GOLGFAG’S REVENGE

Justin D Hill

I

‘Master make you clever.’

It was Fulugg Longstrider who spoke those words.

It was not Fulugg who spoke those words.

Golgfag was sure of that. He was sure of nothing.

His head hurt like he had spent the night butting rhinoxes. He fumbled for his knife. It wasn’t there. He groaned, feeling his right eye scabbed shut. He fell forward, but something held him up.

Golgfag battled to keep his left eye open and could only see the thing that was, and was not, Fulugg Longstrider leering at him.

Golgfag battled to stay conscious.

He lost.

Golgfag groaned. His eyes flickered open. He woke to his jaw being slapped and Fulugg’s leering face in his. Laughing.

Golgfag roared. He summoned all his strength – ten feet of raw muscle and bulk – to throw the tormentor off, to bludgeon and beat him into the dust. But nothing happened. His roar was a cough. He could smell himself: it was a rank mix of sweat, dust and the iron tang of open wounds.

Fulugg looked at him and laughed again, a deep and rattling noise.

‘Master make you clever.’ The words mocked him. ‘Not long now.’

He slapped Golgfag, who struggled for consciousness. He was beaten. ‘Master make me clever,’ Golgfag mumbled. ‘Yes, Fulugg, master make me clever.’

Fulugg squeezed Golgfag’s cheeks as he raised his head up, crushing them together. His mouth was puckered. For a moment Golgfag thought Fulugg was going to kiss him, and he failed to battle back a wave of hysteria. Laughter came from somewhere between insanity and pain. He even laughed as one of Fulugg’s fingers prodded into the open wound on his scalp, sticky with half-congealed blood.

‘Not long now. You wait. Master make you clever.’ The drooling thing that was not Fulugg leaned in close and breathed the words to him. They stank of death, and Golgfag lost his battle with unconsciousness again.

Golgfag blinked both eyes open. He was underground now, crucified to a wall. Fulugg was gone. The gloom had a cool stink of damp, mouldy rat droppings and foetid puddles. His breath misted before him. He would have shivered if the rest of his body didn’t hurt so much that it overrode any sensations of cold. His iron constitution was already at work, healing, fixing, recovering.

Golgfag flexed his fingers and toes. They were stiff with chill and the tight bindings, but nothing was broken. His shoulders ached. He longed to pull his arms down to his sides, but the bindings were too tight and too strong.

Golgfag peered up. A thin grey light fell from a high window or trapdoor. Up there, a breeze was blowing. A sunset breeze. He could smell it, and he could see golden light caught on the edges of the opening. Golgfag hungered for that light as he hungered for mountain air.

Golgfag struggled as the last rays of the setting sun glimmered on the high window ledge, then faded from gold to yellow, to a pale brown. Then the light was gone, replaced by the pale blue of the night sky, where a lone star began to twinkle.

A wolf howled. Then many joined together, howling at the joy of night and dark. After sunset came darkness… Animal instinct told him that he did not want to be here, bound like this, when darkness came.

Fear was an animal: terrified, instinctual, blind. But with it, it brought the kind of strength necessary to wrestle a rhinox to the ground or face a sabretusk in the battle-pits of the Vale of Woe, where he had joined the young bulls proving themselves against the southern tribes. Focusing on the fear and the terror, Golgfag flexed his enormous muscles one last time. Whatever bound him strained and bent and…

And held.

Golgfag spat blood from his mouth and laughed, not the mad laugh of before when Fulugg had been tormenting him, but a dry and humourless sound: the sound of a creature who understood what a hell he was in.

Then he froze and listened.

Fifty feet above him came the faint but unmistakable jingle of distant keys, a brass key turning in a well-oiled lock, the turn of the three sprockets, the heavy iron bolt being drawn back and the slow squeak of hinges as the door into his chamber was thrust firmly open.

Golgfag tensed as a door, high above him swung slowly open.

Forty-six steps down. Golgfag counted each one.

The footsteps were heavy. A huge shape lumbered into view. Golgfag’s fear turned to hope. He knew that hunched shape anywhere. He had spent the last three years battling his way westwards in the shadow of that creature.

‘Fulugg!’ Golgfag croaked. His jaw hurt at the sudden need to articulate. His throat was drier than the Great Eastern Wastes; the words would not come out. ‘I do not know what accursed dungeon you have brought me to, but free me. What is your price? Whatever your new paymaster is giving you, I will give more!’

The steps were carved into the living rock and wound around the circuit of the room. Fulugg stumped down. He made no sign of having heard.

‘Fulugg!’ Golgfag rasped, but his words died as Morrslieb rose high enough to stab a spear of sickly yellow light down into the subterranean chamber and across Fulugg’s face.

It was not Fulugg any more.

The thing that had been Fulugg moved towards him. The skin was sallow. Its mouth hung open and there were maggots there, crawling from his gullet and spilling out over his tongue.

It repelled Golgfag, but he could do nothing but close his eyes, and he would not do that. He faced the monstrosity as it stopped before him and spoke, a cough throwing maggots into Golgfag’s face, where they squirmed and wriggled.

‘It is time,’ the thing that was and was not Fulugg said. ‘Come with me. Master fix you. Master make you clever!’

II

‘What?’

Golgfag was standing in the broad blue sunlight of daytime with his back to the wall and looked up into a shadow. The shadow was speaking to him. The voice was low and deep. The stones at the top of the pile wobbled precariously.

‘What?’ it said again. So very very deep.

Bolgg Giantsnapper pulled himself up to his full height. The seams of his jerkin stretched and tore as he flexed the cords of muscles across his back. He had found a mail shirt on a battlefield somewhere, and the links stretched and popped as he lifted his Ettin club from the floor where its spiked head rested. He jutted out his chin and spoke again. ‘What did you say?’

‘Leave it, Golgfag!’ a brave voice called out, but young Golgfag wasn’t about to leave anything. They’d crossed the Black Mountains at the height of the blizzards, when only ogres would dare to plough a path through the blizzards and snow drifts. They had lost their rhinox and now they had to carry all their packs. Golgfag was sick of this fat fool of a big-gut.

‘Take the high passes, you told us. We’ll come down into the soft belly of the human lands you told us. The manlings will be snug in their farm houses. The larders were full of winter stores. We shall eat well. We shall find horses to carry our packs. Many horses can do what one rhinox can do. But look!’

Many of the ogres looked at the ruins around them. The facts were indisputable. They were in a ruined city, and it wasn’t them who had had the pleasure of ruining it. It had been ruined decades, perhaps centuries before.

‘Instead you brought us to this wasteland. There’s been barely a sheep or a dog to eat, and only crumbling stone ruins! You said you had seen a map. That this was a big manburg. But look! There are trees growing in the gatehouse. This place was destroyed in the time of the titans!’

Golgfag’s voice rose as he spoke. He had come down from the mountains for gold and glory. But he would at least have settled for a full belly. Now they were penniless and starving and the last time they had eaten anything worth eating had been a band of terrified dwarf copper miners they had caught hurrying back to the hills.

‘We could go back over the Black Mountains,’ Bolgg Giantsplitter had suggested as they sat around and cracked the dwarf bones for the marrow. ‘There are caves there said to be full of greenskins. We will feast like titans!’

Bolgg Giantsplitter talked big but he gave them little else but more promises.

Fulugg had protested then. He came from the same tribe as Golgfag. He’d been a champion pit-fighter once, before a jealous rival had blackened his name with Goldtooth, and he’d been forced to take the low paths to exile.

It was a well-trodden path. Fulugg had made a success of it, and when he came back to visit his folk, he was loaded with gold and silver and tales of far off and wondrous places.

Golgfag didn’t need much of a push.

He followed Fulugg back in exile. And they’d fallen in with Bolgg’s party in the Crossing of the Sandveltes. And when Bolgg said he knew a place full of manling cities, they’d followed him here as well, much to the growing frustration of the more eager among them. And none were more eager than Fulugg and Golgfag.

‘I don’t like the taste of greenskin,’ Fulugg said. ‘We came to eat men. You promised us men. You said you had been here before. You had drawn a map. Where is the cursed map! I don’t believe anything. Why did you bring us here? I say we push on. There will be man soon. Man or cow or sheep. I would even settle for more dwarf.’

Bolgg had given in reluctantly and they had split into pairs after that and scouted around, but the land was wasteland: dark forests and watching black carrion birds that circled for a moment and then flew north as if they had a message to report.

They had waited for Bolgg to decide, and when he did he said confidently, ‘North! We press on. You’re right. I was never here. I came over to the north and east. There were many men there. If we go north, we will find more. That is what the map said.’

A week later, they saw the city before them.

‘We shall plunder before nightfall!’ Bolgg had promised them as they hastened forwards. ‘Full guts and full sacks, and horses and mules to carry them!’

He was wrong of course. The closer they came, the more unsettled Golgfag had become. What city sat like this, in the middle of the wild, without a field or farmstead or even a mill to grind their corn?

Haunted cities. Nothing but the wind and the ghosts of dead warriors moaning in the unkempt meadows.

It took a few hours before the rest understood that Bolgg had failed again. This was no city, but the wreck of one. The walls still stood, but there were huge holes in them – the rocks split and shattered as if a titan’s foot had stamped on them, or casually kicked a way through.

By the time the ogres arrived at the gatehouse, where the gates hung twisted and shattered, they were hungry and disappointed, and that made a dangerous combination.

There was going to be a fight. Golgfag could feel it.

It was like a storm that had been brewing.

Golgfag kept out of it. It was Fulugg’s fight. He went to investigate the ruins, stooped under the lintel of the guardhouse. There was a musty smell of damp earth and decay. Racks of rusted halberds stood against the wall. Their ash shafts were green with mildew. The floor was littered with bones. There had been a terrible slaughter here. The bodies had either been torn limb from limb or scattered by carrion. But in the corner of the room lay a whole skeleton.

It must have been a captain of the guard or some such who had died here in some futile defence. The skull still wore a yellow felt cap, faded and dirty, and an enormous white ostrich father. But it was the suit of steel armour that brought Golgfag’s attention. It still shone like newly polished silver, even though everything else had rusted and decayed.

‘You should have worn the helmet,’ Golgfag said to the open-mouthed skeleton.

The skeleton said nothing. Its mouth hung open and the empty eye sockets stared soundlessly back.

Golgfag crouched down and ran a hand over the armour. It was dented in many places, but unbroken. A shiver went through him. Golgfag wanted it. This was treasure at last. He pulled the leg plates free. Thigh bones came with it, and scraps of rusted mail. He shook those off and held the leg plates to his arms. They would serve as vambraces, he thought, bending them into shape.

He took all that would make armour, then stood up and took the white feather. Thrusting it into his cap, he turned away, bored and angry.

That night the ogres had spoken little. The storm was building to thunderheads. There was nothing to eat and they’d been forced to collect the bones of the dead to boil up and stew. It tasted foul, like years of death and decay brewed up into a single broth. Golgfag sat on Fulugg’s side of the fire with the younger bulls.

They glared at Bolgg Giantsnapper and his chief greybacks as Bolgg talked loudly and cheerfully about how there had to be manling cities not far from here that had not been destroyed.

Fulugg had fought in manling lands. He was the only one of them who claimed to have come so far west.

‘Bolgg you are a fat fool,’ Fulugg had said and Golgfag laughed. The laughter pricked Bolgg where insults had not. He glowered and fretted at the giant club he wore at his belt. ‘Tomorrow I take my company alone,’ Fulugg finished.

But in the morning they woke to find that Fulugg had gone alone and left his company behind.

‘I’m the boss here,’ Bolgg said. ‘If you want to flee like Fulugg, then now’s your chance.’

No one left.

Not yet.

III

Many hands dragged Golgfag up the dungeon steps. They stank of rotting flesh. The smell caught in his throat and made him gag. It was dark. His arms were bound before him, but his legs were free. Golgfag didn’t know much. But he knew how to fight. And he knew he did not want to go where they were taking him.

Despite the stiffness in his shoulders he interlocked both fingers and pulled down and then up, violently enough to break the grip. There was a body to his left. He swung up, caught the thing to his left under the jaw and felt the satisfying crunch of bone shattering. An elbow drove another into the wall, his head drove a third back and up so hard the skull shattered with a wet splat against the stone wall.

This felt good.

Golgfag laughed as he heard the spine snap. He caught another assailant by the back of the head and brought knee and hands together, the thing’s head in the middle.

He liked splitting skulls. Even fighting half blind, this was too easy. He braced himself as more hands grabbed him. He inflicted two more deathblows, but they kept coming.

It took perhaps thirty seconds of fighting for Golgfag to realise that even as he was killing them, they were not dying.

In the end, he doubled over and spat bits of tooth and blood onto the stone steps.

‘Enough!’ he growled, but the blows kept coming.

Golgfag had sense enough to save his strength for whatever was to come.

They – Golgfag could not tell what they were, except that the thing that was not Fulugg was one of them – dragged him along a stinking cellar corridor. All along one side, darkness gaped wide. There was a vast chamber here; he could hear the echoes. The air was dry. It stank of bones and decay. A sweet and pervasive smell, as if the place had been used as a charnel house for the dead of whatever armies had fought here so long ago. It was also full of creatures. He could hear them scurrying towards him.

Something leapt suddenly out of the dark, all limbs and claws and fangs, with a single lidless eye in the middle of its forehead. Golgfag knew he was finished. But the creature never struck. An invisible wall held it back, and it thrashed and leapt and howled like a cornered dog.

The thing that had been Fulugg gave the creature a dismissive look. ‘That not clever,’ he said, pulling Golgfag by his blood-matted hair. ‘Come. Master make you clever.’

IV

It was Golgfag who discovered where they were. The words were plain, and if more of them had had the sense to learn their letters – as he had, from a firebelly who lived a nomadic life with his breeding stonehorns – then they could have moved on straight away.

The name was clear as day. It was carved into the arch of the gatehouse in curling gothic letters. There was a pile of rubble, overgrown with bushes and ferns. He had gone out to look for signs of Fulugg, and clambered up and rubbed away the soft green moss and saw the words upside-down.

‘Pheildorf,’ Golgfag told them.

The word felt strange in Golgfag’s mouth. It was a word quite unlike his native tongue. But he had heard enough tales at the fireside to know that it was a name of rumour and horror. A city that had been wiped from the map hundreds of years earlier. A place which had once been prosperous but was now nothing but a deserted haunt of memories, spirits, and the survivors of ancient battles.

‘Pheildorf?’ Bolgg snorted. He had gone scouting with his greybacks and caught a wolf bitch with four fat pups. The taste of fresh meat had put him in a carefree mood. ‘Pah, who cares? It is manling ruin. Today we will eat well. Here!’

He proffered a limp pup to Golgfag, who devoured it in one bite. He was not that proud.

‘And tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow we eat well too. We live here. We will find more. You see! All year we eat well.’ Bolgg seemed strangely confident, and Golgfag walked out.

‘Golgfag,’ Bolgg called after him.

Golgfag turned.

‘What’s that?’

Golgfag looked down to where the dead man’s gold-worked breastplate now covered his gut. ‘Manling metal,’ he said.

‘It looks silly,’ Bolgg said. ‘Take it off.’

‘I’ll take it off when we leave this hole,’ Golgfag said as he walked off.

V

Golgfag lay on a stone slab in the middle of an arched stone chamber. The room had the noxious, sweet smell of old candle wax and black lotus incense. Golgfag’s hairs stood on end.

The room had a chill to it: the unmistakable scent of witchcraft.

Golgfag strained to lift his head from the slab. Pale shapes writhed around each wrist and ankle: ghostly white snakes, twisting and writhing upon themselves, forming a single band of moving and… living? – the word did not seem right – rope

Golgfag tried to lift a leg. The snakes froze into a single, immovable band.

Details came back to him slowly. He could piece it together now. The long climb through halls of slavering and insane denizens of the darkest nightmares, all howling, mewling, dribbling and devouring each other in their blood lust. And then he was brought here. To this room, high in the tower. For surely it was a tower, a round tower wound inside with spiral staircases that were ancient, but not ruined.

Don’t waste your strength, he told himself. You’ve been in worse positions, he told himself. Use your head, even though hurts. Well, at least you can open both eyes at last.

Golgfag’s animalistic senses told him that it was still night outside. He couldn’t have lain here for more than an hour or so. The gibbous Morrslieb was still rising in the sky. His eyes strained to get his bearings.

He was above ground now. It was a rich man’s chamber, the walls stacked with confused piles of vellum scrolls, the animal skins brown with age, and archaic crystal jars with unnameable bits of animal or creature pickled inside. A wheeled stair stood to the side, to reach the upper shelves, he guessed. He had never seen such a thing and did not know what a man could need with so many words.

Golgfag had little use for words. Words had always got him into trouble he thought, remembering the fight with Bolgg Giantsnapper. He should have waited for him as he stumbled back to his night’s rest and clubbed him from behind.

But no, Golgfag had to do it the old way. Face to face, in front of the whole warband. He was stupid like that.

Golgfag closed his eyes. His jaw hurt, he could taste blood in his mouth and one of his eyes was almost swollen shut. Idiot, he told himself.

The facts were clear to him now. Bolgg had got rid of Fulugg and now he had done the same to Golgfag.

The scent of decay lay on him like filth. He remembered Fulugg’s half-rotten face. He swore that he would not end up like that.

At that moment, a bell rang once. The knell came from high above him. Far below, in the dungeons, creatures howled and moaned: sounds of ecstasy or dread, he couldn’t tell, but it made his skin crawl.

The Master was coming.

VI

‘What did you say?’ the shadow demanded. ‘You want more gold? You lead us to gold and fight blood, sweat and bone for it? Run away like Fulugg did! Skulk back over the mountains. I am the leader here until any dare take my place!’ Bolgg stuck his chin out, tempting the younger ogre to swing.

Golgfag’s armour clanked as he braced his feet against the ground for a swing. He had taken all the manling armour that would fit. The thigh-plates were vambraces, the breastplate a gut-shield and he’d rammed the helmet onto the end of his club. He felt like a real warrior with them.

None of the ogres standing there caught his eye. They knew better.

Golgfag tried to speak to their hunger. ‘Bolgg, I know you found food today. You and the greybacks have found food. I can smell it. What was agreed? If any find food, we share it out!’

Bolgg spat. The spit stuck to Golgfag’s cheek. His face coloured. The spit dripped slowly down his face and the veins stood out on Golgfag’s throat.

‘Don’t,’ someone called out, but it was too late.

Golgfag had killed for less and he’d killed for more. He’d even killed because he liked to kill. There was little chance of him winning this one, but chance could be a beautiful thing.

His up-swing caught Bolgg under his fat and stupid chin. His head snapped back, and the shadow tottered and seemed to sway. For a moment, Golgfag thought he had done it.

But then the shadow shook itself and Bolgg’s face turned back towards him. Blood dribbled from one side of his mouth. No one had blooded Bolgg Giantsnapper for years.

Bolgg grinned. Red blood seeped between his yellow teeth. He lifted his club in return. It was capped with cast brass, ruined from years of neglect and abuse, but still just as recognisable as the shape of a wolf’s head. In the years since, it had been made to batter through castle doors, it had been plundered by cave dwellers and it had finally fallen into the hands of Bolgg who had decorated it with the skulls, helms, and weapons of his vanquished foes, each piece crudely bludgeoned into the timber.

Golgfag watched Bolgg ready himself to strike and wished he had a plan to get out of this particular dead end; ‘dead’ being the word that concerned Golgfag at this particular moment. He had counted on at least a few of the bulls supporting him. They’d been keen enough the night before, but in the light of day, they had more sense than him.

Let them all starve, Golgfag thought, looking about for an escape, but the rest of the warband had silently formed a ring about him. His back was to the ruined wall. It was too tall to climb, too thick to push over.

The club went up into the air. It was like watching a felled tree stand back up again.

Golgfag smelled fear.

It was his own.

VII

The Master was not a figure of power and majesty, but a stooped and bald-headed figure with crimped grey hair frizzing out behind its head like a little static cloak.

It had an ornate silver-worked black stave in one hand, and the other was holding something out before it, as if finding its way. It came down the steps with slow and measured steps. The man, for man it surely was, was dressed in a long blue velvet jacket and a waistcoat of peacock feathers, buttoned with gold. It wore soft leather boots. Calfskin, Golgfag smelled, and he did not know why his nose should be so precise about such little details. Calfskin and a perfume such as he had heard that the effete manlings wore: a powerful scent of rosewater and black lotus that almost masked the reek of ancient decay.

The stairs spiralled around the round tower walls. The man came into view. He was talking to himself. Mumbling. As he turned towards Golgfag, the ogre could make out the words.

‘They are coming,’ the man said. ‘They will be here in three days. What can we do? We have to do something. They will be here in three days.’

Golgfag began to feel more hopeful. Perhaps he could talk to it. Cajole, bargain, threaten. Morrslieb cast just enough light for Golgfag to see the man’s face as it stepped off the lowest stair and turned towards him, but Golgfag saw that it was no man.

It might once have been human. But the skin was as wrinkled as the last apple in a barrel and one eye socket was empty, the eye not in the head, but held in its hand, stretched out before it, the single slitted pupil staring through the clawed fingers.

That eye fixed on Golgfag’s face and led the thing towards him. Its hands ended in talons, there were fangs in its mouth and its body was not bent, but horribly misshapen.

‘Ah!’ the voice lisped, with a hiss of pleasure and excitement. ‘Just in time. They will be here in three days. This one is good. Quick, sharpen the knives, light the brazier, the blood loss can be fatal. Quick, Lucard, quick. There is no time to lose. They are coming. We must defeat them. What will be left when they have come? We have much to do!’

It came close and Golgfag’s nostrils filled with the perfume. One hand held the eye. The other groped over the slab until it found where the implements lay, and picked out a broad blade with a razor-sharp edge, serrated to let the blood flow out, and held it up. ‘This one will do.’

The hand clutching the eye came close.

‘There is no time to lose,’it said.

VIII

The ruined city trembled at the violence of Bolgg Giantsplitter’s and Golgfag’s duel. Such strength had not been seen here for a hundred years or more. Such animalistic violence. Somewhere, a precarious spire crashed down onto the long mouldering tombs of the Pfeildorf nobility, their fire-blackened marble features smashing under the force of the collapse. A creaking lintel fell into ruin. A long-hanging gate snapped from rusted hinges and thundered to the ground.

Golgfag’s armour shone so brightly that it nearly blinded Bolgg. He could not hit his foe, and this drove him mad. He raged as he smote with his giant’s club. ‘Who tore the brass doors of Thorinn Blackbeard from the hinges of the mountain and crushed his thanes ’til their eyes popped out of their helms? I am Bolgg Giantsnapper, Terror of the Ten Tribes!’

Bolgg had worked himself up into a fury. Bloody spittle foamed at the corners of his mouth. Golgfag did not know how he had escaped so far, but it was starting to give him hope. Bolgg could not hit him. He easily avoided the first swing and the second. The first smashed the flagstones into dust. The next connected with an old apple tree that creaked and then fell.

Golgfag returned and caught Bolgg’s knee with a punishing blow, but the tyrant was mad with battle-fury and there was no stopping him, short of smashing his skull in. Golgfag was determined to do whatever it took.

‘Curse you!’ Bolgg raged, but Golgfag’s armour shone so brightly that he couldn’t look directly at it.

Bolgg paused for a moment. Golgfag had some conjury that protected him. But if he couldn’t hit the ogre, he could still defeat him.

Behind Golgfag was the wall of some great building: a temple or shrine, with massive blocks of yellow stone fitted one into another with such skill that it had defied the burning and the ages. Bolgg’s blow swung wildly over Golgfag’s head. He didn’t even have to duck. He laughed at Bolgg.

Bolgg’s club impacted with a crunch of metal spikes. The wall moaned. Ancient stones gave way as Golgfag understood the danger. Too late.

There was a moment of stillness as all the war party watched in awe, and then the massive wall crumbled in an avalanche of dust, debris and great blocks of chiselled stone that crashed over Golgfag.

It took a long moment for the dust to settle. Bolgg grinned. Golgfag was buried under tons of masonry. He glared at the others as he put the club under his foot and straightened the bent spikes.

‘Anyone else want more gold?’ he demanded.

IX

‘Quick, light the brazier and prepare the potion.’

The thing called Lucard worked at a dizzying pace, always following the outstretched eye. It fanned the brazier coals into life. It was so close that Golgfag could feel the heat on his thigh. Lucard moved it further down the altar, then moved it back again. He put down the first knife and took up another. After a moment, he put that one down too and fingered a cleaver, such as butchers used to cut sides of beef in half. ‘A big one, good. Hmm, yes, very good. We shall need him. There is so little time.’

In his outstretched palm, the yellow eye rolled downwards and Lucard’s claws scrabbled uncertainly along the line of scattered knives, closing around a screw-shaped blade. ‘Where to start? The thyroyam perhaps, or the lesser oculum glands? Perhaps an extra appendage? An arm, a leg, a claw…’

The eye suddenly thrust towards Golgfag. The pupil narrowed, malevolent and suspicious. The voice hissed through wickedly pointed teeth.

‘Did they send you?’

Golgfag’s voice was uncertain.

‘Who?’ he asked. ‘What?’

The eye came closer. The voice was certain now. The words dripped out like venom. ‘That is why you have come. They sent you. You are a spy. Open the gates would you, let them in?’

The claws reached for Golgfag. When they gripped him, he felt a sudden power, far greater than he had expected from such a small, shrunken and wizened thing. Golgfag was like a rag doll as the creature shook him. His teeth rattled, his bones shook and then he was slammed back down to the slab.

‘You have come to let them in. How dare you betray us all?’

The other claw reached out and grasped Golgfag’s throat. The ogre’s fear left him. He knew he was going to die, and he was furious at the manner of it. If only he could free himself from these sorcerous chains, then he would beat sense into every cadaver and hell-spawn. Golgfag roared, his frustration and anger forcing its way free.

‘Damn you and your mutterings! What madness is this? When I am free I will break your skull into a thousand pieces!’

Golgfag grunted as the thing slammed his head back to the stone. The force was astonishing. He kept shouting, but it only brought more pain. This was how it would end. He would be beaten to a bloody pulp here, in some hell pit, by a mad creature from nightmare.

‘You are with him. You will betray us. He has sent you,’ the thing called Lucard hissed.

‘Who?’ Golgfag managed to gasp. The beating slowed. ‘Who?’ he asked again, and this time the words came out with a trickle of blood.

‘Gorbad!’ the thing said, taking another knife at random. Pointed teeth gleamed in pleasure as the knife began to open up the ogre’s thigh. The pain was terrible. Golgfag bit his lip and tasted his own blood.

‘Gorbad?’ he moaned.

The knife was put down.

A soft hiss came close to his ear.

‘You do know him,’ it said. ‘You have come from him. You are with him.’

Golgfag laughed. The thing was insane. Golgfag felt powerful now. Despite everything, he was sane. Sane against insane, living against dead, hope against hopeless. ‘Gorbad Ironclaw died a thousand years ago,’ he told the shrivelled thing. ‘And you will die as soon as I get a fist free!’

The yellow eye was inches from Golgfag’s face. The black slit was narrow with hatred and disbelief.

‘He lies. Calm yourself, Lucard,’ the thing told itself. ‘Calm. Slow. Do not be rushed.’

Lucard’s creations were getting better, he was sure. He had almost perfected a fighting creature: fierce, ferocious, brutal enough. It was a difficult trick, to imbue the creatures with strength, but also retain enough of their living intelligence that they could best the cunning of the horde that approached. It took centuries of study. He had all the time in the world. It was necessary to preserve the spleen, to fill the body with arcane magics, to make it not another undead creature, but something different and terrifying: the living dead.

‘A delicate and complicated operation. Operation is the right word. Operandus, operandi, operanda infandus, portentifilis, monstrifer.’

The taste of these ancient words felt good in the mouth. Like blood, or flesh, or the words of power that Lucard had learned long ago, when the first burghers of Pfeidorf put stone upon stone and Lucard had built this tower, arriving one night in the shape of a wolf.

He had been wild in those days, consumed by the thirst for blood.

The thirst for learning had consumed him in the long years since, and the application of that knowledge…

Lucard let out a low hissing laugh. A sinister sound. Applicatus doctrina! Where was he? Ah, yes…

‘You are starting to irritate me.’ The low growl made Lucard’s lone eye turn in surprise. His creations did not speak like this. He looked down.

The ogre was awake.

‘Good, it is time. You will drink.’ The sibilant hiss did not sound good. He went over to a boiling glass beaker and slowly mixed some fine green crystals in. The crystals dissolved and a hissing emerald vapour rose. Golgfag tried one more time to break his bonds, but they dug deeper and held him more strongly than ever.

‘It is time!’

Lucard inserted a funnel into Golgfag’s mouth, held the glass beaker high and let a thin trickle run down.

The liquid tasted sweet and foul at the same time, like rotten peaches. Golgfag began to gag. It spilled over the top of the funnel, and where it touched skin it burned and scalded.

‘There is little time,’ Lucard whispered. ‘Just enough, perhaps. You are big and strong. You will meet Gorbad himself. Break him, beat him, drink his blood. Break his bones for marrow!’

Lucard let the last of the liquid dribble into the funnel.

The liquid hissed. Golgfag gagged. He began to sweat and moan. The yellow eye seemed to fill the room. It peered at him as his cheeks burned. He felt sweat roll down his forehead. He writhed. The potion was working at last. The hand came forward and the eye peered down and watched the potion taking effect.

Lucard waited a few more seconds before removing the funnel, and at that instant Golgfag’s eyes flicked open. Instead of pain, Lucard saw hatred burning there, hotter than a dwarf forge.

Golgfag spat the potion into Lucard’s outstretched hand, the hand that held the hateful yellow eye.

Lucard recoiled, but too late. His hand sizzled and bubbled. He dropped the eye and fell backwards into the brazier. His velvet sleeve caught fire. The sleeve, his hand, his arm, and then his whole body went up like a living torch, so dry and ancient was he.

Evil necromancy had imprisoned a form of life within Lucard centuries before, and no fire – however hot – could burn the life from him. But it could hurt him. Golgfag did not need to kill this creature, just to break its concentration.

Golgfag watched as the living torch screamed, a shrill and inhuman sound that made every glass phial and jar shatter. Fragments rained down, the noxious contents of the containers spilling across the chamber. And the writhing bonds that held Golgfag suddenly disappeared.

‘My eye!’ Lucard screamed. ‘My eye!’

After a moment’s lapse, his magics returned, but too late for him.

A hand tapped his left shoulder.

Lucard turned, blind, seeing nothing.

Golgfag kicked the eye across the room and the black pupil spun as it rolled. Then he turned to the blind creature before him, and took a deep breath.

He grabbed Lucard by the throat and lifted him from the ground. He was going to enjoy this.

Faster than a sabretusk, Golgfag slammed the creature against the bookshelves, which crumpled under the impact. The ogre pulled the still-burning Lucard back and slammed him against the stone wall. The flames burned the ogre’s hands, but he held on. Then he realised his folly. Flames could not kill this inhuman thing, nor could brute strength.

The creature sideswiped him. Golgfag felt as though he had been hit by a tree trunk. He grunted at his own folly. It might be blind, but it had the strength of a giant. He had thought this thing to be no more than a human who he could tear limb from limb like a cooked fowl. But sorcery held this beast together, and however hard they wrestled, Golgfag was fighting a flaming thing that flames could not kill. He had never come across such raw arcane power before.

But Golgfag had size and strength. He lifted the thing from the floor.

The flames roared. Golgfag roared too. But he held on and swung the creature round and round, and then let go, and there was a shriek as it flew across the room, and crunched against the stone wall. Golgfag was on it. He swung it again, and this time he did not miss.

Lucard hit the window with an explosion of glass, and burst into the night: a burning torch, a falling star, a comet with a fiery tail.

There was a long, falling wail and then all was silent, apart from Golgfag’s panting and the crackle of flames as they spread up the walls, licking at the rafters overhead. Pieces of timber were beginning to crash down around him.

Below, he could hear howling and snarling. He was not the only thing to have escaped when Lucard’s concentration failed. The image of a slavering, many limbed monster came back to him. He paused and his eyes flashed around the room. The knives were lying where Lucard had scattered them, along with the silver-worked staff that Lucard had used coming down the steps.

It was made of black obsidian, with gold bands at either end and strange markings spiralling like a snake along its length.

Golgfag stuffed it in his belt and took a wicked cleaver from the altar. He took the spiral steps three at a time, but as he reached the top he heard howling racing up the stairs towards him.

Golgfag’s open palm hit the first creature under the chin. The head whipped back, and the neck snapped. But still it came on, the head flopping, clutching hands tearing at his clothes. The cleaver swiped the head from the shoulders and then it fell, three more taking its place, tearing at each other to get to the living flesh.

Golgfag was a whirl of steel. He chopped and hacked and kicked the limbs from the floor before him. He could kill them all, but smoke was starting to fill the corridor, and still the things came on.

And then quite suddenly, there were no more.

Golgfag looked about him. He was in a charnel house of blood and limbs and internal organs. The cleaver killed them where fists did not. Before him the staircase opened up to a flat space that had to be the gatehouse.

Golgfag leapt down the steps.

But then came that voice from the shadows, and a fist like a battering ram.

‘Master make you clever!’

Golgfag took a blow on the chin. He was flung to the right, and winded himself against the iron banisters. But he returned the blow with such force that Fulugg’s feet left the floor for a moment and he crashed back against the wall, crumpled for a moment and then slid down the wall.

Golgfag raised the cleaver to kill the thing. But then he had a stab of guilt.

Fulugg and he were from the same tribe. They spoke with the same accents. They were Sabreskins, and they had been brothers in arms. They had both opposed Bolgg, and they had both paid a heavy price. There was a chance that the magics he had worked on Fulugg could be overcome.

He grabbed the ogre by arm and leg, threw him over his shoulders and hurried down the steps as the roof began to collapse in a shower of sparks.

‘Stop fighting!’ he told it. ‘I’m trying to help you!’

Who knew how long Lucard had been creating his shambling hordes. Who knew what depths of insanity Lucard had sunk into when he saw his city destroyed around him. What had kept the orks from his gates? The fear of death, perhaps. Some arcane magics?

Golgfag used Fulugg as a battering ram as he crashed down through the last shambling monsters who fled this way and that, lost, confused and witless without their master’s driving will. With each step his strength returned, and he knocked them to either side.

Golgfag didn’t much care. He laughed as he jumped down to the gatehouse, and landed with both feet, with Fulugg’s weight on top of him.

The gates were open.

‘Run!’ he told himself, but then stopped short.

Before him sat a great monstrosity from the pits of hell. It was fat and bloated, like a toad, and a forked tongue flicked out from amidst a maw of razor-sharp fangs. Undead it was, but it was alive enough for Golgfag. Alive and hungry, thirsty for blood. It shuffled towards him on its hind limbs and readied itself to spring, its maw wide enough to swallow Golgfag whole.

Golgfag roared a battle cry. The tower shook as he met the thing head on and hurled Fulugg’s body at it.

Fulugg landed full in the monster’s wide maw. The thing gave a choking gurgle.

Golgfag leapt past it into the night, where Morrslieb was setting.

He was free.

X

Two moons later, the early summer sun was starting to set over the fields that surrounded the Mootland village of Nordriding. It also caught in the dust cloud caused by the traffic of many large feet: a sign that invaders were tramping into civilised lands at last.

Bolgg led them. He had taken a crossbow bolt in his hip when his band had stormed a wooden watchtower that defended the river crossing that led to these inhabited parts. But he was mean and old and didn’t like to be beaten. Those defenders had died a horrible death.

Bolgg leaned on a fence post as he led them. He had taken ill, and his guts were not good. They felt full of worms. It was the filthy water they had to drink. That and hunger and constant battling the creatures of the wilds.

On the journey east, his company had halved in size. Desertion. Death. Illness. These plagues had all taken their toll. They had followed old drove roads, and many had led to haunted ruins, but they found their way gradually wending eastwards, till they could see the smoke of fires before them. At last it seemed his promises of food and gold and glory were coming true.

As Bolgg’s company approached the village, the smell of ale, beef stew and fresh wheat bread made their stomachs grumble. They could hear the sound of high halfling voices. Children playing. These halflings were all children. The ogres would eat their way through the village and then move on.

A horn blew somewhere ahead of them. They had been spotted. A defence of some sort might try to halt them, but would fail. They were hungry and desperate, and food was almost within reach.

Bolgg’s pace picked up, despite the pain in his hip. His troop began trotting along behind. They could not let the halflings escape!

As they stamped along, they checked their weapons. They’d probably not even have to strike a blow. They could just terrify the locals into feeding them. Maybe they’d just have to crack a few skulls. The sight of blood did wonders to a crowd

‘Halt!’ a voice called.

Bolgg put a hand up, his troop crowding behind him.

It was not Bolgg who had spoken, but someone before them.

The rearmost ogres laughed when they saw a barricade of wagons had been thrown across the road. A few halflings stood, arrows notched to their bows. It was a pitiful sight. They would hurt less than hornets. The ogres’ laughter turned to contempt.

But then a large shape threw one hand onto the top of the cart, and hauled itself up, and the wagon creaked as a huge figure braced both feet and stood full up. A fellow ogre, it put up a hand.

‘I guard this village. Who comes here?’ it shouted.

Bolgg threw the fence post he had been leaning on to the side and limped forward. ‘It is I, Bolgg Giantsnapper! Tell me your name, and make way before we eat you and throw your bones to the Maw.’

The ogre facing them did not move. ‘You do not recognise me? Your sense is leaving you, Bolgg. It is time you went home and told young bulls about your great adventures. Tell them about that map of yours. Tell them how you sold Fulugg Longstrider to a hellbeast. Tell them how you sent me to that damned pit. For I am Golgfag of the Sabreskins! Golgfag Bolggslayer!’

Bolgg could not let the insult last. He hefted his club and roared as he rushed at Golgfag, who braced himself. He’d arrived from the wilds singed and burnt and as desperate as Bolgg, but he’d made a bargain with the locals, and they fed him. And now his burns had healed, and he was as strong and vital as ever.

Yes, he’d lost the shiny armour and the cleaver was gone, but now he had the lucky stick he’d taken from Lucard in his pocket, and somewhere along the way he’d found a stone battleaxe, the obsidian blade gleaming in the ruddy setting sunlight. The battleaxe felt good in his hands, almost as if it had chosen its owner.

Bolgg was tired and slow and half-starved. Golgfag could see all this as the giant greyback approached. He would kill him and take his bigname, and then he’d put an offer to the others that they couldn’t resist.

Bolgg roared as he closed the yards between them. His club was thrown back and it was clear where his first blow would land. Golgfag weighed the axe in his hands, and sniffed to clear his airways.

This wouldn’t take long.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

‘Golgfag’s Revenge’ is JUSTIN D HILL’S first story for Black Library. He has always believed that good fiction should combine beautiful language with convincing characters and page-turning plots and this approach seems to work, with numerous awards to his name for his writing, which covers both fact and fiction. He has a degree in Old English and Medieval Literature, and spent several years as a volunteer overseas.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Kevin Chin

© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-024-6

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Golgfag’s Revenge - Justin D Hill

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