Retribution by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781844162932
Publisher: BL Publishing
Published: 2007-03-27T07:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

A Band of Brothers

The Dwarf Stronghold of Karak Raziac

Beneath the Worlds Edge Mountains

Kallad Stormwarden couldn’t rest.

The dwarf dearly wanted to just close his eyes and have the world go away into dreams, but there was no hiding, even here, deep under the mountains.

He had hoped after Grim Moor that he would be able to find some kind of peace. He had faced his father’s killer and watched the daemon struck down by Helmar and his Runefang, but there was no peace.

Peace, such a fleeting thing, even for one as long-lived as Kallad. When he closed his eyes he heard the raven’s caw: Mannfred! And recalled the vampire, Skellan’s words: The greatest of all is coming. You do not want to be here when he returns. It was impossible to shake the memory, to move on.

He had been content to pick up the hammer for more useful purposes, for a while. He had worked in the smithy with Keggit and his brother Rerle, but Kallad had had no great skill for it. Despite his brother’s patient teaching, everything he turned his hand to ended up going back into the fire to be melted down again. He quickly tired of failure. Gegka Darkcutter offered him a place in his crew, mining the deeps of the Underway. Kallad had no wish to go deeper; memories of the subterranean prisons of Drakenhof plagued him still. For a while he ran with Iori Slatebreaker’s hunters, bringing down mountain game to feed the families of the Karak, but he tired of that, too.

Even in Karak Raziac, surrounded by his own kind, the dreams tormented him, making sleep impossible. He prowled the stone halls of the stronghold or went out beneath the sky and haunted the mountainside. He was a ghost, a shadow. He slowly came to understand the truth. He had died out there on that battlefield, not a physical death, but a death all the same. If his nocturnal perambulations disturbed the others they were loathe to say so, at least to his face. They knew his pain. Few he encountered spoke with him. He was, they whispered behind his back, cursed. He was the son of Kellus, the last child of Karak Sadra. He had fought the vampires, stood beside Grufbad at Grim Moor, and for that they welcomed him among them, but he was not one of them, and he never would be. Instead of friendship they offered pity.

He was disaffected.

He had had his reckoning, but rather than completing him revenge left him hollow.

He sat alone on the hillside, waiting for the spectre of death to come and claim him. He shouted a challenge to the mountain, his axe Ruinthorn above his head, shaking it at the thunderheads and the sky. He looked for ghosts coming over the peaks. He knew what it was: survivor’s guilt, they called it. He lived where his family, his entire people, had died. He was the last of them. He carried all the guilt that went with outliving his clan, the guilt that went along with failing them.

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