably.

Now, tired from the long days of marching, and a bit drunk from the many toasts that had been drunk to Hamnir and Karak Hirn and the success of the mission, he nodded drowsily in an unscathed high-backed chair, while the others talked and smoked by the fire in chairs edited for dwarf use.

Gorril sighed. "It was a bad business, and very strange... very strange." He sucked at his pipe. "The orcs came up from our mines, but not like any time before: not in a great screaming rush that we could hear coming from the highest gallery, not fighting amongst themselves, and not stopping to eat the fallen and raid the ale cellar. They came silent and organised. They knew every defence we had: all our alarms, all our traps, and all our locks. They knew them all. It's almost as if they had tortured the secrets out of one of us, or there was a traitor in the hold, but that's impossible. No dwarf would give secrets to the grobi, not even under torture. It was... it was..."

"Eerie, is what it was," said a white-bearded dwarf, an ancient veteran named Ruen, with fading blue tattoos at his wrists and neck. "In seven hundred years, I've never seen grobi act so. It's not natural."

Felix noted that, like Ruen, most of the survivors were white-haired Longbeards, too crippled or enfeebled to follow King Alrik north to the war. Younger dwarfs had stayed behind as well, for someone had to guard the hold while the king was away, but most of those had died defending it when the orcs came.

"They came when we slept, and destroyed two clan-holds outright — slaughtered everyone, dwarf, woman and child," said Gorril, his jaw tight. "The Forgefire and Proudhelm clans are no more. There were no survivors."

Hamnir's hands clenched.

"As I said," continued Gorril, "Thane Helmgard was seen to order the Diamondsmith clan to lock themselves in. We don't know if they were successful."

"Then there is at least a chance," said Hamnir, more to himself than the others. He sat lost in his thoughts for a moment, and then looked up. "How does it stand now? What do we face?"

"The orcs defend the hold as well as we did," Gorril laughed bitterly, "perhaps better. Our scouts report that the main doors are whole and locked, and they were shot at from the arrow slits. Orc patrols circle the mountain, and there are permanent guards watching all approaches." He shook his head. "As Ruen said, they don't behave like orcs. No fighting amongst themselves. No getting bored and wandering from their posts. It's uncanny."

Gotrek snorted. "So they have some strong boss or shaman who's scared them into toeing the line, but they're still grobi. They'll crack if we press them hard enough."

Gorril shook his head. "It's more than that. You haven't seen."

"Well, I better see quick," Gotrek growled. "I want to be done with this scuffle and heading north before I lose my chance at another daemon."

"We'll try not to inconvenience you, Slayer," said Hamnir dryly. He turned to Gorril. "Have we a map?"

"Aye."

Gorril took a large roll of velum and spread it on a shortened table between the dwarfs. They leaned forwards. Felix didn't bother to look. He had seen dwarf maps before. They were incomprehensible patterns of intersecting lines in different colours that looked nothing like any plan Felix had ever seen. The dwarfs pored over it as if it was as clear as a painting.

"So, they guard the main door," said Hamnir, his fingers moving over the velum, "and the high pasture gate?"

"Aye. They ate our sheep and rams," said a hunched old dwarf. "We'll need to buy new breeding stock."

"And the midden gate? That lets out into the river?"

"Three miners went up it five days ago, to have a look. They came back down in pieces."

"What of Duk Grung mine?" asked an old Thunderer with an iron-grey beard. "The undgrin connects it to our mines. The grobi came up at us from below. We could do the same to them."

Hamnir shook his head. "Its three days to the mine, Lodrim, and then two days back underground, if the undgrin is clear. The Diamondsmith clan may starve by then, and the grobi might guard the way from the mines as strongly as they guard the front door." He tapped the map with a stubby finger. "Do they patrol the Zhufgrim Scarp side?"

"Why should they?" asked Gorril. "It's a sheer face from Cauldron Lake to Gam's Spire, and there's no entrance to the hold."

"Yes there is," said Hamnir, with a sly smile. "There's the passage to old Birrisson's gyrocopter landing. You remember? Near the forges."

"You're out of date, lad," said old Ruen. "That hole was closed up when your father took the throne. Doesn't hold no truck with such modern nonsense, your da. He burnt all those noisemakers to the ground."

"Aye," said Hamnir, nodding. "He told Birri to wall it up, but Birri is an engineer, and you know engineers. He wanted to keep one of the gyrocopters, and to have a place to work on all the toys my father frowned upon. So, he walled up the passage at both ends, but set secret doors in them, and made a workshop of it."

"What's this?" cried Gorril. "The old fool built an unprotected door into the hold?"

The other dwarfs were muttering angrily under their breath.

"It's protected," said Hamnir, "engineer fashion."

"What does that mean, pray tell," asked Lodrim dryly.

Hamnir shrugged. "That secret door has been by the forges for a hundred years, and none of you have found it. The one on the mountain face is as cunningly concealed. If dwarfs can't find it, could grobi? And Birri set every trick and trap an engineer can conceive of inside. If they found the outer door, they'd be chopped meat before they got the inner."

"It isn't enough," said Lodrim.

"How do you know of this, young Hamnir," asked old Ruen, "and why did you keep such a grave crime from your father's knowledge?"

Hamnir coloured a bit and looked at his hands. "Well, as you know, I'm not so much my father's son — not the way my older brother is. Perhaps it's because he is crown prince, and I am only a second son, but I am not so hidebound when it comes to tradition. I was only a boy then. I liked the gyrocopters, and all of Birrisson's contraptions. One night I caught him sneaking through the secret door. He begged me not to tell my father. I agreed, as long as he agreed to teach me how to fly the gyrocopter, and to give me use of the secret workshop."

"But, lad, the danger," said Lodrim, "to you, and to the hold."

Hamnir spread his hands. "I make no excuses. I know I was wrong in this, as was Birri, but I... well, I liked having a secret from my father. I liked having a place to go that no one else knew of. I took Ferga there a few times." He smiled wistfully, his eyes far away, and then roused himself. "The point is, no matter how the grobi learned our hold's secrets, this is one secret that only I and old Birri and a few of his apprentices know, and no one can make an engineer talk. They are the keepers of the secrets of a hold's defence. Grimnir would deny them a place in the halls of our ancestors." Hamnir tapped the map again. "The grobi won't be defending this door. If a small force can enter there, and then sneak through the hold and open the front door for the main force, they will not stand against us."

Gorril nodded. "Aye. It is our own defences that defeat us, not the grobi. If we can breach our walls, they are finished."

The dwarfs stared at the map, thinking.

"It'll be certain death for those that open the door," said Ruen.

"Aye," said Hamnir. "Likely."

Gotrek looked up. Felix thought he had been asleep. "Certain death? I'm in."

Felix groaned. Wonderful. Gotrek never seemed to consider how his rememberer was going to live to tell his tale when he made these decisions.

"You are willing to die to aid me?" asked Hamnir.

"Are you insulting me again, oathbreaker?" snarled Gotrek. "I'm a Slayer. I'd be fulfilling two vows with one deed." He sighed and lowered his chin to his chest again. "Not that I'll die, of course, Grimnir curse it. Not at the hands of grobi. But at least I won't have to endure your presence."

The dwarfs in the room glared and grumbled to hear their prince so abused, but Hamnir just sighed. "And I won't have to endure yours," he said, "so it's all for the best. Good."

"It'll take more than one dwarf to do the deed," said Gorril, "no matter how strong. Two levers in two separate rooms must be pulled simultaneously to open the Horn Gate, and others will need to hold off the orcs while they're pulled."

Hamnir nodded. "We'll ask for volunteers at the council tomorrow. That is if we are agreed here?"