"Sketti Hammerhand, I am," said the dwarf, puffing out his chest, "of the Hammerhand clan. Ironbreaker and Deep Warden of Karak Izor." And true to his name, the haft of a warhammer stuck up over his right shoulder.

Gotrek turned away from him, unimpressed. "And you?" he asked, looking at the black-bearded Stonemonger. "The one who means to protect me so he can fight me later."

"Druric Brodigsson," said the dwarf in his mild voice. "A ranger of the Black Fire Pass, yours to command, for now." He bowed his head, which was covered in close cropped, bristly black hair. "Though it may not be me who fights you; he who will have the honour of facing you is still being discussed. I pray I am chosen. I have always wanted to take the measure of a Slayer."

"Take the measure of your coffin first," said Gotrek. He turned to the others, his gaze passing over old Matrak, the engineer, who had gone back to chewing his moustache and staring into space, and came to rest upon the blond dwarf with the piercing blue eyes. "And you're the son of the old blowhard who challenged me last night."

The dwarf smirked and leaned back, hooking his thumbs in his wide belt. "Aye, that's me, Narin Blowhardsson. At your service, and your clan's."

The other dwarfs chuckled.

"What's the kindling in your beard for?"

Narin closed his hand around the sliver of wood, suddenly embarrassed. "My father's idea, he bid me wear a piece of the Shield of Drutti so that you would always see it and remember our grudge against you." He scowled down at himself. "I don't care for it. It's dirtying my beard."

Gotrek raised an eyebrow. "You want to fight me too, I suppose?"

"No no," said Narin. "My father will not give up the honour. I'm only to make sure you keep your head until he has the pleasure of removing it himself He grinned, his blue eyes sparkling. You really got the old badger's dander up. Wish I'd been there, but there was a lass from Karak Drazh, and well, it took some time for us to get properly acquainted." He shrugged. "About time the old dinner plate was turned to tinder anyway. No use to anybody, save as beard jewellery."

Druric's head came up. His eyes flashed. "The shield of Drutti was a great and noble heirloom. The theft of it by the Ironskin clan..."

"Oh come, cousin," said Narin scowling. "It has never been taken into battle. It was mounted on the wall of your feast hall for a thousand years before my greatgrandfather took it, and then it was mounted on the wall of our feast hall for a thousand years. It was a dinner plate."

Druric glared at Narin for a long moment, and then sighed. "Very well, it was a dinner plate, but that is entirely beside the point," he said, raising his voice as the others laughed. "Theft is theft. It matters not if it is a bar of gold or a loaf of bread, the dwarf who took it is without honour."

Narin held up his hands. "Take it up with my father. It isn't my fight. The dwarfs will have no future if we keep fighting battles two thousand years in the past."

"And what sort of future will we have if it is achieved at the price of honour?" asked Druric.

"Enough," said Gotrek, growling. "Save it for the beer hall." He passed over Thorgig and Kagrin, who he knew, and looked at the last dwarf, who sat on an overturned bucket with the hood of his cloak pulled so far forwards that his face was entirely in shadow. "You at the back, what's your name? Let's have a look at you."

The dwarf didn't speak, only reached up and pulled back his hood. The others swore and laughed. Even Gotrek blinked. Felix didn't blame him, for this dwarf was the strangest of that strange breed he had ever seen.

"What are you?" asked Gotrek, scowling.

The dwarf straightened his shoulders and looked directly at Gotrek, light green eyes glaring out of the eyeholes of the head-covering leather mask he wore. The mask was, in its way, a thing of exquisite craftsmanship, beautifully tooled and sculpted in the square fashion of old dwarf sculptures. Thick strips of orange tinted leather hung in tapering plaits from its cheeks and jaw-line to represent a beard, and a bristling horse-hair crest of flaming orange rose from a flap of leather that went up over the dwarfs scalp and buckled to straps that extended back from the face. "I am a Slayer," he said in a low rasp. "Leatherbeard the Slayer."

"A Slayer? With no crest?" Gotrek raised a shaggy eyebrow. "What manner of..."

Leatherbeard put his hand on his axe. He was bare-chested, in Slayer fashion, and wore only the hooded cloak over his shoulders to keep off the morning chill. "Do I ask of your shame, brother?" he growled. "Do I ask your reason for seeking death?"

Gotrek's teeth clicked together. He sobered instantly, and nodded at Leatherbeard. "Fair enough." He turned abruptly from the masked dwarf and shouldered his pack. "Come on, then. Up and out." He started out of the stable without a backward glance.

Felix gaped at Gotrek as the dwarfs gathered up their gear and followed him out into the wet morning air. That had almost been an apology!

They travelled north and east from Rodenheim Castle all morning, up and down thickly forested hills that rose one after the other like swells in a green sea. There was a road to Karak Hirn — the remains of one of the old dwarf roads — but they didn't take it. The road led to the hold's front door, and would be watched. Hamnir's army was marching up it, bold as brass. With luck, the orcs would keep their eyes fixed on the column, and miss the little company of nine that went the hard way.

They sloshed through rock-choked mountain streams and scrabbled up loose shale slopes, trekked through deep forests and across upland meadows. As they climbed higher, drifts of half-melted snow appeared in the shadows, though the sun was hot on their necks. Felix had thrown back his red cloak and was sweating though his shirt. His calves ached like fire, and they hadn't even reached the real climb yet. Too many months at sea. He'd become a tenderfoot again.

The dwarfs took it all in their stride, maintaining the same dogged pace on flat ground or steep hill. Even old peg-legged Matrak kept up, mumbling, as he limped along, in a monologue that no one else could hear.

Felix wished some of the others were as quiet. Sketti Hammerhand in particular would not shut up for more than two minutes at a time, and it was always the same subject.

"It's the elves behind it all. They want the dwarfs dead because we're what stands in the way of them ruling the world. You can be sure they're behind this grobi trouble."

"How could they be behind this?" asked Thorgig.

The others groaned as Sketti's eyes lit up. He had only been waiting for someone to give him an opening.

"You don't know elves like I do, young one. I've met them, and a twistier set of shock-headed beanpoles you wouldn't want to find yourself dead in a ditch with. There are no depths to which they wouldn't sink. No plan is too devious." He licked his lips. "I'll tell you how it is, lad. You think the greenskins getting too big for their britches is because so many dwarfs and men have gone north, and there isn't anyone to keep them out of the Badlands. That's true as far as it goes, but that's only the surface. A true dwarf doesn't trust the surface of nothing. He looks beneath."

Gotrek muttered something about true dwarfs knowing when to shut up, but Felix didn't quite catch it.

"What you need to ask yourself, lad," continued Sketti, "is why the northmen are invading in the first place. What stirred them up? Put aside the fact that it was the elves messing about with magic they couldn't control that opened the Chaos rift in the first place, making them the fathers of Chaos, you can be sure it was elves put the bee in this Archaon's bonnet as well. Now the `fair ones' like to make out that they have nothing to do with their dark cousins in Naggaroth, but everyone knows that's a trick to blame their evil deeds on someone else. I had it from a dwarf who trades with Bretonnian sailors who deal with Ulthuan that it was the dark elves who whispered in the ear of this `chosen one' and told him his `destiny' lay in the south." Sketti spread his hands. "So, he heeds their words and invades the Empire, and the dwarfs, who have pledged since Sigmar's time to protect mankind, no matter how often they steal from us and stab us in the back, go north to defend the ungrateful weaklings, and lo and behold, the grobi `coincidentally' choose that moment to rise and attack! You can't make me believe it isn't all some dark elf scheme."

"You're saying it was the dark elves who convinced the northmen to attack the Empire just so the grobi could take over Karak Hirn?" said Narin, chuckling.

"And why not?" asked Sketti.

"So the elves give orders to the grobi now?" scoffed Thorgig.

"Not directly. Not directly," said Sketti. "But they're in league with the skaven, everyone knows that, and the skaven..."

Everyone groaned again. Felix shivered, recalling all the times that he and Gotrek had encountered the horrid, man-like vermin, and the single-minded grey seer who had dogged their steps so unflaggingly during their travels in the Old World. He couldn't imagine the great Teclis ever conspiring with the likes of them.

"Hammerhand!" said Narin, interrupting Sketti's rant. "There's a manling among us. Do you truly want to reveal to him all this secret dwarf knowledge? Everyone knows that men are the lackeys of the elves. Do you want the elves to know how much you know?"

Sketti's mouth shut like a trap. He turned and glared at Felix with wild eyes. "It's true," he muttered. "It's true. I have perhaps said too much." He shot a last suspicious glance at Felix and marched on in silence.

Narin winked at Felix behind Sketti's back as the rest sighed with relief.

Felix nodded his thanks and stifled a grin. A good fellow, Narin. Not as stiff as the others.

Just before noon, the party stepped out of pine woods at the top of a shallow ravine to find the jutting peak of Karag Hirn towering above them, a long feathery scarf of blown snow trailing away from its white craggy peak across the bright blue sky. The rest of the mountain was as black and sober as a judge. Thorgig, Kagrin and old Matrak looked up at it reverently.

"To think the halls of our birth hold run with grobi," Thorgig spat. "To think that they defile our sacred places with their presence. We will avenge you, karaz. We will cleanse you of their taint."

The others murmured answering oaths.

On the west side of the mountain, the gleaming switchback curve of a road could be seen, and above it, almost hidden by rocks and outcroppings, the regular planes of massive dwarf battlements.

"That is the front gate — the Horn Gate," said old Matrak, pointing. "Where we..." He choked on the words. "Where we fled from the silent grobi. Hamnir and the others go there to wait for us. We..." He swung his hand to the right. "We go there. The Zhufgrim Scarp."

Felix's eyes followed the engineer's finger to the eastern face of the mountain. The base of it, where it rose from the trees, was notched, as if some dwarf god had hacked out a gigantic foothold with an axe. A vertical wall rose up from the notch, more than halfway to the snow-peaked crown, and looked, at least from where Felix stood, as smooth and flat as a sheet of parchment. A thin line of silver glittered down the middle of it.

"At the base is the Cauldron," said Thorgig, stepping up beside the old engineer. "A deep lake fed by the falls that pour down the cliff. That is our road."

Felix swallowed. "Up the cliff? Do you have wings in your packs?"

Sketti snorted. "Nothing to it, for dwarfs."

"Hist," said Druric. "Orcs."

The others went quiet instantly and turned to where he looked. A small company of orcs was pushing through the heavy undergrowth of berry bushes that covered the floor of the ravine below. The dwarfs stepped back from the edge, and squatted down so they could only just see over the lip.

"Twenty of them," said Thorgig.

"And we are only eight," said Sketti.

"Nine," said Druric, "with the man."

"As I said, eight," said Sketti. "We'll still manage."

Gotrek snorted at that.

"I'd manage alone!" said Leatherbeard, defensively.

"Forgive me for speaking out of turn," said Felix, "but isn't the aim of our mission to reach the secret door without being seen?"

"If they're all dead," growled Narin, tugging on the charred sliver in his beard, "how can they tell what they've seen?"

"If others find them chopped to pieces," said Felix, "they will know we were here. And if we are to open the Horn Gate in time to let Hamnir in, can we spare the time for a fight?"

The dwarfs hesitated, palpably angry at Felix's attempts at logic. They were tensed like wolves looking down on unsuspecting sheep. Every fibre in their squat, powerful bodies wanted to charge into the ravine and butcher the greenskins.

At last Gotrek sighed. "The manling is right. This isn't the time for a fight."

The others grunted their annoyance.

"How much time could it take?" asked Leather-beard.

"We'll have plenty of fighting in the hold," said Gotrek, "enough to kill us. Or the rest of you, at any rate."

"I have sworn to follow you," said Thorgig, stiffly, "but it pains me to let even a single orc live."

"It isn't the dwarf way," said Sketti.

"It's my way" said Gotrek. "Now wait until they pass."

The dwarfs grumbled, but did as he ordered, watching in hiding as the orcs passed below them.

The greenskins walked in double file, their leader at their head, scanning the landscape. They did not talk or argue amongst themselves as orcs usually did. There was no shoving or fighting, no drinking or eating, or bored hacking at the underbrush with their weapons. They kept at their task with a sad dullness that looked almost comical on their hideous faces. Only occasionally would this listlessness break, when one of them shook its head and twitched, roaring like a bull stung by a wasp, and its eyes would blaze with the accustomed orcish fury. Then, as soon as it had begun, the outburst would end, and the orc would sink back into its stupor.

"What's come over them?" asked Thorgig.

Kagrin shook his head, baffled.

"What kind of orcs don't squabble?" muttered Narin, unnerved.

"It seems almost as if they are asleep," said Sketti, frowning.

"Then they kill in their sleep," said old Matrak, trembling, "for this is how they came when the Karak fell: silent, but bloodthirsty. We didn't hear them until they were on us. We didn't..." He trailed off, his eyes wide and far away.

The other dwarfs looked away from him, uncomfortable. "Elf work, no doubt," said Sketti. "White sorcery." Narin considered this. "Could any sorcerer alive today command the wills of an entire hold full of orcs?"