The Helsmiths of Hashut arrive for pre-order this weekend, a duardin society twisted by the pull of Chaos. But how did they come to be? Our latest slice of Age of Sigmar fiction sheds a little light.
‘Submit.’
So came the voice again.
Darkness filled the rune-forge of Karak Monz. It crept up the stone walls and cast shadow over the statues of the ancestor gods as they watched, gilded and stern, from their plinths. Darkness – an unusual state for a karak of Aqshy. More unusual still in the Adamantine Chain, where channels of magmic force wound through the mountain vales. But then, the world was ending, so maybe it was not a surprise at all.
Maybe other strongholds had been spared. Grimnir’s Firehold to the north, for one—
‘Which has sealed its gates.’
The voice brooked no argument. Each syllable dripped spite.
‘They send no aid. They consider you beneath saving. But there are ways, scion. There is craft. Submit.’
Sixteen years ago, when it had first crackled from his forge, Morgrum Gargrumsson had scorned the voice in the flames. Nearly two decades of privation had worn on even his stubborn duardin soul, though. Fingers that had cast the runes so cleverly were now arthritic and claw-like. Ragged hung the beard that had once been his pride. Flesh clung tight and skeletal over his skull. Indeed, very little in his appearance betrayed the Runesmith’s noble heritage.
For all the good it did him, hunched and corpse-like as he was, sitting on a threadbare stool and staring into the flickering heart of his sanctuary. For all the good it had done his father, oh-so-judicious King Gargrum, when he had ordered their own gates shut fast against the terror sweeping over the realms and damned them to this slow decline.
‘Recant.’ Pain shot through his nerves, a superheated blast, though he barely had strength to groan. The voice’s disdain clanged loud. ‘Your father was elder, sire and king. Your obeisance was correct. When the enemy came, would you have abandoned the tombs? The vaults? Would you have allowed the hordes to plunder your riches and defile your bones? Would you have fled to the clouds or grovelled at the feet of the Storm God?’
Morgrum tried to argue. Upon his honour, he did, but the heat parched his lips. He was feeling the years of siege tonight, feeling them pull taut. And, in truth, he had no argument. No, he would not have. He had not contested his father, though as Runesmith he’d had the power to do so. Discord bred panic. A united front had seemed best. It had formed a rift with some of his siblings. He wondered who still lived, for rarely now did he leave this chamber. His people still held faith that he could craft some salve to their ills, yet he had none to offer them.
One year prior, he had cried out to absent Grungni, offering every scrap of his soul before setting to his task. Gargrum had fasted and toiled, had shunned the last bonds he possessed. Every moment, save those prostrated before the Maker’s altar, had been spent shaping the master runes he had believed might bring salvation.
They lay before him now. The sight ached worse than the hunger pangs and a throat that now tasted only polluted water eked from curdled mountain springs. They were lumpen; under the harsh light, he could see that what he had thought had been born in a fugue of divine inspiration were barely a novice’s work. Inert, sparkless… ugly. They were ugly.
‘You fail because you lack focus. You fail because you hear the whispers in your mind and see them as things to fear, not master. You fail because you refuse to do what must be done. Submit.’
Harsh, but no word a lie, truth be told. He’d suffered distraction. Lids closed across Morgrum’s sunken eyes. In the blackness, faint voices rose from below. Seething. Gnashing. Always present, never acknowledged.
The daemons.
After all, they had not just closed the gates. King Gargrum had had a plan, one that had seemed the only course when the daemons had poured into Karak Monz. Seal the entrance with the oldest, most learned form of binding runes. Entrap those already within to prevent more from entering. His father and the royal throng had marched down to face the trapped fiends. He had not returned. In the aftermath, it was thought that the daemons might simply burn out. They had not. Rather they persisted, a black furnace heart leaking corruption through the rock.
A flare of spite suddenly burned along Morgrum’s spine. He looked up at the plinths on which the ancestor gods stood. He saw the contempt in their stone gazes. For years, they had drunk down his and his kin’s worship, and for what? Grungni had abandoned them. Grimnir had sold his life for pride. Valaya had failed to stoke their hearth with defiance. One and all, they kept their aloof silence.
‘Yet, were they here, they would damn your courage and craft in imprisoning the daemons as arrogance. Always judging. Never facing the challenges others have.’
Was an oath still an oath when none heard it spoken?
‘You were closer than you know. There lies power beyond that of the runes. Power in ruin. You could wield it. If you were strong.’
The daemonic susurrations ceased, as if suddenly scenting some greater predator beyond the firelight. Morgrum’s eyes settled on an empty plinth set in the rune-forge’s highest and most shadowed alcove. It had never borne a statue. When he had asked his former master why, he had received a thunderous glare as an answer. Yet now it seemed more honest in its vacancy than its present, disdainful kin.
‘I shall show you, scion. Through artifice, all things may be mastered. All can be preserved. Submit.’
For sixteen relentless years, the voice had spoken thusly. It had never deviated nor compromised; it had been a piston pounding, a bull hammering its head against the wall of his will. But there was honesty in that too.
Morgrum looked at his failed runes, then his eyes returned to the plinth. The voice did not hesitate now.
‘Simply speak my name. You know it. All of you know it. Submit.’
He found he did. The Runesmith wet his throat. He croaked two syllables.
‘Hashut.’
Four hundred and twenty six years had passed since he had sealed the pact.
Not long to wait for vengeance, all told.
Morgrabal inhaled, ring-pierced nostrils flaring. He took in the scent of Grimnir’s Firehold dying. It smelt like smoke and ash. The wounds ripped in the magmahold’s walls still steamed, running like molten flesh where they had not vitrified or been transfigured to unearthly steel. Rivers of blood trickled across flagstones, stained unnatural colours by the forces unleashed against them.
Chaos, even chained to the duardin’s will, wrought such travesties upon the weak. But then, that was why the worshippers of Grimnir faltered while the Helsmiths of Hashut had grown strong. They had tamed ruin, bound it to blade and cannon. All it had required was a fair wage of sacrifice.
They had already been making sacrifices. To endure without gain had lacked good duardin sense. His siblings – for it turned out some had lived after all – had not understood that. They had still contributed in their own way to his learnings. There had been others within the karak who had heard the voice, who had understood the principles. Once you had made the first sacrifice, all that followed were simply matters of coarse arithmetic.
Morgrabal touched his face. The intricate tattoos marking a Daemonsmith of the Forge Anathema had not been disturbed. Ritual power lay in them; they were blueprints to divinity, revealed by Hashut and bartered with souls. He had earned them. He had chosen to bear them. They were no mark of submission, no chain. Not like those the manling barbarians bore. Nothing like them.
Amongst the percussion of mortar fire and the groan of collapsing pillars, a warrior approached. Ghurot – some fifth-born son of a distant cousin. He was bound to the Daemonsmith for another forty-seven years of service, at the end of which he expected to inherit control of a lucrative frontier foundry as reward. Morgrabal did not foresee him living long enough to collect.
Glaives, wielded by the masked and blessed Bull Centaurs flanking the Daemonsmith, were crossed in imposition at Ghurot’s approach. Blanching briefly under the hulking mutants’ glare, the duardin lowered himself to the floor in prostration.
‘Honoured immaculacy.’
‘I was in reminiscence,’ Morgrabal said, running a ring-encrusted hand through a ringleted beard. The other limb remained within his sleeve – curled, immobile, turned to stone. No need to show the petrification creeping across his flesh. Hashut’s knowledge had not been a gift but a transaction. Even with mere decades at best remaining before his total transfiguration, Morgrabal would not call it an ill bargain. ‘Speak.’
‘Lord Taar desires a more deliberate advance.’
‘Absurd. I have reported to his blessed eminence that our pace does not slacken. We grind the scum to ruin.’
‘He has sent a commandment for more, great one. There are delays in the eastern gallery. Lady Taruka says that her cohorts will soon be in position to resolve the matter.’
‘That cinder-swiller shall not shame me before the First Smith, or by the Bullfather’s burning hooves, I shall see you all flayed!’
Through a rent ripped in the magmahold’s ceiling, a bellow shook the burning sky. Looking up, Morgrabal could see a tauroid shape swooping low over the fortress. Embers spilled from each beat of its bronze wings and leapt from the fingers of the laughing figure mounted on its back, bathing more of the stronghold in hellish flame.
With another rumble, the monster passed from sight, back into the darkness, Morgrabal’s own fingers flexed. He growled, black cinders spilling between his tusks, recovering himself.
‘We shall attend to it.’
Leaving Ghurot to assemble a suitable guard from nearby warriors crowing their triumph, Morgrabal channelled his will into the iron-legged platform he stood upon. Arcane Zharralid script pulsed across its side as the daemons imprisoned within shivered in pain and fed power into the conveyance. They were some of the selfsame entities that had once raged loudest in his mind. He leant the weight of his petrified legs upon the dais, hiding a smirk at the daemons’ wordless wails.
The Hashutites passed toppled ancestor statues with glowing gouges carved into them. They passed pyres of Fyreslayer corpses, piled high and charred black. They passed hobgrots prising golden runes from slain duardin; Morgrabal ordered his Bull Centaurs to trample any who did not offer proper deference as he went by. They passed walls where cavern frescos had vanished under the flames of rocket batteries or the warping explosions of bombards. Where the passage turned, Morgrabal bade his minions blast through the wall with packs of cluster bombs. No worthy duardin turned their path at the behest of lowly rock.
Only upon reaching the eastern gallery did Morgrabal spy unrecovered Hashutite corpses mixed amongst the Fyreslayers’ own. A figure waited amongst them, leaning on an axe, panting hard. The warrior ignored his own wounds, straightening and furrowing his brow as the Hashutites approached.
‘So, you are a lord amongst these umbaraki, are you?’ The Fyreslayer spat upon the ground, paying no heed to the blood flecking the spittle. From atop his scuttling platform, Morgrabal sneered. His flesh-hand gestured dismissively to the bodies of the slain Hashutites.
‘They fell to this wretch?’ The words were directed at Ghurot, who gave an obsequious bow.
‘I shall have their lineages disciplined, immaculacy.’
‘Look upon me, oathbreaker!’ the Fyreslayer snarled. Blood sprayed over his lips as he beat a fist on his chest. ‘Know that you face Rofar, son of Rinfim-Grimnir!’
‘Do not address me, worm,’ Morgrabal spat. Even now, he looked through the Fyreslayer. ‘Avert your gaze. Look instead upon the price of your forebears’ cowardice. You wished us to fall. Instead, we rose.’
‘You speak old Khazalid, but your corruption is plain, dark one,’ Rofar said. He barked a laugh, but hate twisted it. ‘None wished for your doom. Why would we? But you made your choice. You weighed up the cost, and you refused to accept the end like warriors. The monster holding your strings was always bound to tug on them eventually. You survived nothing. You bowed.’
‘Let me gut him, great one.’ Ghurot stepped forwards with a growl, half unsheathing his blade. Hungry daemon-fire licked its steel. Outraged snorts left the Bull Centaurs as they stamped and brandished their equally blazing polearms. All were silenced as Morgrabal lifted a hand. He bade them move back with a flick, a low chuckle escaping him.
‘We bowed to nothing, whelp. Our Father in Darkness chose us. He did not choose you. But come, then.’ He raised a palm, the gesture almost magnanimous. ‘You would challenge me? I would stand as my own champion. Name your weapon.’
Rofar studied him, searching for the lie. Slowly, he came to clasp his axe with both hands.
‘The axe of my line, vowed in Grimnir’s name.’
‘Predictable,’ Morgrabal said. The tattoos across his face glowed an infernal crimson. ‘I choose fire.’
Rofar’s eyes widened as he smelt the tang of sorcery. He bellowed an oath and leapt, blood trailing, axe raised. Morgrabal’s eyes shined hellflame bright as he spat an incantation, fingers twisting and clenching. The floor ran as wax. Stone collapsed into vortices of dirty flame that belched ash. From their depths lashed chains of fire that snapped around Rofar’s ankle.
Even as he was dragged down into the bubbling pit that the floor had become, even as his flesh charred and blackened, Rofar refused at first to cry out. His axe clattered down, metal warping under the heat, but he tried to desperately drag himself forwards all the same.
Then claws of unnatural daemon-flame reached up. They seized him and raked him with ashen talons. Now Rofar thrashed in the molten mass, howling, his beard then his flesh catching alight as his spine arched.
Morgrabal’s fingers clenched tighter. Rofar’s screams lingered on air that still quivered to the roar of daemon-guns and the shrieking of broken rock.
‘Who bows now, kinsman?’ Morgrabal laughed. His guard did the same as they watched the Fyreslayer princeling burn alive. ‘Who bows now?’
The Helsmiths of Hashut army set will be available to pre-order tomorrow!
