The Great Betrayal Read Free Page A

motivated them.
    ‘ We are the devourers… ’ they said as one in a horrible collision of voices patched together from a thousand different shouts of anger and wrath.
    Grinning wickedly they began to circle the lords, beckoning them towards death and damnation with the tips of their hell-blades. Loping between the bloody daemons were brass-collared hounds, bigger and more brutish than any normal canine and with a vaguely reptilian aspect.
    In seconds, the edges of the flat rock were festooned with daemons and the lords were surrounded.
    Snorri backed up, snarling with wrath palpable enough to make the abominations pause.
    ‘ We shall feast upon your mortal soul… ’ promised the daemons. A hound leapt at the dwarf with an echoing roar.
    But it would take more than a daemonic dog to fell the High King. ‘Then chew on this,’ he said. Silver fire flared, too fast to truly see, and the hell-beast was cut in half.
    ‘Tasty?’ asked Snorri, brandishing the head of his gore-stained axe at the other monsters.
    Three more hounds sprang after the first, but were swiftly struck by a flight of pearlescent arrows. Every shaft was a heart shot.
    Snorri only half turned, giving Malekith a sidelong glance.
    The elf nodded to the dwarf, lowering his bow and stowing it to draw Avanuir.
    ‘That’s a debt I’ll have to repay now,’ said the High King. Snorri grinned at the elf, showing two rows of crag-like teeth within the forest of his long beard. ‘We stand before the world’s ending, elfling.’
    Malekith gave the dwarf a wry glance, but his attention was partly on the daemons advancing across the Fist of Gron. He lost count after fifty, and was acutely aware he had retreated several paces. Elf and dwarf were almost back to back.
    ‘You sound almost pleased.’
    ‘Aye, think of the saga it will make. Immortality awaits!’
    Malekith didn’t sound convinced, ‘Not if there is no one left alive to write it, and all existence has come to an end.’
    ‘Good point,’ the dwarf conceded. ‘Let us hope not then.’
    Snorri eyed the daemons as he would dung upon his hobnailed boot, swallowing back a bitter taste in his throat at their stench. A cage of iron-hard, blood-red monsters surrounded them and its bars were tightening.
    ‘We need room to fight,’ he muttered, then hefted both his rune weapons and beckoned to the daemons. ‘Come on then!’
    In one gnarled fist the dwarf had a gromril axe, its face etched with three angular runes. In the other he had a hammer, a lightning bolt embossed upon the head in gold. Thick links of gilded mail swathed his broad, muscular body. His arms, dark from the forge and the earth, were bonded with torcs and vambraces. A red, fur-trimmed cloak fell from slab-like shoulders armoured with pauldrons fashioned into the faces of ancestor gods. He wore no helm, for he wanted his enemies to see his fury, but carried a crown upon his brow instead. Runes inscribing every inch of his armour shimmered. Flawless rubies, verdant emeralds and pellucid sapphires studded every ring and bracelet.
    I am the High King , they said. I am Lord of the Dwarfs and my vengeance is terrible. Behold! For your doom has come.
    Snorri beat his chest with a clenched fist.
    ‘Khazuk!’
    It was not meant as a challenge, but a death sentence.
    The daemons heard neither but attacked as one, hounds and masters both. They were a crimson tide, of rage, hate and a desire to end all things.
    Snorri cried out to Malekith as the daemons rushed them, ‘Hold on, elfling!’ and brought his rune hammer crashing down on the rock with all the potency of a lightning bolt.
    Tremors rippled from the point where the dwarf had struck, cracks jagging outwards in an ever-expanding crater of sundered earth. Stone split, sending teeth of razor-edged rock into the daemons, scything into hellish flesh and spilling their tainted ichor.
    Malekith was fast as quicksilver, darting between the spears of rock thundering out of the ground, running