Gotrek Gurnisson

The Bone Desert

(Robbie MacNiven)

From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

To Mickey, the Big Nephew that started it all.

Prologue

Hazim’s Parlour was closing early. Hazim himself, rarely seen in the hasham den, emerged not long after nightfall with two of his burly Karami bodyguards. They started ushering the patrons out, regardless of how delirious or inebriated they were. Those who tried to resist were forcibly ejected. The regulars went quietly. Even affected by the den’s opiates, they weren’t going to argue with Hazim. Not tonight. Not when the normally unflappable hasham seller was so obviously afraid.

The parlour’s front doors and windows were boarded, but business continued unseen. The rear rooms had been commandeered, bought for a price that Hazim hoped he was never offered again. He withdrew to his private chambers without dismissing the two Karami, and barricaded the door for the rest of the night.

His new clients were not the sort of people he wished to spend the night-time hours with.

‘Barkash?’ asked one of them. The parlour’s rear room was supposed to be kept for only the wealthiest of clients, but the new edicts by the city’s ruling council had brought hard times on downtown business. The chamber was now mostly given over to storage space, the walls stacked with sacks of unfiltered hasham leaf and the various other contraband goods Hazim’s criminal network had acquired over the years – silk from Merport, counterfeit coins forged by renegades from the Jelali banker guild, grain stock being held for merchants wishing to avoid the city’s market tithes. The air, lit by a single tallow candle set on a small table at the room’s centre, was dark and heavy with dust.

‘Yes,’ came the answer to the question. ‘The target is expected to arrive there within the next three days. How long they will stay, I do not know, but I doubt they will wish to linger.’

‘And beyond Barkash?’ the original speaker asked. He was a Kharadron, clad in the bulky silver armour plates and rubbery sky-suit worn by the airborne duardin reivers, his face obscured by a grim, gold-etched ancestor mask. There was another of his kin beside him, a heavy blunderbuss slung casually over one shoulder.

‘Now, that, I do not know,’ answered the voice, lost in the shadows at the far end of the room. ‘But it is likely Khaled-Tush, and from there the Eight Pillars, or the Temple of the Lightning.’

A murmur ran through the assembled group. Besides the Kharadrons there were four others present in the back room. Two were human females, dark-haired and black-eyed, clad in the shimmering, multi-hued silkweave and pearl strings of traditional tribal dancers of the Alharab. The third stood apart from the others, wearing a heavy cloak, its species and gender unknowable behind cowl and veil.

‘And you wish the target dead?’ one of the two Alharabi dancers asked. ‘Not taken?’

‘Dead,’ the voice hissed. ‘Plus proof of its demise, by whatever means you can procure.’

Silence followed, disturbed only by the clawing and scratching sounds of the rats that seemed to infest the hasham den.

‘Full payment only to the group that makes the kill?’ the Kharadron asked eventually.

‘That is correct, duardin.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ the duardin growled, nodding his kinsman towards the door.

The assassins left, the Kharadrons first, followed by the Alharabi. The cloaked figure went next, saying nothing. Only after they were all long gone did the being in the shadows stir and depart, melding instantly with the refuse-stinking darkness in the crumbling alleyways outside.

It was a long time before Hazim dared check the back room and bar its open door.

Chapter One

‘How much further?’

Gotrek’s growl ended the last hope Maleneth had of sleeping. She opened one eye to look at her companion, but the sunburned duardin hadn’t been speaking to her. He’d been addressing their guide.

‘A half-day’s journey yet, sellah,’ Aziz replied, glancing back nervously from his perch atop the front of the wagon. The scrawny young merchant had chattered incessantly when their journey had first begun, his words clearly driven by the anxiety he felt at being in the presence of the cantankerous red-crested duardin warrior. Gotrek’s surliness had quickly drained him of words, though.

‘You spat those lies half a day ago, manling,’ Gotrek snarled. Aziz cringed, and Maleneth grimaced. The duardin’s perpetual ill mood was becoming infectious.

‘The temple inscriptions have been there for the better part of an age, Gotrek Gurnisson,’ Maleneth responded over Aziz’s stammered apologies. ‘I doubt one turning of day to night will alter that.’

She closed her eyes again, trying to ignore the incessant rocking motion of the wagon, the sack of meal grinding her back, the infernal heat cooking her tight-bound leathers. She tried to ignore existence itself, but to no avail. Silently, she cursed everything – the heat, the journey, the sleeplessness. Most of all, she cursed Gotrek Gurnisson, the greatest monster-slayer of a dead age and the being – some said demigod – that Maleneth was murder-sworn to protect.

As though the mad red-crested Doomseeker needed protecting.

‘Will there be any dwarfs at our destination?’ she heard him ask. She could tell from the pained silence which followed that Aziz was struggling with the question.

‘Will there be… duardin, at the outpost,’ Gotrek rephrased, pronouncing the name of his own race with painful hesitancy.

‘Duardin at Khaled-Tush, why yes, sellah!’ Aziz said eagerly, grasping on to any perceived good news he could offer his ill-tempered companion. ‘It is the beginning of the Golden Season, when the master smiths of the Great Karagi will ply their wares to the tribes up and down the trails. Some of their retainers will likely already be setting up at Khaled-Tush.’

Gotrek spat on the golden sand. The gobbet sizzled. ‘Then when we arrive, you be sure to keep me and my axe away from them,’ Gotrek said. Aziz lapsed back into silence, clearly unwilling to enquire what dark deed had left the lone duardin estranged from his kindred. Maleneth knew well enough – in the months since Gotrek had hammered the Master Rune into his flesh and bonded with its power, his name had surged from one duardin hold to another. Some warriors of the Fyreslayer lodges believed him Grimnir reforged, their shattered god made whole once again. It hadn’t been long before Gotrek had found the genuflecting too much to bear. He’d sent them all away, made them swear oaths not to follow him. All except Maleneth.

That had surprised her. She had been preparing for the day when Gotrek would demand they part company, rehearsing her own arguments. Speaking in terms that a duardin would understand, she was oathsworn to protect the Master Rune, even if it was currently hammered into a mad Doomseeker’s heart. She could not leave an item so precious to the Order of the Azyr unguarded, and thus she could not leave Gotrek.

But God of Murder, she wished she could.

Focus, Witchblade, whispered the voice of Maleneth’s former mistress, bound to the blood vial she wore around her neck. Now is not the time to let the heat take you.

She opened both eyes to regard the Slayer and the rune on his breast. Forged in the grim likeness of the god Grimnir, it blazed with a deep golden lustre, as though drinking in the heat of the desert. The same could not be said for the rest of Gotrek’s body. His exposed arms and torso were burned red raw from Hysh’s unyielding light, his swirling tattoos almost lost amidst the flaking skin. Yet he showed no discomfort in the heat, even though she was certain she could see blisters forming on his inflamed skin. She had told him to at least don a cloak, had even offered her own, but he’d ignored her. According to the Slayer, fancy cloaks and clothing were for umgi, not dwarfs.

The duardin shifted. He had noticed Maleneth’s attention. His single eye moved from the fyrestorm greataxe slung across his lap, and she found herself dropping her gaze before it met her own. That was a feeling she had rarely experienced since leaving the Murder Temples. There was something about his one remaining eye – more than grim resolve, more than stony determination, a fire that seemed able to burn bare the very thoughts of those it touched. It was the eye of a being that had witnessed a great deal more than it should have. The eye that, for all the private scorn she held for such a view, could well have belonged to a deity not of the Mortal Realms.

‘Drink, aelf.’

It was a statement, not a question. Maleneth realised Gotrek was holding out a water skin. She reached over the meal sacks that separated them in the back of the wagon, and took it.

She hadn’t realised how thirsty she was. Dehydration was just one of the desert’s thousand dangers. To live in such places was to defy the odds. Here in the Bone Desert especially, nothing lived beyond the wagon’s flank, bar the shaven tusker that was dragging it. All was a sea of undulating, bleached yellow dunes, punctuated only by the skeletal remains of vast beasts. Some said those carcasses were what gave the desert its name. Others claimed the sand itself was bone-dust, blown fine as powder from the realm of the slaughter-god on a burning furnace wind.

It didn’t do well to ponder such things. Maleneth had begun the journey with just one hope – that they would use the opportunity to stop at the outpost maintained by the Order of the Azyr deep in the desert’s heart, close to the monument city known as the Eight Pillars. Gotrek had already brushed the suggestion off. His destination was the Pillars themselves, driven by the rumoured presence of an inscription detailing the location of the Axe of Grimnir within the ancient ruins. An axe the duardin claimed was once his while the dead world lived.

‘Finish it,’ she said, tossing the half-empty water skin back to Gotrek. The Slayer let it land in his lap without catching it. Maleneth fought the urge to snap at him.

Aziz had sworn to take them as far as Khaled-Tush, the oasis settlement a day’s journey from the Pillars. They had found him in the market at Barkash, a young tusker pack driver and teamster who shifted trade stock along the desert trails for one of the local merchant cartels. A single gold coin from Gotrek had been more than enough to allay his reservations. Now, three and a half days since Barkash’s fertile river basin had given way to the desolation of the endless sand dunes, Maleneth was beginning to consider riding ahead once they reached Khaled-Tush and bringing the servants of the Order of the Azyr directly to Gotrek. The Master Rune had to be examined and Gotrek’s true abilities assessed. If even half the rumours already spawned about him were true, he was too valuable and too dangerous simply to be wandering the Mortal Realms.

She didn’t relish the thought of telling him that.

You are afraid of the duardin, hissed Maleneth’s mistress, the disembodied echo-voice slipping into her thoughts. No true child of Khaine would hesitate because of that brutish race.

‘I would like nothing more than to see if this Khainite could rip out your heart, mistress,’ she muttered darkly. ‘If only you still had one.’

There was no response from the blood vial around her neck, and she tried to put her mind elsewhere. The wagon lurched uncomfortably. Anywhere that wasn’t coarse and burning hot. The lurch came again, and the tusker hauling the wagon let out a bellow.

‘What is happening?’ she demanded, pulling back her hood and rising onto her knees to look ahead. They had entered a shallow depression between two dunes, following the line of Hysh-bleached wooden stakes that marked out the route in the event of a sandstorm. They trailed away over the next rise directly ahead, but the tusker seemed to be struggling.

‘Esha, esha!’ Aziz was snapping at the beast, poking its stubbly rear with his goad. ‘Maliki esha!’

‘It’s trapped in the sand,’ Maleneth said as the tusker let out another fearful bellow. ‘We are sinking.’

‘But the posts,’ Aziz said. ‘We are still on the correct route, sellah. This cannot be the dragging sands!’

‘Well, clearly this route is the wrong one,’ Maleneth snapped. ‘Gotrek, get up. We must abandon this wagon. Now.’

The duardin had strapped his axe across his back and was leaning over his side of the wagon, peering at the sand around them. The wheels were already half-submerged, and the tusker was now floundering visibly.

‘The dunes must be stable,’ Maleneth said. ‘Grab the water skins, and jump.’

‘We cannot leave the produce!’ Aziz said, scrambling into the back of the wagon with Maleneth and Gotrek and trying to heft the meal sacks. ‘I cannot lose them! They will beat me if I fail to bring them even one less than I am signed for!’

‘You’ll be delivering them straight to Shyish and the God of Death himself if you stay,’ Gotrek snapped, grabbing a pack and the two nearest water skins and tying them around his waist. Even now, it still sounded strange to hear him trying to pronounce the names of the Eight Realms.

‘Gotrek, the boy first,’ Maleneth said.

‘Hold still, manling,’ Gotrek grunted, and grabbed Aziz around his skinny waist. The pack driver struggled, then let out a terrified wail as Gotrek braced himself on the wagon’s side, and flung him. Aziz thumped into the sand on the bottom of the dune to the right of the trail, rolled with surprising dexterity and stared back at the wagon. He didn’t sink.

‘Go, you oaf,’ Maleneth said to Gotrek. The timber around them was beginning to creak and groan at the pressure exerted on it, and the tusker was going wild, lowing and goring the yielding ground beneath it. Gotrek scowled at Maleneth for a moment, then mounted the wagon’s side and, with a bellow of exertion, flung himself. The rune on his chest burned brighter than ever, and he cleared far more ground than Maleneth had expected. He slammed into the sand half a dozen feet short of Aziz.

And began to sink.

‘Khaine’s bloodied blades,’ Maleneth swore. She leapt. Lithe as a feline, she landed in a crouch next to Aziz. Without missing a breath, she turned and slid the belt from around her waist. Gotrek was already half-gone, sinking like a lodestone. He let out a roar that eclipsed even that of the tusker, clawing in vain for firm ground, seemingly more angry than panicked. Maleneth darted forward until she felt the yielding sand begin to drag at her feet. She knelt a pace back, and flung the belt out towards the duardin.

‘Is that all you have?’ Gotrek bellowed as the strip of aelf-cured hide reached him.

Maleneth smiled. ‘Take it or drown. It matters not to me. I can always recover your corpse and dig the Master Rune from you cold flesh.’

Gotrek snatched the end. Maleneth stood, dug her feet into the sand as best she could, wrapped the belt’s end around both fists and began to pull. It was like trying to drag a Khainite sacrificial slab single-handedly.

You should leave him, her mistress hissed. He is a mad fool.

‘Help me,’ Maleneth snarled at Aziz, then realised he was no longer at her side. The teamster was sprinting along the bottom of the dune, headed away from them.

‘I will seek help!’ he yelled back at her.

‘There’s no time, you fool,’ Maleneth barked after him, but to no avail. He kept going.

She cursed the boy’s cowardice, every muscle straining as she leaned back. The belt was taut and quivering, but she was certain it would hold. She had strangled the life from enough people with it to be sure.

Gotrek’s downward motion was arrested and, with agonising slowness, reversed. He began to rise up out of the dragging sands and, with a last roar of effort, dug his fists into the edge of the firm ground and hauled himself from the mire like some primordial earth-god returning to the Mortal Realms. Maleneth collapsed backwards, panting.

Behind them, the tusker was gone. The two stood and watched in silence as the rear of the wagon, upended now, was dragged under inch by slow, creaking inch. Eventually there was a final sucking sound and the whole thing was gone. The sand lay silent and undisturbed, as though the wagon and its tusker had never existed.

‘We must leave, Gotrek, son of Gurni,’ Maleneth said. ‘If we wish to reach Khaled-Tush before nightfall.’

‘What happened to the beardling?’

‘He ran,’ Maleneth replied. ‘He probably thought you were going to eat him for leading you astray.’

‘Better than stabbing him in the back, aelf.’

‘Only in your deranged imagination am I forever murdering those who are trying to help me, Gotrek.’

Gotrek levelled an axe at her. ‘I saw enough of your kind’s treachery in the world before.’

‘The world before is dead,’ Maleneth hissed, rounding on him. ‘And it pains me that you did not die with it.’

He didn’t offer a retort, and she assumed he was struggling to master his anger at having to be saved from so ignominious an end as the dragging sands. When she caught his gaze, though, she realised his focus was elsewhere.

There was a figure atop the dune behind them. It was little more than a silhouette, dark against the cloudless blue of the heavens. She saw it only for a second before it disappeared back beyond the rise, clearly sensing their attention.

‘What was that?’ she asked.

‘I know not, aelf. But they have been following us since we left the city.’

‘Since Barkash?’ Maleneth snarled. ‘Why didn’t you say something, you foolish dolt? Do you not think it’s even slightly relevant that there is someone hunting us?’

Gotrek shrugged. ‘They were keeping well back – we couldn’t have caught them unless we laid up some sort of ambush, and I’m in no mind to linger in this place when I have my axe to find. Besides, they were mounted, meaning they weren’t the Grey Lord’s vermin.’

‘They are not skaven, so you do not think they are relevant?’ Maleneth demanded. ‘And just what if they are being recompensed by him?’

Her words were only an attempt to mask her anger. She hadn’t seen the figure before, and she had never known a duardin to be more attentive to his surroundings than her. Then again, she had never known a duardin like Gotrek Gurnisson.

‘Let us move, as the day is wearing thin,’ she said, then realised Gotrek had already begun to stomp off. She rolled her eyes, bound her belt around her waist and followed.

Chapter Two

They walked. The heat raged against them like a physical force, a beast that sought to bear them down into the shifting sands. They followed the tops of the dunes running parallel with the trail markers. Maleneth didn’t trust them not to end in the dragging sands once more, but they were the only apparent clear route to Khaled-Tush.

They hadn’t gone far before they stumbled across the last thing Maleneth had expected to find in the desert – water. In a cleft between two dunes they discovered a timber trough, its bottom full. Next to it was what looked like a hitching post, the rope tied around it lying abandoned in the sand.

‘A waypoint for message riders?’ she wondered out loud. Gotrek said nothing. They filled up the water skins and carried on, the shadows cast by the dunes starting to stretch.

They reached Khaled-Tush just as the bone-chill of deep night was beginning to creep over them. Chamon and Ghyran were ascendant overhead, soaring half-lit spheres amidst the constellations spread across the ink-spill of the aetheric void. The lights above were mirrored by the lights below, a thousand campfires creating a flickering firmament surrounding the mirror sheen of the great oasis of the Khaled.

The trading post’s veiled guards intercepted them as they approached the outer wagons, peering at the strange travellers by the light of raised torches. One of Gotrek’s coins saw them safely through.

Ahead, Khaled-Tush sprawled, a great encampment of desert traders, tribespeople and travellers. What had once been little more than a watering hole for those moving between the cities of Barkash, Hedina and Merport had become a settlement in its own right. Ranks of wagons, carts and covered caravans surrounded wooden structures constructed from the trees that clustered around the banks of the oasis – counting houses and taverns, brothels and guard posts, the heart of an ever-expanding trade hub on a route made rich by the astute ruling councils of the Triumvirate Cities, and the wares of the duardin known by the desert peoples as the Great Karagi.

‘I didn’t think I could find a more miserable kruk of a place than the Unbak lodge,’ Gotrek grumbled as they halted on the edge of an opening between the circled wagons. ‘But it seems this mannish age knows how to disappoint.’

Ahead of them lay a dirt square formed between the idle caravans and a row of ramshackle buildings. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was bustling with trader stalls, haggling booths and merchants selling wares from the backs of their carts. The cool night air was thick with the aromas of spices and perfumes, and lit by the light of braziers and firepits.

‘We trek for half a day through blistering desert, with no food and little water, yet the sight of this place dulls your spirits?’ Maleneth demanded. ‘Hysh must have cooked whatever remains of your addled brains, duardin.’

‘I’d wager they’d still be more filling than whatever this place has to offer,’ Gotrek muttered.

‘We require fresh food and water,’ Maleneth said, forcing herself to ignore the Slayer’s retort. ‘And a place to rest. Tomorrow we can start looking for someone to give us passage to the Eight Pillars.’

‘Thagi,’ Gotrek spat. Maleneth assumed the duardin insult had been directed at her, and was instinctively forming a Khainite curse back when she noticed Gotrek was moving off into the crowd. She started after him, realising what he had seen.

Aziz tried to run. The crowd around him hemmed him in though, and he squealed with terror as Gotrek snatched him with one scarred fist.

‘Thought you’d seen the last of us, beardless thaggaz,’ the duardin barked.

‘Please no, sellah,’ Aziz wailed, cringing back. ‘I went to get help, I swear!’

‘Then where was it?’ Maleneth demanded, reaching Gotrek’s side.

‘There were riders,’ Aziz insisted, eyes darting between the aelf and the duardin. ‘Three riders, I told them you would pay them well if they could reach you.’

‘Liar,’ Gotrek snarled, and for a second Maleneth though he was going to strike the youth.

‘I can still help you,’ Aziz yelped. ‘Please, sellah, I know many traders here at Khaled-Tush!’

‘We need food,’ Gotrek growled. ‘And shelter for the night, then transport to the Eight Pillars.’

‘I can bring you all of those things, sellah,’ Aziz insisted. ‘My uncle, Fazeel, is a moonfin trader posted here. He will not turn me away.’

‘You are thinking about running,’ Maleneth said, her voice lower and altogether more chilling than Gotrek’s. ‘I know your kind, desert rat. Do not do it. Go to your uncle, and when everything is arranged, return here and find us. Or I will find you and I will skin you, slowly, using these.’

She tapped the long fyresteel knives in her belt. ‘Do you doubt me?’

‘N-no,’ Aziz stammered, tears in his eyes. Gotrek released him, and he stumbled away into the press.

Gotrek harrumphed. ‘We will never see him again,’ the duardin grumbled.

‘We will,’ Maleneth replied. ‘He is but a boy. He is terrified we will use our mystical powers, or blades, to hunt him down.’

‘Aelf nonsense,’ Gotrek said. ‘You don’t know the first thing about mystical. The gods themselves have tried to betray me, slay me even. I have broken daemons and fought deranged wizards and slain beasts and monsters that would tear apart legions of your gold-armoured champions. I have fallen from the skies amidst fire and battled through the depths of the earth for days at a time. I have been flung into an ocean of madness and filth and then clawed my way back out. The boy knows nothing of fear, because these realms know nothing of it. I spit on your idea of fear.’

Maleneth leant against the wheel of the nearest wagon. Exhaustion was trying to drag her down. The pack on her back felt like a lodestone. A part of her just wanted to curl up beneath the closest cart and sleep.

It took her a few seconds to realise that Gotrek was no longer beside her.

‘Duardin,’ she snapped as he headed off deeper into the square. He didn’t stop or turn. Cursing, she followed him.

‘Do your kind never rest?’ she demanded as she caught up.

‘Rest is something for people without anything to do,’ Gotrek said, not looking at her. ‘Rest comes when you find your doom. I have never known rest. Sometimes I wonder whether I ever will.’

The marketplace embraced them. They passed a row of stalls selling Hedina silks, the traders calling for their attention, then had to brush aside the advances of a Hilathi tribal spice-seller offering samples. The aroma of cooking meat drifted over them as they passed a half-tusker being slow-roasted in one of the firepits, and Maleneth’s aching stomach lurched. A little further on they had to move aside for a sect of white-veiled Shezpah priests swinging sweet-smelling censers. None spared either of them a glance. At Khaled-Tush, a weary aelf and a sunburned duardin were hardly the strangest sights on show.

They moved on, deeper into the busy menagerie, the market and its inhabitants pressing in on every side. Maleneth found herself fingering the hilt of one of her daggers, the compulsive motion concealed by her cloak. She didn’t like crowds.

Gotrek seemed unperturbed. She didn’t demand he tell her what he was looking for. She knew he’d give no clear answer. In the months since they had first met, she had grown accustomed to his sudden bouts of melancholy, to his distant gaze and to the unexplained interludes where he would stomp off on his own. Sometimes she left him to do so, trusting he would always return, but occasionally she would follow him. It always seemed as though he were looking for something or someone, though exactly what or who she was never quite sure.

She felt something bump into her shoulder, the pressure a little more than the mere passing of bodies in the teeming space. Her fyresteel knives were out in a flash, faster than the eye could follow, every one of her aelf senses poised to kill before conscious thought had even engaged.

She found herself looking into a pair of dark eyes. To her surprise, there was neither fear nor anger in them, only a reserved, knowing amusement.

‘Shemali, sellah,’ said the woman, taking her hand off Maleneth’s shoulder. She was human, young but almost as tall as the aelf, dusky-skinned and clad in gossamer folds of pink and purple silk. Maleneth realised she was smiling. She took the knife away from her throat.

‘My apologies, travellers,’ she went on, offering a curtsey. ‘I have been sent by the mistress of my troupe.’

Her eyes travelled from Maleneth to Gotrek. The duardin had stopped his progress through the market, and one scarred fist was clenched firmly around the haft of his fyrestorm greataxe.

‘The Fyreslayer with only one rune hammered into his flesh,’ the woman said, her smile dissipating as she addressed him. ‘We possess something of great value to you, Runetamer. A man who has seen the words you seek.’

‘Who are you?’ Gotrek growled. ‘You look too much like another damned aelf to me!’

‘We are dancers of the Alharab,’ the woman said, giving the duardin an elegant bow and producing a slip of paper between two fingers with a flourish. ‘We see much, and hear even more, especially in a place like this. The man my troupe has made contact with is not the only one to have gazed upon the riddle of the Eight Pillars. My mistress, Shaldeen, awaits your pleasure at the black top.’

‘And why would we trust you, or your mistress?’ Gotrek demanded. He reached for the paper, but Maleneth snatched it first.

‘I am only a messenger,’ the woman said, beginning to move away through the crowd. ‘That is not for me to say.’

‘Not much of a message, is it,’ Gotrek growled after her, but she was gone. Maleneth laid a hand on his shoulder. She had glanced down at the parchment – it was an invitation in native Alharabi script, inviting weary travellers to the night-time performance of the Seventeen Blades. Maleneth tensed. The Seventeen Blades was a traditional aelf dance, still popular among the Murder Temples. She had rarely heard of a human troupe performing it.

You remember the last time you saw it danced, don’t you, Witchblade?

‘What is it?’ Gotrek demanded.

‘Nothing,’ Maleneth said, shrugging off the voice of her former mistress. ‘We should not follow her. It is some sort of trap.’

‘If it is, then it’s about time. Almost a day has passed since the last one,’ Gotrek rumbled, shrugging off Maleneth’s hand. ‘I want answers, and I’ll have them whether they want me dead or not.’

‘If only you held your own life as dearly as the Order of the Azyr does,’ Maleneth snapped.

‘I lost it a long time ago, aelf. If this is another plot by the Grey Lord, I will slaughter his verminous griks. I always do. More so than any fool or coward in the World-That-Was, the rat Thanquol was determined to fulfil my doom oath. I should have known he’d follow me into a new reality.’

‘If you don’t care about your own life then at least consider the rune,’ Maleneth said, struggling to keep her exhaustion-stoked temper in check. ‘More than anyone else, you must be aware of its power. It cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of servants of disorder and darkness. Or do you think I have been following you merely for your good company?’

‘It’ll be hard for the rats to get their hands on it as long as it’s here,’ Gotrek replied, thumping a fist against the Master Rune on his chest.

‘For one moment, stop to consider the consequences of your actions,’ Maleneth raged, her anger finally getting the better of her. ‘At least one unknown being is tracking us, presumably the same one who shifted the trail markers and nearly succeeded in drowning us in dragging sand. That is not to speak of the ratmen assassins that have been hunting you, three in the last month alone. Whatever these dancers have for us, it is almost certainly a trap.’

Gotrek glared at her, and she noticed the grim-faced rune stamped into his skin glow a little more brightly.

‘I told you, dark aelf, the vermin have been trying to stab me in the back for as long as I can remember,’ the duardin replied, pointedly ignoring her last words. ‘If you don’t like rats, you should stop following me. The mad one, Thanquol, will never stop hunting me. From what I’ve seen of these accursed realms, he’ll probably return even after I’ve put an axe through his horned skull.’

‘You think because you have lived this long that you are immortal,’ Maleneth said, taking a step towards the duardin and pointing down at him. ‘You think you are a god–’

‘Do not insult me more than you already have, wretch,’ Gotrek barked. ‘You know nothing of the gods. I have seen foolishness and craven treachery among mortals, but none to match that of the divine. I have met many thousands of dwarfs worthier and more honourable than Grimnir alone!’

‘Regardless, you will not live forever, Gotrek of the World-that-Was. I serve a true god, the Bloody-Handed one, Khaine, Prince of Murder, and if there is one thing my devotion has taught me it is that all beings die. Even gods. Guard your own life, duardin, for there are many eager to steal it from you.’

The commotion of the market around her had stilled.

You are attracting attention, Witchblade, hissed her mistress’ voice. Sometimes I wonder whether you were ever my student.

‘I knew your god in that long-dead age,’ Gotrek growled, his eye flaring like the stoked embers of a forge pit. ‘His servants there were just as weak and pathetic as they are here. I fear nothing, dark aelf, least of all your threats.’

Before she could reply, Maleneth felt a presence intruding from her left. She half turned, lightning fast, barely resisting the murderous urge to lash out with her blades.

Aziz cringed back and yelped with fear. He had returned.

‘I’ve been looking for you, sellah,’ he stammered. ‘My uncle, he has agreed to let you stay under his roof tonight. But…’

He trailed off, and Maleneth realised he was looking at the writing on the slip of paper she still held in one hand.

‘The dancers of the Alharab,’ she said, holding the note before his eyes. ‘You know of them?’ Aziz hesitated before responding.

‘Yes, sellah. You will not find many here who have not. They perform for the councils and guilder lords of the Triumvirate Cities. I have never heard of their troupe visiting a place like Khaled-Tush to dance before.’

‘And?’

Aziz shook his head, clearly reluctant to continue. ‘They say that the daughters of the Alharab are spies, that they buy and sell knowledge to those who pay for their performances. Their dances are not merely for the entertainment of onlookers.’

‘See!’ Maleneth snapped, turning back to Gotrek. ‘It’s a trap.’ But the duardin was already pushing away through the market once more.

‘I’m going to watch the dancing,’ he barked back over his shoulder. ‘Don’t you aelves love that kind of thing?’

Maleneth closed her eyes and bit her lip, forcing herself not to spit a string of Khainite curses in the Slayer’s wake.

‘My uncle,’ Aziz said slowly, edging away from the aelf. ‘He is expecting us. It would be a disgrace to turn away his hospitality now. Please, sellah, bring the angry duardin back. The Alharabi will surely not have anything that he needs. They sell only lies and secrets.’

‘Go back to your uncle,’ Maleneth ordered. ‘Apologise for us, and try to save us some food. We will return as soon as we are able.’

Before Aziz could protest, she picked one of Gotrek’s coins from the pouch around her waist and pressed it into his palm. Then she was gone, slipping through the crowds after the Slayer.

Chapter Three

The black top was a tented pavilion sited on the banks of the great oasis, beneath the shade of spreading palms and poplar trees. The oasis itself was unlike any Maleneth had seen in the Bone Desert – its water was not bound by the dry earth, but floated gently in a thousand liquid spheres ranging from a few feet or so off the ground to nearly a hundred yards overhead, far above the tops of the surrounding trees. Occasionally one of the slowly swirling globes would break apart and come pattering down in a shower of water, drenching the moist oasis bed, while others would slowly come together amidst a fresh spray.

The black top’s flanks were glistening from such collisions. The great tent was removed from much of the rest of Khaled-Tush, and Maleneth felt her senses becoming increasingly on edge as Gotrek’s route led them away from the braziers and torches and ceaseless activity of the caravan market and into the darkness. The night was still, the lapping of the oasis spheres against one another and the rustle of the trees overhead providing a disconcerting change to the bustle they had left behind.

As Maleneth drew closer to the pavilion the sounds of the night faded, overtaken once more by the hubbub of activity. Her attuned hearing picked out voices, laughter, shouts and, underlying it all, the thumping rhythm of drumbeats. Light glimmered from the entrance of the pavilion ahead, silhouetting two veiled guards. She saw Gotrek entering, the flames flickering across the surface of the Master Rune and the greataxe slung across his back. She quickened her pace, one hand on the blade of her dagger. The two men watching the entrance looked at her, but neither moved to intercept the aelf. She passed between them and in through the entrance flap.

The pavilion was packed. Candle stands illuminated hundreds of figures pressed in beneath the black canvas arching high overhead, their attention fixed on a wooden stage that had been erected across from the main entrance. They looked for the most part like merchants, tribal leaders and better-off travellers, clad in the white or deep red robes, silks, headscarves and veils of the Triumvirate Cities’ wealthy guilds. They applauded the stage or chattered and laughed amongst themselves, creating a clamour that made Maleneth grimace.

Be on your guard, child, murmured her mistress’ voice in her head. She clutched her pendant in one hand, the blood vial a cold reassurance.

Gotrek was just ahead, pushing his way unceremoniously through the crowd towards the stage. The complaints died rapidly when those he forced aside saw the scarred duardin’s dour expression, or the broad blades of his axe.

Maleneth darted after him. The air in the pavilion was stifling, heavy with the stink of sweat and the sickly sweet cloy of perfume. The whole place vibrated to the primal drumbeats coming from the stage. It was making her feel light-headed. She caught Gotrek just as he forced his way to the front of the audience.

‘Changed your mind, I see,’ he said over the noise of the crowd.

‘You should try it some time,’ she snapped back.

‘I would, if I wasn’t always right.’

Maleneth’s response died in her throat as she saw clearly what was happening on the stage for the first time.

Four female dancers were spinning around one another, their darting motions dictated by the rhythm of a pair of hide drums being palm-beaten by two more women sat with legs crossed behind them. The performers were scantily clad in the same pearls and pink-and-purple silks worn by the messenger that had first invited Maleneth and Gotrek to the pavilion. Their black hair was unbound, and it whipped about as they wove and pivoted. Their dark, toned flesh was glistening with sweat.

You have seen this before.

‘I have,’ Maleneth murmured, her eyes not leaving the performance.

Each dancer carried a knife in both hands, and as they spun close to one another the wicked blades would kiss the clothing of the others with immaculate precision, slicing silk and turning the garments into long, flowing strands that further accentuated their fluid movements. With every slashing sound the crowd would let out a gasp or a cheer of appreciation, the whole mass swaying in time with the beat.

It was not the presence of the dancers themselves that had made Maleneth pause, nor even the knives in their hands. It was their motions. It was the Seventeen Blades. She had performed the dance a hundred times, had long ago memorised every step and pivot, every duck and flick and twist. It was the dance she herself had watched on the night that her life had changed forever, when her father had ripped her from the aelf she was to marry and had cast her into the temple’s bloodthirsty sisterhood.

She had never seen the dance performed by humans before, and she could never have imagined that they would do so with such precision. They could not match the speed or grace of an aelf, but every step and motion was assured and practised, and every knife-kiss precisely made. Though together, the four women represented a hail of razor blows and bared flesh, not a single one had been cut by the sharp steel.

She closed her eyes, willing away the memories the scene had brought on. Her four younger sisters, dancing the Seventeen Blades, their faces lit with joy. Jakari’s hand in her own, her half-smile – always so wicked – as she teased her about which noble house they were going to be married off to. The slam of doors, the rush of feet, the screams. The pain of cold, spiked gauntlets gripping her arms. The greater pain of Jakari’s hand being ripped from her own. The utter indifference in her father’s eyes.

The dance had stopped. Raucous applause dragged her back to the present. Despite the tent’s stifling heat, she felt cold.

Gotrek was still watching the stage, arms crossed over his broad chest, seemingly unimpressed. Those behind him were roaring for an encore, a cry that was quickly taken up by the rest of the crowd. The four dancers, their garments in tatters, offered a bow before parting with fluid grace, admitting a fifth woman to the centre of the stage. A rapid tattoo of drumbeats announced her arrival.

She was older than the dancers, and more formally attired, her hair bound up in a patterned tribal headscarf. Maleneth realised she was probably the troupe’s mistress, the one the dancer in the market had called Shaldeen. She raised her arms, a knowing smile on her lips. The drums came to an abrupt stop, and a hush settled over the crowd.

‘Shemali, sellah, friends and companions,’ Shaldeen said. ‘I hope our performances this night have brought pleasure and delight to one and all!’

A cheer greeted her words, and applause spread like a ripple. She held her hands up once more until silence returned.

‘It pleases me to say that our performance is not yet quite done. You have just borne witness to the Seventeen Blades, that famous old aelf dance, the signature of the dreaded and murderous temples of Khaine!’

The words were delivered with dramatic relish, and the audience responded with gasps and hisses.

‘We Alharabi have performed it to the best of our abilities, and we pray to that dreaded god that we have done his dance justice. I do not deny, however, that the best of our efforts would surely pale in comparison to the mastery of the aelves themselves.’

The crowd let out cries of denial, but the mistress waved them away, her smile fixed.

‘But we are blessed this night, friends and companies,’ she continued. ‘Blessed perhaps by that terrible power whom this dance venerates. For we have a servant of Khaine here among us, this very moment!’

A shocked silence fell over the spectators. Maleneth froze. The troupe mistress looked directly at her and extended one hand, the smile never wavering.

‘You honour us with your own presence, child of the Bloody-Handed. Now, will you help us honour your god as well, one more time?’

The whole tent had gone deathly silent, and those in the crowd closest to Maleneth had edged away from her. She glanced at Gotrek. The Slayer’s expression was stoic, but he nodded, once. Her own mistress remained silent.

Maleneth tensed, and leapt, clearing the edge of the stage easily. The lithe motion caused the crowd to gasp and exclaim in their native tongues. She landed lightly on both feet. A part of her, buried deep inside, quailed at the realisation that she was standing being watched by hundreds. She was an assassin, not an entertainer. A fire-lit stage was the last place she wanted to be.

But the memories had come on, too strong, too overpowering to be denied. She unclasped her cloak, letting it fall to more gasps. Her leathers were a far cry from the light silks of the Alharabi, and what little of her body that was bared – only her forearms – was a pale contrast to their dark complexions. Her raven hair and eyes, however, matched those of the dancers perfectly.

Two of the previous performers had backed off to the rear of the stage, leaving their two other dancing partners alongside Shaldeen and Maleneth. The shocked quiet was replaced by cheering and applause as the drums began to beat out a rhythm once more, slower this time. She mirrored the bow offered to the audience by the dancers. They were all still smiling. Heartbeat rising, Maleneth slipped her fyresteel knives free.

Remember the steps, child.

The dance began. Maleneth forced herself to stop thinking, to stop worrying, and obey the rhythm being set by the drums. The pavilion faded into the background as she let the motions sweep over and through her, the memories resurging stronger than ever. Jakari was opposite her once again, dancing the same dance, laughing freely, hair unbound and the slender blades in her hands glittering. Maleneth’s heart surged, and she almost misstepped. She recovered with a speed and precision no human could have matched, and drew another gasp from the crowd.

It was not Jakari opposite her. It was the troupe mistress, Shaldeen. Her mastery of the dance’s complex weave of steps and motions was as complete as Maleneth had ever seen. She moved with a fluid, controlled passion, channelling an energy that didn’t concern itself with anything beyond the next step, and the next, and the next. Maleneth slid past and around her, their bodies inches apart, the Alharabi silk flowing. The cloying perfume was thick in her nostrils.

The blades glinted in the firelight. A razor kiss, accentuated by another acceleration in the drumming. Gasps from the crowd intruded on the flow of Maleneth’s thoughts as she slid one of her blades up and along the troupe mistress’ spine, the tip just missing her perfect, dark skin, feathering open a section of her silken garment. She felt the same connection along her own back, sliding down her leathers. It failed to penetrate, and there was no cloth to cut open, but that was not the point – the garments were merely accessories. The power of the dance lay in the caress of death, the aching closeness of being an inch away from Khaine’s red touch. The sensation of her own knife darting along someone’s back, and another at her own, almost made the breath catch in Maleneth’s throat.

You’re enjoying this too much, Witchblade. Focus!

Maleneth ignored the cold voice. The dance moved on, another slash, this one to the shoulder, hers alone to make. She knew even as she spun away that the knife of another of the dancers would be coming for her, a low, precise cut that grazed across the clothing on her hip. Another touched her own shoulder at the exact moment that she cut more of the silk cladding the troupe mistress, the blades making a slitting noise as they slashed air and cloth, just audible over the rising frenzy of the drums and the raucous awe of the crowd.

Then came the pain. She’d become so absorbed that she almost didn’t notice it at first. The sudden jab in her side was lost in the web of movement, no room in her mind for anything beyond the dance. Then it registered and she stumbled, unable to correct herself this time.

To be cut in the Seventeen Blades was not uncommon. She had seen aelves of the temple far more experienced than her slashed in half a dozen places, white flesh streaked red. Such injuries showed the favour of Khaine, for it was by his will that sharpened steel had first pierced mortal flesh.

It had been so long since Maleneth had last performed, however, that the sensation of actually being cut interrupted her rhythm. It also saved her life. Had she carried on then the next step, a downward lunge angling towards her right, would have carried a misplaced knife into her bare throat. It came at her anyway, and she was forced to change her footing to avoid the jab.

The blade hadn’t been misplaced at all.

More lunges, from left and right, Shaldeen and her three dancers breaking step to stab and slash in perfect synchronisation. A human would have been dead in only a few seconds, heart and throat pierced. But for all the speed and suddenness of the attack, Maleneth was quicker.

She danced out of reach. The drums had stopped, and from the shouts and screams behind her it seemed as though the crowd were unsure whether they were still watching a staged production or a murder attempt. Maleneth ignored them all – her blood still sang with the rhythm of the Seventeen Blades, and the tempo of her movements continued to accelerate. There was no time to think about what the Alharabi were doing or why – Khaine demanded the dance go on.

Kill them all, Witchblade.

They were fast, there was no denying it. Shaldeen came at her head on, and steel rang against steel as Maleneth flicked each knife stroke aside. It was only a distraction, however. The other two dancers, along with the pair who had stepped aside and both of the drummers, came leaping at her from either side, a blur of stabbing blades. Maleneth gave ground with desperate, focused speed, moving towards the edge of the stage, knowing that if even one of them managed to slip behind her the dance would be finished. She ducked, twisted one way then another, too busy parrying and weaving to even consider going on the attack.

And through it all, they were still smiling.

Behind her the black top had descended into pandemonium. Some in the crowd were pushing and shoving to get out; others were trying to reach the stage, the whole mob overcome with hysteria. Insomuch as Maleneth was aware of any of it, a single thought broke the tempo of her thoughts.

Gotrek.

Move right.

Maleneth had never questioned her mistress’ advice, and she wasn’t about to start. She twisted right, almost throwing herself into the two Alharabi assassins coming at her from that direction. For a moment, her back was completely exposed. She felt the boards of the stage shuddering, and flinched away from the killing blow she expected between her shoulder blades, even as she turned aside the weapons of those in front of her.

A roar broke the moment to pieces, accompanied by a sickening crunch of bone. Gotrek had leapt onto the stage, Master Rune blazing, and now came thundering to Maleneth’s aid. His greataxe was ignited, the fyreforge brazier between the twin heads blazing with a light almost as hot and furious as the one that burned in the Slayer’s single eye. He slammed into the two assassins trying to slip in behind to Maleneth’s left, his shoulder-charge sending both flying across the stage. Bones cracked and split, but they belonged to the lucky ones. A third was caught as she attempted to sidestep the raging duardin. Gotrek moved with a speed that belied his muscled bulk, the axe inscribing a white-hot line as it cleaved into the Alharabi’s midriff and cut her effortlessly in half, blood and viscera bursting from the horrific killing blow.

‘If anyone’s killing the aelf, it’s me,’ the Slayer snarled.

As blood pattered down onto the stage and smeared beneath Maleneth’s feet, Shaldeen and her three remaining dancers broke off, darting back out of reach of both the Slayer and the aelf. Neither of the two pitched over by Gotrek’s charge were moving. The duardin was snorting like an enraged beast, the Master Rune glowing with a deep lustrous power.

‘Get on my left side, dark aelf,’ he snapped. He nodded his head to his left shoulder, guarded by his lion-headed pauldron. ‘If we’re going to do this together, I’m more used to having someone on my left.’

Maleneth didn’t question him, but moved around behind him just as the Alharabi came at them again.

She met them equally this time, blade-for-blade. She felt her hatred surge. They’d been lured here, tricked into exposing themselves. Exactly why, she did not know, though in the months she had spent with Gotrek she’d rapidly grown accustomed to attempts on their lives. The list of those who coveted the Master Rune was long, and grew by the day as rumours of the strange Fyreslayer spread through the Mortal Realms.

Whoever the Alharabi really were, or whoever they worked for, they were not going to be the ones to take either the duardin or the rune, not while Maleneth drew breath. She knocked aside a knife and lunged into the woman’s guard, too fast even for the well-trained human to counter. In a single rapid heartbeat Maleneth’s knife was in her throat, and the aelf felt the Alharabi’s arms clutch around her impotently as she tried to pull herself off the cold steel. The death grip trembled against the tall aelf before Maleneth ripped her blade free in a gout of blood.

‘Hold still, damned thaggaz,’ she heard Gotrek bellowing.

He had met Shaldeen. Fast as the duardin was, the dancer swept past his guard, blades darting across his scarred flesh. Maleneth realised that the expressions of the Alharabi had finally changed – gone were the smiles, replaced now with looks of pure, concentrated hatred. The realisation brought a strange relief. They were not as preternatural as they first appeared. During the dance and in the desperate seconds when it had turned to combat, Maleneth had found herself doubting the teachings of the Temple of Khaine, even the abilities of her own race. Now, however, as steel rang against steel and sliced through flesh, certainty returned once more.

No one hated, and no one killed, quite like a servant of Khaine.

She moved right as Gotrek was forced to turn after the troupe mistress, covering his back. The other Alharabi had seen the opening created by their leader, but Maleneth stopped them from exploiting it, despite their numbers. In a few seconds she’d taken half a dozen furious blows, but her armour, light though it was, ensured they only grazed her. She heard Gotrek grunt behind her, and could feel the burning heat of his axe as it swept and spun, keeping Shaldeen at bay.

They could only sustain this defence for so long. They were still outnumbered, and no one in Khaled-Tush was going to come to the aid of a duardin and an aelf in a knife fight with the Alharabi. For all Maleneth’s own abilities, there was only so much she could do while pinned defending another’s back. She’d already taken two shallow cuts across her right arm, and the first stab she’d received in her side was still throbbing. She could feel blood running down her thigh.

The tempo of the dancers’ blows picked up as they sensed their victim’s uncertainty. She heard Gotrek snarl with frustration, a sure sign that he was still unable to lay a blow on the troupe mistress. Another knife blade struck and twisted into Maleneth’s hip, making her hiss and slash her own steel over the attacker’s arm.

To die here will bring eternal dishonour to the temple.

‘Be silent, mistress!’ Maleneth snapped, her back now physically pressed up against Gotrek’s, as one of the veiled dancers made a series of jabs towards her face and eyes, forcing her to give ground.

A tremor shuddered through the stage. It was not a pounding tattoo like Gotrek’s initial charge, but something altogether deeper. The Alharabi sensed it too. Their attacks faltered.

Maleneth didn’t get a chance to attack. A blast wave hit the black top. The screaming of the crowd intensified as the black canvas ripped, and the whole structure buckled. Maleneth saw a jagged line torn across the ceiling directly above her, a section of the pavilion plucked away to reveal the night beyond.

It was riven with fire.

Another explosion shuddered through the air, intensifying the screaming of the spectators. They had begun to stampede, some for the pavilion’s entrance, others for the hole ripped in its flanks. Maleneth realised that fire had caught and was kindling on a section of the canvas near the ground to her right, whether from the flames spreading outside or from the overturned candle stands it was impossible to tell.

The black top was about to become a furnace.

Get out.

‘We must flee,’ Maleneth said to Gotrek, still at her back.

‘Tell that to your treacherous dance partners,’ the duardin snarled. ‘Dwarfs don’t flee, especially not Gotrek Gurnisson!’

Despite the conflagration taking hold around them, the Alharabi came at them once more, more furious than ever. Maleneth met them in a low fighting crouch, blades held tip-down to either side, one wet with the blood running down her wounded arm.

Their attackers’ blows never landed. Flames burst from the rear of the stage, searing heat blazing over Maleneth and making her flinch and choke. The clothing of one of the assassins ignited, and she shrieked as the fire took her.

Maleneth felt the stage begin to tilt under her. More flames were licking at the support beams, and there was a crack as one blackened length of timber gave way. The dancers maintained their balance, but the distraction was enough. Maleneth gritted her teeth and thrust herself back against Gotrek with all her strength. She felt the Slayer going over, carried by the movement of the collapsing stage past the troupe master and the platform’s edge.

Maleneth’s stomach lurched as she tumbled into freefall. Her foot connected with the side of one of the collapsing beams, and she was able to use the brief buttress to turn herself round in mid-air. She landed next to Gotrek on all fours, knives thumping into the pavilion floor either side of her. A second later there was a splitting crash as the rest of the stage behind them gave way, the flames leaping up to gorge on the splitting timbers.

The crowd at the front of the stage had long since fled, packing into the mass now struggling to fight their way through the ripping canvas walls. The flames were still spreading, their heat overwhelming. Some onlookers had caught fire, their horrific screaming only adding to the panic and confusion. Black smoke was starting to fill the claustrophobic space. Maleneth knew they had seconds before the greater part of the pavilion’s roof gave way and descended on them all in a smothering blanket of burning cloth.

‘Rise,’ she snapped at Gotrek, retrieving her two blades as she did so. The Slayer grunted and picked up his axe. Its fires had gone out, an irony given the flames that were now engulfing everything else.

‘Damned piece of dross,’ the Slayer snarled at the weapon. ‘Why is everything in this new reality so worthless?’

Maleneth heard a shriek just as she found her feet. She spun in time to see Shaldeen leaping at them through the flames consuming the stage. Her silken clothing was alight, and she looked like a daemonic fury as she flung herself at the aelf and the duardin, her face a terrible rictus of pain and rage.

Down.

Maleneth dropped into a crouch as the troupe mistress flew at her, screaming. She felt something heavy pass overhead, and realised that she’d reflexively screwed her eyes shut. There was a sickening thump, and the scream was cut off abruptly. Something hot and wet splattered her. She opened her eyes to find herself covered in blood. The two halves of the troupe mistress lay either side of her, bisected by Gotrek’s overhead swing, the flames quickly eating up the gory remains.

‘Dance around that,’ Gotrek said.

‘We’ve got to get out,’ Maleneth repeated. She pointed towards the nearest opening in the pavilion’s flank. Fire had seared it away, its edges licked by flames. The heat was keeping people at bay. Maleneth reached down, sheathed her knives and snatched a heavily embroidered desert trader’s cape from the ground.

‘Stay behind and stay close,’ she ordered Gotrek.

‘Don’t worry,’ Gotrek panted. ‘If you go first, I’ll get to see you burn to death before I do. Maybe I’ll even get out, and then I can find the inscription in peace. Go ahead, aelfling.’

Maleneth charged the gap. The smoke was making her eyes sting and choking her throat, and the heat had slicked her with sweat. She stumbled but kept going, the cape held up before her like a shield. She could hear the heavy thumping of Gotrek’s footfalls at her back.

She flung herself against the fire-eaten hole in the canvas, feeling the intense, blistering heat wash over her. Something scorched her hands, and she dropped the cape reflexively. Initially, she could neither breathe nor see, her eyes forced shut by the smoke, the ash making her gag and retch. Then she was through – the heat was gone, a memory at her back, and she could breathe again. She stumbled, but turned the fall into a roll, finally coming to a stop on her back amidst rough oasis grass, staring up at the sky, panting.

Gotrek had come to a halt beside her, hands on his knees as he gulped down air untainted by the pavilion’s fiery demise. He muttered something, but Maleneth wasn’t listening. Her eyes were still on the sky. It was almost wholly engulfed by smoke billowing from the burning caravans, the market and the black top, but she had caught something amidst the swirling ash and red embers. It took her a moment to recognise its outline.

She was watching a duardin skyship, an arkanaut frigate most commonly used by the piratical Kharadron Overlords. Its bulk resembled the iron hull of a seagoing vessel, but instead of watery waves it traversed the clouds of the aether thanks to the arcane power of three spherical endrins suspended by cables and copper wiring above the ship’s structure.

Maleneth thought at first that the ship had been moored somewhere amidst the caravans of Khaled-Tush, and was making its escape as the fires leapt and spread throughout the outpost. As she watched though, she realised that its course must have brought it in over the oasis, and that it was holding station rather than pulling away.

Something dropped from the airship’s flank. She followed it as it plummeted through the smoke and ash, a black sphere, seemingly innocuous amidst the devastation surrounding it. She lost it as it disappeared among the remains of the burning marketplace. Fire flared, silhouetting the intervening wagons, and the thunderclap of another detonation rolled out across the desert, bringing realisation with it.

The arkanaut frigate was attacking Khaled-Tush. They were dropping incendiary grudge-bombs over the side, onto the helpless caravans below. It was their fire that had first ignited the black top, and toppled the stage. Now the entire outpost was ablaze.

Maleneth’s view of the Kharadron skyship was obscured by a shadow. She blinked, and realised that Gotrek was standing over her. It took her a moment to realise that he was offering her his hand. She took it, her slender fingers encased by the duardin’s scarred, stone-hard fist. She allowed herself to be drawn up onto her feet, and glanced back at the pavilion. It had almost wholly collapsed into the flames consuming it, and the space around it was a heaving mass of people, trying to push and shove their way out of the reach of the fires as they spread to the nearby trees and the undergrowth that carpeted the banks of the oasis. It was chaos, and amidst it all no one seemed to have noticed the skyship. It was turning, banking around through the smoke and heading back in their direction.

‘Dwarfs?’ Gotrek said, following Maleneth’s gaze.

‘Not as you know them.’

‘Apparently not,’ Gotrek growled. ‘The only dawi that take to the sky are brain-addled. Just like everything else in this place.’

The skyship was losing altitude. Some of those on the edge of the crowd, stricken with fear and confusion, had started to flock towards it, not realising that it was responsible for the devastation reigning around them.

She pulled her knives from her belt once more.

‘I pray the idea of kinslaying does not disturb you, duardin,’ she said darkly.

Gotrek’s expression, usually stony, hardened further in the flickering firelight.

‘Not any more, aelf. Not for a long time.’

Chapter Four

Durbarak’s steel-shod boots hit the earth with a satisfying thump. He let go of the grav-ladder’s rappel line, steadying himself. Around him, his crew were clustering, the fires of destruction unleashed by their skyship gleaming from armour plates, cutlasses, ancestor masks and pistols. He paused to assess the two dozen Kharadron reivers, and the inferno taking hold around them.

Khaled-Tush was no more. The incendiary grudge-bombs dropped by the arkanaut frigate and the heated shot of its cannons had set fire to the trading post’s few permanent structures, and to hundreds of the wagons and carts that had been clustered around the oasis. They now presented a wall of flame, against which were silhouetted hundreds of individual figures – those who had survived the aerial bombardment and were now attempting to flee out into the desert night with whatever they’d been able to snatch before the flames took hold.

The crew would need to be quick, before their quarry escaped with them. Assuming, of course, that the inferno hadn’t taken the target already. The thought of so many perishing in the flames brought a grim smile to Durbarak’s lips. Sometimes, he doubted his life choices. He doubted breaking the Kharadron code, and turning his holdings to nothing but reiving and murder. But at times like these, all those doubts were burned away. Even the fear of losing the incredible bounty the Slayer represented could not penetrate the thrill of witnessing unchecked devastation on a scale such as this.

‘Throm, Dregg, take six and scout towards the marketplace. Borin, another three and circle east – cut off anyone fleeing down the main trail. Set more fires if you need to. The rest of you, with me.’

The Kharadrons moved off into the fire-lit darkness, weapons drawn. Durbarak led his group towards the waters of the oasis, shimmering through the flames and heat haze. He could see hundreds of people spilling from a large tent, its burning canvas almost wholly consumed by the skyship’s ponderous bombing run. Some were throwing themselves into the oasis itself, others were stumbling towards the fires consuming the marketplace, overcome by confusion and the black smoke hanging heavy over the outpost. Like the rest of the Kharadrons, Durbarak had bound a wetted rag around his mouth and nose before donning his ancestor mask, knowing he would need it to breathe amidst the inferno their attack had ignited. He could feel the heat even through the rubberised insulation of his sky-suit, slicking his body with sweat and making every movement chafing and uncomfortable.

‘Please, sellah, help us,’ shouted a man in a torn headscarf, stumbling from the direction of the burning pavilion. Durbarak shot him, relishing the brute kick of his aetherlock pistol. The heavy ball flung the man down as though he’d been poleaxed, a chunk of his torso blown away. The Kharadrons continued over the corpse. More gunshots rang through the night as they fired indiscriminately into the fleeing crowd. Few seemed to have realised that the fires were no accident, and that the outpost was under attack.

‘Keep a clear watch,’ Durbarak bellowed, gesturing at his landing party to spread out further. When they’d first passed over the outpost, the ship’s navigator, Zeggi, had been monitoring it with half a dozen enhanced vision scopes, linked to various parts of the frigate’s underbelly. He’d been unable to discern their quarry amidst the sudden blossoms of flame or the panicked crowds, however, so they were doing it the old fashioned way – a ground raid, pistols and cutlasses drawn. In truth, Durbarak wasn’t complaining. It always did him good to see the carnage they sowed up close.

‘Watch the starboard side,’ growled his midshipman, Threg. A trio of men came running from the crowd, scimitars raised, the nearby conflagration reflecting like liquid fire from the curved steel. Durbarak raised his second pistol, but before he could fire, the duardin nearest the attackers – Lorik, Stromm and Gurbad – had already put them down with a hail of shots.

‘Keep going,’ Durbarak ordered. He heard more firing coming from the direction of the caravans as the other Kharadron landing parties began to move in among the survivors there. Those directly ahead had finally realised that the duardin had not come with friendly intentions. They were screaming and pushing at one another, forced forward by the pressure of those behind still desperate to get away from the burning pavilion. More went down to the renegade Kharadron’s gunfire.

For a moment, Durbarak entertained the fear that their quarry had already escaped. He doubted it though. From what he had heard, running away from innocents while they were being cut down by ruthless attackers was the opposite of what the target would do. He was counting on it.

The remains of the pavilion collapsed, fire and sparks billowing into the air. The last of the crowd ahead of them were beginning to disintegrate and scatter. There was a noise like a thunderclap from behind Durbarak, and he realised the skeleton crew left aboard the frigate, the Draz Karr, had probably fired one of the cannons to keep those fleeing the fires from mobbing the landing area.

They were running out of time.

Perhaps the one they sought was already dead. Perhaps the target’s bones were currently snapping and crackling in the white heat at the heart of the settlement, or in the remains of the pavilion ahead. Perhaps the job he’d been hired to do had already been done. He hoped not. Despite orders, he had no intention of killing the target, or its accomplices.

‘I can see something up there,’ Stromm shouted. For a moment Durbarak had no idea what the ship’s mate was talking about. Then he caught it, through the dark figures milling about before the pavilion’s flames, trapped between the fire and the advancing Kharadrons.

It was a light. Not, as he first thought, a torch. The little flicker of fire, almost swallowed up by the greater conflagration behind it, was being reflected back from two broad axe heads, set either side of it. After a moment he realised what he was looking at – rune-etched fyresteel, a greataxe of one of the Slayer clans, a brazier of forge-flame burning in its heart.

The light illuminated the being carrying it. From a distance, it looked like a particularly large Fyreslayer, complete with red crest and beard. As it drew nearer, however, Durbarak could pick out distinguishing features. The duardin’s bare torso and arms were covered in thick knots of blue tattoos, and his wrists were encased by battered vambraces hung with loops of broken chain. Most noticeable of all was his chest – a single rune glowed there, its lustre immediately making Durbarak feel sick with envy.

Despite himself, he grinned. He knew taking this contract had been a good idea. It had led him right to Gotrek Gurnisson.

‘Draz Karr, on me!’ he shouted, summoning his crew. ‘And remember, don’t shoot him! If we’re going to ransom them on, we need them each in at least two pieces!’

‘You did this?’ the approaching duardin bellowed, gesturing with his free hand at the bodies scattered before the Kharadrons. ‘Does my old eye deceive me? Are you the pitiful creatures that dare claim to bear the legacy of the dawi in this mad world?’

The fury was now visible in his burning gaze, and Durbarak felt his spirit quail, as though he were a beardling whose misdeeds had been discovered by an elder. He thrust the feeling aside.

He’d heard the rumours. They all had. That only made Gotrek Gurnisson all the more valuable. Damned if he was going to kill so much potential profit, regardless of the orders of the one who’d hired him.

‘The aelf,’ Stromm snarled, spitting before pointing his pistol over the oncoming Slayer’s shoulder. A shape had materialised behind the duardin, tall and slender, wrapped in shadow.

‘This is perfect,’ Durbarak growled. ‘Both of them, for the highest bidder. Threg, Krazak, take them.’

The two shipmates stepped forward, ratcheting up their net launchers.

‘Surrender if you want to live!’ Durbarak shouted at the duardin and the aelf.

But they didn’t surrender. Instead the Slayer roared, and charged.

Chapter Five

It was not often that Maleneth found herself approving of Gotrek Gurnisson’s more rash moments. Just then, however, with the fires of Khaled-Tush at her back and the screams of the burned and the dying ringing in her ears, Maleneth understood the Slayer’s fury perfectly.

The Kharadrons opposite him fired. The motions seemed half in haste as they started back from the charging Slayer, and though their faces were inscrutable behind their ancestor masks Maleneth didn’t doubt that the sight of Gotrek unleashed had more than intimidated them. As he broke into a run the Master Rune surged with light, and bright energy seemed to suffuse the duardin’s body, blazing in his eye and making his hair bristle, the red dye shot through with gold.

Maleneth had seen it only a few times in all the months they had spent together, and every time it burned away any doubts she had about the power of Gotrek Gurnisson.

The net launchers carried by two of the Kharadrons failed to fire properly, one entangling its own muzzle while the second simply thumped into the dirt at Gotrek’s feet. Maleneth heard one Kharadron screaming at the others to reload as the Slayer closed the ground between them with a thunderous charge, the fire wreathing his greataxe blazing.

Maleneth raced after him, knives out. Her anger boiled no less hot than the Slayer’s, a murder-curse on her lips. If the Overlords thought Gotrek was fearsome, they had never seen a servant of Khaine raised to ire.

Gotrek hit them first, while the ones with net launchers were struggling to reload. In a panic the nearest Kharadron tried to shoot his pistol at the Slayer. The point-blank discharge simply grazed Gotrek’s flank, and he burst through the smoke with a furious two-handed overhead swing of his axe. The mighty weapon struck the Kharadron clean on the skull, and parted helmet, head and sky-suit with ease, shearing the duardin in half in a shower of blood that hissed where it pattered against the glowing steel of the heated axe blades.

‘Oath-breaking grobkaz,’ Gotrek roared, his voice booming like a thunderclap. He shouldered his way through the bloody remains of the first Overlord and swung for the second, cleaving his head from his shoulders and sending it hurtling like a catapult stone away into the night. More weapons discharged, only adding to the confusion as Maleneth leapt in among the melee. One of the Overlords had managed to look away from Gotrek long enough to see her coming, and he brought his cutlass up in time to knock away a stab towards his heart. He went back, cursing, and Maleneth kept going, jabbing at the unarmoured parts of his rubbery sky-suit, keeping her body in perpetual motion. It was like the Seventeen Blades all over again.

No, she corrected herself as she slipped around a desperate slash of the cutlass and back into the duardin’s guard. The Seventeen Blades was like murder.

‘Stand firm, you wannazi!’ one of the Kharadrons was bellowing, and Maleneth realised that more were rushing towards the fight from the direction of the burning caravans. She was hopelessly outnumbered. They should never have confronted them, even after realising the skyfaring duardin were responsible for the firestorm. She couldn’t have stopped Gotrek though, not after he’d seen the way they were cutting down those who escaped the flames.

A feint to the right, and the dagger in her left hand slipped in under the chin of the Overlord she was fighting, plunging up behind his ancestor mask. A single line of blood ran from the mouth slit down the mask’s stylised silver beard, and he made a wet gargling sound as Maleneth twisted the knife and dragged it free.

Something slammed into her from behind as she did so. She tried to spin away, but it grappled with her, fighting to find a purchase on her light leather armour. She felt something crack into her leg, making her gasp with pain. The stink of rubbery sky-suits and filthy duardin sweat invaded her senses, overpowering the reek of burning.

She managed to twist and writhe her way out of the grip, spinning with one blade outstretched as she turned. It jarred off a Kharadron’s helmet, and as she tried to dance further back to give herself more room she felt her leg give. One of the new attackers rushing to the scene had hit her calf with the swipe of a hammer, and the limb couldn’t properly support her weight any more. She buckled, spitting a blood curse at the Kharadrons as they rushed at her.

‘Alive, I said alive!’ she could hear one of the duardin shouting in his grating language. She slid around the thrust of a sky pike and knocked aside another swinging cutlass, but as she tried to repost her leg gave way entirely and she went down on one knee. Another Kharadron tackled her from the side, bearing her down onto the ground, and she felt her grip go on one of her knives. She wrapped her arms around the struggling bulk of the one on top of her and slammed her remaining blade into the small of his back, trying to work it through his thick sky-suit. He cursed, then headbutted her.

Stars burst before her eyes as the ancestor mask slammed down. She tried to turn her head away, gasping at the pain in her skull, and through her blurred vision saw Gotrek, splattered with blood, being ensnared by another volley from the net launchers.

She tried to reach out to him, tried to shout, but the Kharadron’s helm cracked into her jaw again, and she knew no more.

Chapter Six

‘Move,’ Durbarak urged, throwing a glance back over his shoulder at Khaled-Tush. The flames had spread to the greenery clustered on the banks of the oasis, and now the once-bustling outpost was wholly consumed, the constellations overhead lost in a thick bank of smoke and ash.

‘Hurry,’ Durbarak reiterated, smacking his leather gauntlet on Throm’s back for emphasis. The Draz Karr lay ahead, the throbbing of its idling endrins a welcome sensation in the ash-choked air. He glanced at Stromm, Elki and Borin, all three of them struggling to keep up. He’d ordered the Draz Karr’s stoutest crewmen to drag the Slayer prisoner, and even between them they were sweat-drenched and panting, half divested of their sky-suit cowling and armour plates.

The prisoner himself was unconscious, as was the aelf. It had taken considerably more effort to knock the former out than the latter. Even just looking back at the duardin, wrapped in thick strands of skywhale gut netting, Durbarak found himself at once afraid and fascinated by the Slayer and the infamous rune gleaming in his flesh. He wanted to get him back and clapped up in the Draz Karr’s brig before he stirred.

Gotrek Gurnisson was going to make them all rich, that much he was sure of.

‘Hook him up,’ Durbarak shouted up at the skyship’s main deck. He saw a figure – probably Skeg – appear briefly at the deck’s railings, and seconds later a pair of long cargo hooks, attached to winch lines, whickered down over the side of the hull and thumped into the dirt in front of Durbarak. He motioned at the Kharadrons around him. With practised speed, the duardin who had been hauling Gotrek attached the hooks to his netting.

There was a clattering noise as one of the frigate’s cargo winches began hoisting the Slayer skywards. ‘The axe,’ Durbarak said, motioning to Krazak. The crewmate had taken custody of Gotrek’s huge Fyreslayer weapon – from the beginning, Durbarak had been clear about the importance of not just taking Gotrek alive. The Slayer’s equipment and his companions were also vital. Capturing the infamous Slayer in his entirety would magnify his value, and Durbarak wasn’t going to miss out on individual payments in exchange for an easy life. That wasn’t how the Kharadrons functioned.

Krazak handed the Fyreslayer axe to Durbarak, who strapped it over his back. Grav-ladders were being lowered from the Draz Karr’s flank now, and the pitch of the endrins was rising as they prepared for a full lift-off. The second prisoner, the unconscious aelf, was being carried over Throm’s shoulder. The big duardin mounted the ladders first, followed by the rest of the landing party. Durbarak waited until the end, as was customary for the captain of the sky reivers, casting his gaze back at Khaled-Tush. The outpost was now little more than a sheet of flame. The formerly cool night air of the desert was thick with the stink of charred wood and burned flesh, and hung heavy with black smoke and grey ash. The oasis had been transformed into a furnace. The sights and smells filled Durbarak with a deep grim happiness, and it took an effort to turn away and climb back aboard his ship.

As delightful as such devastation was, thoughts of the bounty he would collect with the Slayer and the aelf as his prisoners proved even more tantalising. The amount he had been offered to kill them was trifling by comparison.

The visions of wealth lasted only a few moments. Durbarak’s boots had barely thumped down on the Draz Karr’s decking plates before he realised something was out of order. Both the Slayer and the aelf had been safely deposited, but they were not the only beings brought on board by the crew. A human, young and scrawny, was being held in Skeg’s steel gauntlet, shivering and wailing in some garbled desert language.

‘Who’s this?’ Durbarak demanded, uncoupling himself from the grav-ladder and stomping across the deck to Skeg.

‘I caught the umgi hiding under the hull after we lowered the endrins,’ Skeg growled, shaking the terrified manling roughly.

‘So? Why is he still alive?’

‘He started babbling about the Slayer. I think he knows him, and you said that anything related to Gotrek Gurnisson is valuable.’

‘Sellah!’ the human wailed. Gotrek had been dragged along the deck to the open brig by a brace of boarding grapnels and now lay slumped, still netted and unconscious.

‘Sellah, sellah, please,’ the human shouted, making a pathetic attempt to get free from Skeg’s steel grasp. ‘You must wake up, sellah!’

‘Bind him too,’ Durbarak snapped. ‘Throw them all in the brig and let’s get under way. We’ve lingered here long enough.’

His orders were disturbed by a shriek. He turned, reaching for his pistols.

The aelf was awake. She had slipped out of Throm’s grip and had almost flung him over the frigate’s side. The two closest crewmates, Lorik and Stromm, rushed at her, grabbing her arms and trying to grapple her to the deck. She twisted and broke free again like a frenzied felid, punching Lorik in his prodigious gut. There was blood from a graze across her scalp running down the side of her slender face, and her dark hair was whipping around her, her black eyes wide and wild. They fixed on the human prisoner still being held by Skeg.

‘Mistress, help,’ the human pleaded piteously. She hesitated for the briefest second, and Durbarak knew she was sizing up remaining with her captive companions or leaping over the side.

In the end, the decision was made for her. Stromm, barely a foot to the aelf’s left, had cocked his aetherlock.

‘Move and die, witch,’ the duardin growled.

‘We haven’t come here to kill you,’ Durbarak added. ‘Grimnir knows, I wouldn’t mind if we did, but you’re more valuable alive. Consider that before you throw yourself over the side.’

The doubt seemed to do enough. He sensed the aelf become a fraction less tense as she accepted the situation. Durbarak made a terse motion to Lorik and Throm, and they began to edge back towards the aelf. Her expression had changed from one of wild desperation to haughty, reserved acceptance.

‘Release him,’ she said in the local human tongue. She pointed at Gotrek’s sprawled form.

‘If you have any respect for your kindred or the survival of the Mortal Realms, you won’t deliver him to whoever is paying you.’

‘I don’t have any respect for either,’ Durbarak answered in the same language, making the rest of the crew laugh.

The aelf made to answer, but Lorik slammed the butt of his aetherlock into her stomach, doubling her over, then delivered another blow to the side of her head.

‘Grungni’s golden balls, that felt satisfying,’ he said as the aelf hit the deck.

‘Get them all below,’ Durbarak snapped, turning towards the helm wheel and gear block on the skyship’s bridge. ‘And get us aetherward. Now, before any of the others catch up with us.’

Chapter Seven

The vibrating of the arkanaut frigate’s buoyancy endrins woke Maleneth. She sat up, and immediately regretted doing so. Pain split through her stomach and skull like a sunburst, making her flinch. She slumped back.

She groaned, and let her aching head come to terms with her new surroundings. Her hands were bound, looped with coils of duardin cabling. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was that Gotrek and Aziz were beside her. Both were awake, and both tied like her. Gotrek was glowering into the middle distance. Aziz just looked terrified.

The third realisation was that the wind was in her hair, and that they were skyborne. She looked around, tentatively, wary of the pain in her scalp resurfacing.

They were tied up in the brig-pit of a Kharadron skyship. Its hold was open, but there was no way to climb the pipe-ribbed walls to its edge. Above them the metallic orbs of two buoyancy endrins throbbed, their brass-and-steel shells gleaming brilliantly in the unfiltered dawn light. Their arcane power competed with the thudding of the rotor blades that adorned the skycraft’s sleek flanks. Beyond was nothing but the azure.

‘How long was I unconscious?’ Maleneth asked, having to swallow before speaking. Her throat was parched.

‘Since you were captured,’ Gotrek said, without a hint of humour.

‘And how long ago was that?’ she snapped, anger flaring up from the pain suffusing her body.

‘Last night. You new aelves are just the same as the old ones. One hit and you crumple.’

‘Would that I had the strength and fortitude of the great Gotrek. He would never have allowed himself to succumb to a pack of sky pirates,’ Maleneth hissed. ‘Unless that was you, laid out and netted on their deck when I last saw you…’

Gotrek rounded on her, and she thought he was going to lunge at her before she saw his bonds – heavy metal clamps, rather than the cords that bit into her own wrists. Clearly their captors were well aware of the Slayer’s deadly potential.

‘Have you tried to negotiate?’

‘And why would I do that?’ the Slayer growled. ‘The only thing I would negotiate is whether their blood feeds my axe’s thirst now or later.’

‘They’re duardin, for Khaine’s spite. They’ve not killed us, so they must want something. They’re not just assassins, or if they were they’ve disobeyed their directives. So negotiate with them.’

‘I-I think I heard something about a ransom, sellah,’ Aziz stammered. ‘These sky dogs, sometimes they take people from the trails, usually wealthy traders. They do not follow their kindred’s code.’

‘Then why did they take you too?’ Maleneth demanded.

‘They think he’s with us,’ Gotrek said, looking up and frowning at the endrin orbs above. ‘I told them he wasn’t. Told them they should just throw him over the side of… whatever this thing is.’

‘It is a skyship,’ Aziz said, wringing his tied hands together.

‘Not like any skyship I’ve been on before. And I’ve known one or two.’

A tremor ran through the cold decking plates surrounding them. A moment later a figure loomed at the edge of the brig’s entrance, followed by two more. Maleneth looked up into the grim, unyielding ancestor masks of their captors. One was pointing the gleaming barrels of an aethermatic volley gun down at them. She remembered waking up on the skyship just as it had been about to pull away from the inferno that had once been Khaled-Tush. The duardin had spoken about taking them alive. In the hands of the Kharadron Overlords, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

One of the captors pointed at Maleneth. He had Gotrek’s axe slung over his back.

‘Bring her.’

One of his companions tossed a grav-ladder down from the edge of the hold. Covered by the volley gun, he swung in and snatched Maleneth, gauntlet clamping around her arm. She didn’t try to resist. Now was not the time. Aziz whimpered but Gotrek remained unmoving, his eye still on the endrins overhead, as though oblivious to what was happening around him.

The duardin holding Maleneth pushed her up the grav-ladder. It was difficult negotiating it with her hands tied, but near the top the Kharadron above snatched her beneath the arms and hauled her up. The wind hit her properly, making her flinch, and her feet touched the main deck just as another tremor ran through the ribbed metal. She was sure she heard one of the endrins skip a beat.

‘This way, aelf,’ the duardin snarled, a hand in the flat of her back pushing her towards the skyship’s external railing. She staggered, her stomach lurching as she became aware of just how high up they were. The Bone Desert stretched out in every direction, like a Hysh-bleached sheet, each of the thousands of tiny ripples spreading away below her one of the great dunes that covered the desolate expanse.

‘Who is that?’ the duardin demanded, pointing down past the rear endrin latched to the skyship’s stern. Maleneth frowned against the wind, unable to discern anything amidst the distant haze.

‘I do not see anyone.’

‘You’re not using my spyglass, murder-aelf,’ the duardin snarled. ‘You’ll throw it overboard. Put that famous eyesight to use, or we’ll see how long you enjoy being dangled by your toes over the side.’

The Kharadron pointed again and Maleneth gripped the skyship’s railing, staring down into the endless desert. Eventually she began to discern a shape, dark against the pale ochre, a distant spec that seemed to be following in the frigate’s wake.

‘A rider,’ she said, having to shout over the wind and the endrin’s throb.

‘Who?’ the Kharadron demanded.

‘I don’t know! I have no companions besides the duardin and the boy!’

‘Then you won’t mind if we give him a Kharadron salutation. Skori, prime the skycannon and bring us about.’

Before the duardin’s orders could be obeyed there was a metallic pinging noise, followed by a shriek of escaping steam. Maleneth looked up to see the rivets had burst around one of the rubberised pipes leading to the endrin domes. Steam was now jetting from the opening, and a thick, oily substance was drooling from cracks further up the metal orb.

‘Dregg, get aloft!’ the Kharadron gripping Maleneth shouted, gesturing towards an endrinrigger emerging from the ship’s forecabin, lugging a half-welder and a cog-toothed hammer.

‘Another one’s about to go!’ shouted a second Kharadron, pointing towards another of the endrin’s valves. The entire sphere was beginning to visibly buckle and deform under some sort of internal pressure, as though a vast, invisible fist had closed around it and was crushing the metal shell.

‘Grungsson’s oath,’ the Kharadron beside Maleneth managed to swear, before the whole ship lurched.

The motion threw the entire crew, Maleneth included, hard to the right. She banged against some rigging cables, her natural poise undone by the cords pinning her wrists together. She spat a curse of her own as the ship lurched back violently in the opposite direction, banging her off the railings protecting the edge. Her duardin captor grunted as he held his own balance, the spikes on his boots helping him dig into the deck.

‘Check the endrin readings!’ he barked. Since the first rupture the tone of the orbs keeping the skyship aloft had changed noticeably. Gone were the steady vibrations, replaced by an ugly sputtering, clattering sound. The noise seemed to grow even more harsh and irregular as Maleneth listened to it, and a note of panic had entered the voices of the duardin around her as they hurried to sign in from their stations. She couldn’t decipher all of the gruff reports, but none sounded positive.

The skyship shook again. This time it wasn’t with sudden fury, but with an even more terrible, slow sense of slipping. Maleneth, attuned as she was to her surroundings, was the first to sense the slight change in the slope of the deck. She was able to hook her bonds over the railings along the edge of the hull as the angle continued to shift, and the duardin finally noticed.

‘Throm, the stabiliser gauge!’ the duardin next to Maleneth bellowed. ‘She’s going to capsize!’

The two remaining endrins were vibrating, their agony audible as an ear-piercing scream. The metal all around Maleneth was juddering violently, steam pouring from the skyship’s ports and hatches, wreathing the stricken frigate as it continued its slow, inexorable roll.

‘The hatch!’ Maleneth heard another voice, rising above the barks of the duardin and the shriek of their crumpling ship. It was Aziz.

The cart driver and Gotrek were both still in the brig. Even more importantly, the brig had a hatch.

The duardin appeared to have forgotten her. Several had flung grapnels to the far side of the hull and were using them to scale the tipping deck with surprising dexterity. Others were using cutlasses, daggers and boarding pikes to anchor themselves to the ship, trying to claw their way back to the tiller and the gauge that appeared responsible for the craft’s aerial buoyancy. One lost his grip on the rigging and plummeted back, slamming into the railing running along the edge of the ship with a grunt.

The railing. Maleneth stopped trying to fight the tipping sensation, and instead allowed herself to drop to the metal rungs. For a moment they were the only things between her and a plummeting drop, the desert laid out at a dizzying, stomach-turning angle. She forced herself not to look down, but planted two feet on one of the rungs and, from a crouch, leapt for the edge of the brig hatch.

She almost cleared it. Her hands, still bound together, clamped over the edges, the impact of her body against the unyielding metal of the hull almost driving the wind from her lungs.

‘The hatch!’ she heard Aziz still screaming. The angle of the ship was such that it had almost tipped him and Gotrek out into the open air.

‘I am trying, you fool,’ she hissed back. The brig’s hatch lever was set into the deck just to her right, but reaching it would be impossible with her hands bound, at least if she wanted to avoid losing her grip.

She grimaced. When had a servant of Khaine ever had doubts when playing these games of life and death?

She flung herself to the side, letting out a yell of effort as she did so. As her grip left the hatch and her stomach lurched at the void opening out beneath her, it seemed as though she’d thrown herself to her death. Time slowed as she arched her back and thrust her arms out towards the lever. She saw the bonds slide up and over it as her jump reached its apex and, as it seemed her momentum would drag her back down over the side of the tipping deck, the cords caught and snagged.

They held her weight only for a second before snapping around the lever, but by then she had her hands around it. She thumped into the deck again as her fall was arrested once more, the weight dragging the lever down with a heavy click. She was left dangling again, her arms straining. But it was done. The locking mechanism had engaged.

She heard a crack and something smacked off the deck next to her head. She realised one of the duardin, anchored below her by a grappling hook, had fired an aetherlock up at her. Above, the brig had started to clatter as the hatch rattled shut over the hold.

She had a couple of seconds at best before she was locked outside.

Muscles burning with the unrelenting strain, she hauled herself up onto the lever block. The cords had bitten deep into her wrists, but with her hands free she suddenly felt more confident. Perched like a feline on the narrow block of metal, she gave herself a split second to gather her strength and focus, ignoring the horrifying angle of the ship as its flank approached ninety degrees to the desert floor far below.

She leapt, shrieking as she did so, though she barely realised it. The hatch yawned before her, its grate sliding shut, just a few yards left before the whole brig was locked off.

She was trapping herself in the bowels of an arkanaut frigate that was plummeting towards the desert. But it was that, or tumble from the open deck when it finally tipped all the way upside down.

She dropped in through the hatch, a hair’s breadth from the grate’s locking spikes, not even hitting the deck below before she heard it clang fully shut. She slammed into the metal beneath with a grunt and was then almost immediately thrown to one side. What had once been the bottom of the brig was now one of the sides, and the wall they had previously been lying against was now the floor. The hatch, now barred, was to her right. Through it the desert was swinging ponderously into view, the horizon stretching dizzyingly away.

The realisation of just what was happening caught up with Maleneth.

‘Hag’s spite see me safe, that I might claim more lives for the Bloody-Handed,’ she intoned.

‘Hold on to the bars!’ Aziz was screaming, barely audible over the death-shrieks of the crumpling, rupturing endrins. The teamster had managed to work his way free of his own bonds, and had braced himself up against the corner of the hold.

The skyship turned over on its axis. Maleneth was thumped against the bars of the hold, now the floor. Beneath them was nothing but the desert. She clung to the grate, her stomach turning. A duardin hurtled past, his grip on the ship’s deck gone, his scream whipped away by the wind and the earache of the endrins. She could see others dangling by grapnels and sky pikes, hooked to the rigging or railings. The dunes below were rushing up to greet them.

‘Hope you don’t get air-sick, aelf,’ she heard Gotrek say. He was balanced against the grate, arms braced against one of the corners. It sounded as though he was enjoying himself.

She screwed her eyes shut and tried to drive out the juddering fall of the skyship with words of spite and murder, an old lullaby of the Hidden Temples. She was going to die, a part of her had already accepted as much. Her only hope was that it would be Khaine who claimed her soul, and not some other cruel deity.

The sound of the endrins’ torture reached fever pitch, driving out all conscious thought, reducing anyone still on board the falling frigate to base, primal terror. Maleneth found herself opening her eyes again, and saw a dune directly ahead, caught for a second in perfect clarity, serenely still in the burning heat.

The world seemed to calm around Maleneth. The gut-wrenching shuddering and the plummeting sensation went, along with the pain of the endrins. All she could hear was the rapid tattoo of her own heart, the blood in her ears, the breath rasping in her lungs.

‘Khaela mensha adrathi Khaina,’ she said, reciting her temple’s last rites.

The skyship struck.

Chapter Eight

She remembered being told by a human warrior, Bayzor, a fellow member of the Order of the Azyr, that whenever he awoke after being struck unconscious, it was the pain that let him know he was still living. Apparently in whatever afterlife he believed in, there was no pain, so its presence indicated that he was not yet dead.

Maleneth had no such certainties. The temples of the Black Courts and the Shadow Covens preached little other than pain, and the cold murder that eased it. As she woke, acutely aware of the spikes of agony in her side and throbbing in her skull, her sluggish thoughts wondered whether she was about to face her final trials before the Bloody-Handed, and perhaps reckon one last time with her old mistress.

A part of her, distant and icy as a Shyish morning, hoped Jakari had already crossed over, and was waiting for her.

The God of Murder would permit no such mercies. Maleneth’s eyes fluttered open, and she found herself looking once more at Gotrek’s scarred, blunt face. She started, trying to push herself away from the duardin and realising when she did so that she was sitting up with her back to the skyship’s hull. A section of copper pipes, ruptured, had been digging into her side, slicing her leathers. She groaned as her movements teased the dozen cuts and bruises she had gained over the previous day.

Gotrek stood, turning away from her. He had recovered his axe from somewhere, and she thought she caught a rare hint of amusement in his eye. She tested her throbbing head, touching it tentatively. Neither the lump on her scalp nor the bruises from the pipework seemed dangerous, but being flung around the hold seemed to have opened up the wound in her side given to her by the Alharabi dancers. She noticed as Gotrek moved away that his arm was injured too. Something had cut his right bicep to the bone, and the wound was still pulsing fresh blood, leaving his arm a sheet of glistening crimson.

She reached out one hand, grasping a metal strut that was broken out beyond the ribbing of what she took to be the skyship’s hull. As she stood she realised that the ground underfoot was shifting and hot – gone were the decking plates, replaced by sand.

They had landed, and they had survived. She saw that she was still in the hold, or what remained of it. The ship appeared to have grazed the top of the dune they had been plunging towards and settled on its flank in the valley between the first rise and the second. Wreckage littered the sand beyond the broken and twisted remains of the hold.

She tried to speak, but the sound came out as a dry croak, and descended into coughing. Gotrek turned back to her and undid something from his belt, tossing it down beside her. It was a flask, engraved with Kharadron markings. She put it to her lips, and was relieved to taste water rather than a burning duardin ale.

She’d barely started to drink when her stomach heaved, and she was forced to double up by a bout of retching. She was sick, the bile leaving her gasping and choking on all fours, its stink in her nostrils and its foul acid aftertaste thick in her throat. She slumped back into a sitting position, panting, wiping sweat-slick hair out of her face. She realised that she was shaking.

‘I’m almost impressed. I’d have thought such a crash would have ended a weakling, runty aelf,’ Gotrek said, standing over her.

The words made her laugh weakly, though she didn’t know why.

‘Drink more,’ he told her, turning his back again. She spat out the sickly aftertaste, and tentatively took another sip of what remained in the flask.

‘You are wounded,’ she said. The words came out raw sounding. He grunted, not turning back to face her.

‘Had worse.’

‘Not while I’ve been with you.’

‘You’ve not been with me very long, dark aelf.’

She somehow found the strength to roll her eyes. ‘You need to clean and bind that wound, before you lose any more blood.’

‘I’d rather clean and bind your incessantly jabbering mouth.’

Gotrek moved out of the hull’s shadow and into the burning light of the desert. Taking a moment to compose herself, Maleneth found her feet and followed him, shielding her eyes from the glare. Side by side, they surveyed the wreckage of the downed Kharadron skyship.

It had taken a section of the dune behind them with it during its first collision, ploughing a deep furrow down into the valley floor. Most of the ship’s broken hull was intact, but two of the three endrins had come apart completely, their twisted metal strewn all over the sand. There were bodies too, Maleneth realised. Kharadron corpses, scattered indiscriminately amidst the ruination of their frigate.

‘I’ve never known duardin-crafted machinery to fail like that,’ she said, looking at the crumpled remains of the only remaining semi-intact endrin, buried in the dune a hundred yards off to her right.

‘Malakai’s would not have,’ Gotrek grumbled.

‘Whose?’

‘The only dwarf I would trust to fly a damned skyship. He was an inventor, the likes of which you won’t find in these dull realms. The manling says we are not far from the Eight Pillars. They are that way.’ He gestured over the next dune.

‘The manling…’ Maleneth began, then spotted movement among the skyship’s remains. A figure was crawling from the shattered portholes of what had been the frigate’s main cabin section. As he wormed his way out into the sand, Maleneth recognised Aziz. The teamster got to his feet and, noticing her, waved cheerfully. Miraculously, he seemed completely unharmed.

‘They had supplies,’ Gotrek said by way of explanation as Aziz jogged over. He had tied half a dozen more Kharadron flasks around his waist, and they clattered with every step he took. There was a sack over his back as well.

‘You are awake, sellah,’ he exclaimed as he reached Maleneth. She grimaced.

‘I feel like I would rather not be.’

Aziz’s cheerful demeanour withered before Maleneth’s icy response. She forced herself to acknowledge him properly, against her better instincts.

‘Had you not told me to close the hatch, I would likely be standing in judgement before Khaine right now. For that, you have my thanks, Aziz.’

The teamster’s smile returned, infectious. He reached back into the sack and drew out two lengths of blood-encrusted silver – Maleneth’s knives.

‘Anything for you, sellah,’ he said, handing each blade to her in turn.

‘They were in the cabin,’ Gotrek said.

‘They wanted to sell us on with all of our possessions,’ Maleneth said, appreciating having the two weapons in her hands, before sliding them into her belt. ‘Many thanks once more, Aziz.’

‘The Eight Pillars,’ Gotrek said to the human. ‘You’re sure of the way?’

‘Sure as Hysh rises over the Sea of Mer, sellah,’ Aziz said, gesturing up at the burning orb dominating the cloudless sky. He dropped his arm to point over the nearest dune. ‘Though upon my word I do not know how far it will be.’

‘We can’t go back,’ Maleneth said. ‘Khaled-Tush will be nothing but ash now. Besides, your wound must be seen to.’

She reached out to touch Gotrek’s injured arm, but the Slayer drew back with a scowl.

‘Do not treat me like some newborn beardling, aelf. I see through your scheming. You will advise me to go to that temple of yours. You want to make me their prisoner.’

‘There are healers at the Temple of the Lightning,’ Maleneth said, trying to mask her exasperation. ‘A learned human chirurgeon, loyal to the Order of the Azyr. If you do not have it properly cleaned it will become infected. How well will a demigod deal with amputation?’

‘I have fought through this world and the last without losing any part of me I hold dear,’ the Slayer grunted. ‘I’m not going to start now.’

Maleneth looked to Aziz, but the human wouldn’t meet her eye, clearly not wanting to be drawn into an argument between his unlikely companions. She sighed.

‘I am going to the Eight Pillars,’ Gotrek said. ‘The location of the Axe of Grimnir will be revealed to me. Where you go is your own choice.’

The Slayer trailed off as Maleneth moved suddenly to her right, her face contorting with anger.

She’d seen one of the Kharadron bodies littering the desert stirring. She had assumed they were all dead, pulverised by their fall or broken by the frigate’s impact. She realised now that she was wrong.

She recognised the duardin – it was the only one with a golden ancestor mask, rather than silver, the same one that had dragged her out of the brig. She felt her spite surge and, without thinking, dropped to her knees in the sand and pressed her knife against the Kharadron’s gorget seal.

A fist clamped like a vice around her wrist before she could push the tip home. She looked up at Gotrek, face contorted with anger.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Call it habit,’ Gotrek said. ‘But it wouldn’t sit right to watch an aelf slit a dwarf’s throat in his sleep.’

‘They’re pirates,’ Maleneth said incredulously. ‘They killed hundreds of innocent people at Khaled-Tush. They were going to sell all of us to the hag only knows who!’

‘And they’ve collected their rewards,’ Gotrek answered, pointing with his free, bloody hand at the wrecked skyship and the bodies scattered around it.

‘If any more of them have survived they’ll follow us!’

‘You think they’ll go far?’ Gotrek replied. ‘We’ve taken all their water. If you want them dead, you’ll only have to wait. Anyway, we don’t have the time to go through the wreckage and follow its trail to find every last injured one. I want to get to that damned inscription.’

The son of Gurni is correct, Witchblade. They’re as good as dead. Stop wasting time.

‘He is a fool,’ Maleneth growled back, but moved her blade away from the Kharadron’s throat. Gotrek released her arm.

‘Let us make haste then,’ she said, standing. ‘Or we could wait until he’s fully awake. Will you let me kill him then?’

Gotrek said nothing, but motioned to Aziz, standing uncertainly nearby.

‘The Eight Pillars, manling. Lead on.’

Chapter Nine

Durbarak’s arm was broken. He had cracked it back into place and formed a makeshift sling from a length of endrin cord. The pain was a dull, constant throb, a distant second to the anger that burned through him.

The Draz Karr had been wrecked beyond repair. The hull was buckled and split and the endrins shattered. Twisted wreckage littered the Bone Desert.

Bodies littered it too, crewmates who had failed to tie themselves to the deck before the skyship had capsized. Not all those who had done so had survived either. He’d already found Stromm and Borin, both crushed by one of the endrins when the remains of the crumpled orb had come down after the frigate had ploughed into the desert.

Durbarak’s livelihood was in ruins and his crewmates were dead. Someone would pay. He’d already checked the hold, but the Draz Karr’s collision with the desert had ruptured the hull and left a tear in the brig’s flank. There were three sets of prints leading from the downed skyship, three sets headed east, over the dunes. Durbarak had pulled off his ancestor mask and was staring after them, cradling his broken arm and trying to stop himself shaking with anger.

They’d taken the water with them too. He’d managed to find a single flask, half-empty, in the brig’s remains, but that was all. He would have to go, and soon. A part of him simply wished to remain with his frigate’s wreckage.

He heard a sound carried to him by the whispers of the desert wind. At first he thought it was the low groan of the skyship’s remains settling, then he realised it was a voice, a voice that he recognised. He turned and moved back in amongst the hold, struggling in the sand that had been ploughed up by the Draz Karr’s impact.

He found Throm lying in the shade of one of the broken endrins, its misshapen sphere half buried in the sand. The Kharadron’s legs were broken – bone and cartilage were protruding from his dusty sky-suit, and the sand was speckled with blood, a trail marking where he had dragged himself from the shattered decking plates nearby. Scraps of armour and his ancestor mask lay scattered around him, discarded in the infernal heat. He was only half conscious.

Durbarak trudged to his side, unhooking the water flask from his belt as he went. Throm’s eyes flickered, and he blinked up at his crewmate.

‘Captain?’ His voice was a dry, deathly croak.

‘Easy, lad,’ Durbarak said, kneeling beside him and pressing the flask to his lips with his good hand. Rather than drinking, Throm turned his head away.

‘You’ll need it more than me, captain. I’m done.’

‘I’m going to find the one who did this,’ Durbarak said. ‘Some oath-breaking thaggoraki has betrayed us.’

‘The ship,’ Throm murmured. ‘The ship would never have gone down like that. Someone… someone had uncoupled the valve lines.’

Durbarak’s response was interrupted by the sound of a horse’s neigh. He froze. Throm had heard it too, his expression becoming clearer.

‘Was that–’ he began to say.

‘Stay here,’ Durbarak growled. He left the flask in Throm’s lap and, after checking one of his pistols was still loaded and wedged in his belt, started to move towards the main section of the Draz Karr’s wreckage. The sound had come from the other side of the skyship’s carcass.

He trudged around it warily, eyes creased against the glare of the sun and the streamers of sand being carried from the baking hull by the wind. He rounded a broken propeller that had lodged itself upright in the dirt, and found himself staring at a horse.

Even to a duardin it was a fine-looking beast, white and ill-tempered, tugging at reins that had been tied around the propeller’s broken spoke. Durbarak drew his aetherlock, expecting the rider to be nearby, but there was no sign of anyone close to the beast. It snorted at him angrily and let out another shrill neigh. Only then did he notice the saddle on its back, and the device on its cloth. He turned and started to run back to Throm, stumbling and cursing as he went.

He heard a cracking sound – the discharge of another pistol, echoing back from the Draz Karr’s remains. Cursing more loudly, he reached the broken endrin once more, his shattered arm in agony.

He was too late. Throm slumped on his side in the dirt, gagging and choking, beard and hands slippery with his own blood as he tried in vain to hold shut his slit throat. A figure stepped away from the dying Kharadron, the wind snapping at its cloak. It sensed Durbarak and spun as he brought his pistol up.

‘You,’ the former captain of the Draz Karr snarled. The assassin didn’t respond, reaching into its cloak instead.

Durbarak fired, but by the time he had squeezed the trigger a throwing star had thudded in between his eyes, killing him instantly. His shot went wide and he fell straight back, spread-eagled in the sand, eyes staring sightlessly into Hysh’s fiery glare.

The assassin retrieved the throwing star and then crouched next to Throm, watching with apparent fascination as the last surviving crew member of the arkanaut frigate slowly bled to death. When his eyes had finally glazed over, the killer made one last circuit of the wreckage site, ensuring every last wounded duardin was dead, before returning and remounting its horse. It turned the white steed east and, leaning low in the saddle, set off after Gotrek, Maleneth and Aziz.

Chapter Ten

They caught sight of the Eight Pillars as darkness crept over the dunes once again. Maleneth, moving ahead of the other two, crested a rise of craggy desert rocks and found it sprawling abruptly below them – the towering, sand-blasted pillars that gave the place its name, and the great pyramid structure that lay at the end of the ancient colonnade, the final resting place of some human desert lord and, according to the seer coven in Barkash, the site of an inscription bearing the location of the Axe of Grimnir. The crumbling structures lay at the end of a long gorge, flanked by sheer walls of arid yellow stone.

When they had first set out from Barkash on the back of Aziz’s cart, the pack driver had told them that long ago a town had clustered around the pyramid, forever in the shadow of their entombed master. The slow, insidious work of the desert had wiped away any trace of the old settlement, but the recent affluence of the Triumvirate Cities had aroused interest in the Bone Desert and its potential secrets. Adventurers, artefact-hunters and looters had begun flocking to the Eight Pillars, lured by tall tales relating to the wealth the pyramid’s founder had supposedly been buried with.

Their arrival had resulted in a new town springing up. Like Khaled-Tush, it was largely ramshackle, a conglomeration of wagons that had been converted into dwellings. Tents and lean-tos and rough huts of dirt and stone clustered like growths around the bases of each of the eight great pillars, the spaces between teeming with people. The sound of voices and the crack of picks and shovels rose up on the humid wind.

‘It looks like trouble,’ Maleneth said darkly, surveying the dilapidated camp-turned-settlement.

‘No more than usual,’ Gotrek said.

They descended to the bottom of the gorge and moved along the craggy path to the outskirts of the Pillars. Hysh was setting, and the cliffs on either side provided relief from its burning gaze. Maleneth was too weary to offer any sort of thanks for the reprieve. She was bone-tired and ravenous. A part of her wished she’d perished in the skyship crash. Surely whatever fate awaited her beyond death was preferable to the heat that had scorched and burned her arms, neck and face, the ache that had worked its way into her limbs, the thirst that had turned her throat raw or the hunger that gnawed at her insides.

Aziz seemed little better, limping along in her wake, but Gotrek appeared indefatigable. She was certain it was more than just the legendary endurance of the duardin race at work. Perhaps it was more, even, than the power of the Master Rune. Once Gotrek had decided upon something, nothing seemed capable of stopping him, least of all trifling things like physical exhaustion or hunger.

Gotrek had decided he would go to the Eight Pillars, and so to the Eight Pillars he would go.

As they neared the furthest-flung wagons, the sound of an explosion reverberated down the gorge. As it echoed away, smoke and dust rose in the distance to their right, near the base of the pyramid. No one in the encampment sprawling before Maleneth seemed surprised by the detonation, and she realised some wealthy treasure-seeker was probably using a form of explosive to crack open one of the tombs.

She wondered what the Priests of the Lightning thought of such desecration. They had tended the temple nestled into the mountains a few miles from the gorge for as long as any in the Bone Desert could remember. The priesthood had served the ruler whose tomb now lay before Maleneth, guiding him towards the will of Sigmar. The presence of the Order of the Azyr among the priesthood had been a more recent development, but it was an easy accommodation to make – they both served the Lightning God, and the temple gave the Order an outpost in Aqysh, in a region whose cities were growing in importance.

Maleneth had resolved to report there, whether Gotrek would go with her or not. Perhaps the Order would permit her to cease accompanying the irascible duardin.

‘These manlings,’ Gotrek growled as they moved in among the edges of the settlement, ‘are they seeking the axe too? I’d sooner spend the rest of my days eating grobi dung than allow the woeful umgi of these realms to find it first.’

The words had been directed at Aziz. The cart driver raised weary eyes from his feet and shook his head.

‘No, sellah,’ he said. ‘At least, I do not believe they seek anything so specific here. There are many legends about the riches of the Eight Pillars, not only of the axe.’

That much was clearly true. As they continued up the main track towards the pyramid Maleneth was afforded a proper view of the work being done by the prospectors. Not content with trying to break into the tomb itself, they were seeking to crack open the pillars as well. Rickety wooden scaffolding surrounded the nearest ones, and Maleneth could see dozens of men and youths, many stripped to their waists, hacking at the old structures with all manner of tools. The air rang with the sounds of hard labour, punctuated by the report of another excavation blast sounding down from further up the gorge.

‘You still think you’ll find the axe before everyone else?’ she asked Gotrek as they trudged deeper into the camp. ‘If there is an inscription within that tomb pointing to its location, dozens of hotheads and fools will be seeking it the moment it’s translated.’

‘The axe, my axe, won’t be found unless it’s meant to be found,’ the duardin replied stoically.

‘You know the Order of the Azyr would likely help you to find it,’ Maleneth pressed. ‘Our agents cover the Mortal Realms. Nothing passes unseen. We can help you track down its most likely resting place.’

‘Or you will imprison me,’ Gotrek replied, without looking at the aelf. ‘You think I’m too dangerous, and that makes you afraid, aelf. So you will lock me away in your temple. Or you will try.’

Maleneth stifled her response, knowing he would only shoot back with something denigrating about her race.

‘We need lodgings,’ she said instead, directing the statement to Aziz. ‘Have you visited the Eight Pillars before?’

‘Twice,’ he responded, his usual eagerness visibly crushed by the trials of the past two days. ‘Both times carrying feed for the Master of Azalam. His contractors gave me space to sleep in one of their storage sheds.’

‘Anywhere will do,’ Maleneth said. ‘We need to eat as well.’

‘I will cook,’ Aziz said, his spirits apparently lifted at least a little by the prospect. ‘I still have the coin sellah gave me in Khaled-Tush. I will be able to buy much with it!’

Maleneth let the teamster take the lead, carrying them into the burrow-like network of rough buildings, scaffolding, shacks and wagons that nestled around one of the towering pillars. He spent long minutes haggling in his native desert tongue with a suspicious-looking man with an immaculately oiled black goatee, clad in the red robes of a Merport cattle guilder. Eventually the man conceded whatever was being debated with an exasperated wave of his hand, and motioned towards the cattle barns that sat in the shadow of the great stone column, leaning precariously between two rows of sheds being used to sift the pillar’s broken stone.

‘They say that at their core the pillars are solid gold,’ Aziz explained as he led them into the dank shadows of the barn. The stench of animal dung and the scrape and scuffle of hooves in the dirt assailed Maleneth, and her keen eyes picked out a dozen tuskers herded together behind stalls at the far end of the barn. She grimaced. For a moment she contemplated once again demanding Gotrek accompany her to the Temple of the Lightning, but the duardin’s stubbornness coupled with her own exhaustion overcame the words. She picked a heap of grubby straw fodder just inside the doorway and collapsed onto it.

‘I will bring us food,’ Aziz said.

‘Anything you can find,’ Maleneth agreed.

‘I’m going to look at the pyramid,’ Gotrek said. ‘Don’t follow me. Your blundering attracts too much attention.’

Chapter Eleven

Darkness was sliding along the gorge when Aziz returned and kindled a fire outside the barn door. He had been right about Gotrek’s Fyreslayer gold going far. The pot he had purchased was soon full of an alluring mixture of beans, herbs and spices. Despite herself, Maleneth had slipped into a half-sleep as she waited, her usual care in such an unfamiliar place overcome by fatigue. It was not an easy rest – memories of Jakari and their forced separation haunted her for the first time in years. It was a relief when the aroma of Aziz’s cooking woke her.

‘The warabi beans add the flavour, and the spice unlocks it,’ he said as she sat back on her haunches next to him, staring into the bubbling pot. He drew out a spoonful and held it out for her, nodding earnestly.

She was far too hungry to resist. It tasted good, but it only made her stomach ache all the more.

Gotrek arrived back soon after. He’d found or purchased fresh linen from somewhere and had bound his injured arm tightly. Going by the amount of blood staining the cloth, it would still need to be treated.

‘How does the pyramid look?’ Maleneth asked as he joined them at the fire. Aziz had begun doling out his broth into a trio of clay bowls he’d bought along with the food supplies.

‘The entrance is sealed,’ the Slayer said. ‘The umgi are trying to blast their way inside, but they don’t know the first thing about a mining charge or where to plant it.’

‘And you’re not going to enlighten them?’

Gotrek made a barking noise that Maleneth thought might be a laugh.

‘Better to watch the manlings blow each other up. See how high the different pieces fly. I’ll just get inside another way.’

‘Another way?’ Aziz asked, as he passed the bowls around.

‘There is always another way,’ Gotrek said, taking the bowl and sniffing it. ‘What is this?’

‘A recipe of my tribe,’ Aziz said. ‘We call it kalem. You will enjoy it, master duardin, I promise you.’

Gotrek took a sip, and grunted noncommittally. Maleneth had no such reservations – she was too hungry to show the Slayer’s reserve. She gulped down the broth, enduring the strength of the spices Aziz had seasoned it with.

‘I went up the gorge side,’ Gotrek said, eyeing the flames of the fire burning low beneath Aziz’s cooking pot. ‘There are paths. Old paths. The rock has been marked with tunnel-work.’

‘There are stories about hidden ways into the great pyramid,’ Aziz said between a mouthful of warabi beans. ‘Many have sought them, but none have succeeded.’

‘I doubt many were dwarfs,’ Gotrek said.

‘If there are hidden passages, the priests of the Temple of the Lightning would likely know more about them,’ Maleneth said, setting her bowl down momentarily. Her stomach was aching, and she chided herself for eating too quickly and too greedily. It had been years since she had last been pushed to such extremes of fatigue and hunger.

‘For the last time, I won’t go to see your accursed priests,’ Gotrek spat. ‘If you want this damned rune then why not draw those pretty little steak knives of yours, come over here and see if you can carve it out of my chest?’

The suggestion didn’t appeal. A part of Maleneth knew she should stop pursuing the need to submit the Slayer to the Order of the Azyr, but this close to one of their outposts the opportunity was infuriating her. If she could turn him over to them, she could finally be rid of the duardin and his insufferable stubbornness.

‘You won’t find the axe you seek alone,’ she pressed. ‘The Eight Realms are vast – even the gods themselves cannot wander them at will and hope to perceive all things. Or perhaps you do not really seek the axe…’ She paused. ‘Felix. Was that his name?’

‘Do not speak of the manling, aelf,’ Gotrek growled. ‘He is gone.’

Another blast rang through the gorge, reverberating from its sheer sides as though in harmony with the duardin’s anger. Maleneth ignored it.

‘The Order can help you,’ she reiterated. ‘If he lives, they can find him.’

‘A rust plague on your damned Order! I told you, he is gone! I care not for him any more!’

Maleneth cackled gleefully. ‘Again, another lie, duardin.’

Gotrek’s response was not the one she expected. He didn’t speak. Instead, his eye refocused past the cooking fire, and after a few seconds he uttered a curse in his strange dialect. Maleneth had just registered the word before a crashing noise made her leap to her feet, her half-empty bowl spilled into the dirt. She followed the duardin’s gaze.

The explosion that had rung out just before wasn’t another attempt to crack open the pyramid, or even one of the pillars. Whether deliberately or not, someone had set off explosive charges at the base of the western gorge face. Now a crashing sound was heralding an avalanche of shattered stone and dirt, as a portion of the gorge came tumbling down towards the nearest pillar and the makeshift camp surrounding it – the one the three of them had chosen for the night.

‘The damned rats,’ Gotrek muttered.

‘Move!’ Maleneth shouted, snatching her pack from the entrance to the animal shed. Hysh’s light was suddenly bathing the pillar at their backs once more, the collapse of the top of the gorge revealing the lowering orb. It silhouetted a wall of dirt and dust that was plummeting with ponderous inevitability towards them.

Aziz was scrambling over the fire and away from the avalanche, his meal forgotten. Gotrek hadn’t moved, and a part of Maleneth wondered if he wanted to stay where he was and greet the landslide head on, stone meeting stone. In her mind’s eye she could imagine the Master Rune igniting, the rock tumbling to either side, broken apart by nothing but the duardin’s unyielding resolve.

Then she realised Gotrek was running.

She followed.

The whole world was beginning to shake, the earth underfoot and the air about them shuddering with the weight of the approaching debris. The camp around them was descending into chaos as disbelieving prospectors finally realised what was happening and tried to flee. Screams and the lowing of panicked animals filled the air. Tents were torn and trampled and lean-tos collapsed. A cart was overturned in the stampede, its occupants trapped beneath its weight, their cries for help unheeded in the tumult. Maleneth found herself pressed in from both sides by a mass of stinking, white-eyed people as they poured from their shacks and caravans.

The crowd dragged them, and for all her speed and Gotrek’s strength, it carried them along regardless of which direction they wanted to go. She could no longer see Aziz, and the thunder of the avalanche was now filling her ears, the ground tremoring so violently that whole groups of the fleeing mob were being thrown to the dirt, trampled by those rushing heedlessly on from behind them.

She tried to shout Gotrek’s name, struggling to keep her feet in the press. A sudden pain in her arm made her gasp. She stumbled, face contorted, and brought her forearm up. Blood was streaming from a long slash in her pale flesh, cut from just above her wrist to just below her elbow. She clutched the wound with her other hand, hissing with pain, trying to see who or what had struck her, but amidst the swell of bodies it was impossible to tell. All the while the avalanche filled the world with thunder, a fury so great it seemed in that heart-racing, desperate moment that it was the death knell of creation itself.

Follow the duardin, child!

‘Aelf!’

The barked word, now all too familiar, drew her attention back to Gotrek. The Slayer had ignited his greataxe, and the sight of its runic fires had served to give him the slightest amount of space. He snatched at Maleneth, managing to grasp her belt and draw her to his side.

‘Dwarfs should never run,’ he growled, turning back to the onrushing wall of dirt and rocks with his axe raised.

‘Are you insane?’ Maleneth shouted, her voice barely audible.

‘No more than you,’ Gotrek grunted, and began to charge back the way they had come.

Maleneth started to follow him instinctively before reason made her pause. Perhaps Gotrek was a demigod. Perhaps he could survive a collision with a falling cliff face. She had no such guarantees.

Foolish girl, snapped the hag. I said follow him!

‘You wish me to stand before Khaine so soon,’ Maleneth said bitterly. She was still clutching her wounded arm, her fingers soaked with blood.

I wish you to reach that spite-cursed pillar.

And finally Maleneth understood. He wasn’t running at the avalanche. He was trying to reach the base of one of the Eight Pillars before the oncoming tide.

She followed him. The crowd was less dense now. Ahead she could see the ponderous morass of earth and rock shattering and eating up the encampment. One of the pillars stood just ahead of it, a tower of defiance, scarred and chipped by the tools of greedy mortals. Maleneth raced for its base, quickly catching up with Gotrek. Heart thundering and tired limbs flushed, she reached the pillar’s shadow, then its Hysh-baked stone, slamming into its flank. Gotrek hit a moment later.

There was no time for words. The torrent of dirt engulfed them, slamming like the fist of a god into the other side of the pillar, thundering either side. The weight and momentum carried it round, but not all the way, leaving the aelf and the duardin standing in the clear wake created by the pillar’s bulk. Maleneth shielded her face behind her uninjured arm as grit and stones battered them, and for what felt like an age it appeared the shifting tide of soil would wrap the pillar entirely, dragging them into its crushing embrace to be churned and ground up with the remains of the encampment and all those souls too slow to get out.

But it didn’t. The avalanche had already expended a great deal of its force. It reached past the pillar on either side but didn’t travel much further before it finally began to settle. The stonework of the pillar itself had shifted slightly, but held.

‘Told you they don’t know how to use mining charges,’ Gotrek said.

Maleneth didn’t reply. A pain had gripped her, a burning sensation running through her torso. She hissed, and the next thing she knew she was on her knees, hand clutching her wound and both arms clenched to her sides. Gotrek was saying something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. Her hiss became a cry, and the pain surged to agony. It was as though a fire had been kindled inside her, the flames eating up her insides. She felt Gotrek’s hand on her shoulder.

‘The wound,’ she managed to snarl from between clenched teeth. ‘Someone… in the crowd… The wound is poisoned.’

Chapter Twelve

High Priest Shal’ek was roused from his matins prayers by one of the notaries. The main prayer room of the temple was quiet, only a cluster of candles around the hammer altar giving light to the yellowing walls and rough-hewn stone pews.

‘It is Zelja, your holiness,’ the youth said. Shal’ek opened one eye, and scowled. He could never remember which notary was which.

‘What is wrong with Zelja, boy?’ the gaunt-faced priest demanded.

‘There are travellers at the gate, your holiness. She sent me to inform you.’

Zelja, captain of the Temple Guard, knew well enough to turn away random pilgrims, especially when dawn was still only a glimmer over the distant dunes. Shal’ek assumed something more required his clarification, but that didn’t stop him from snapping at the anonymous messenger.

‘Captain Zelja does not need me to instruct her to follow her usual orders and tell them to begone. What does she want from me?’

Kneeling as he was towards the hammer altar, Shal’ek could not see the notary, but he didn’t need to in order to sense the boy squirming.

‘The captain… She reports that they may warrant your attention, your holiness. There are three of them, a human, a duardin and an aelf.’

Shal’ek’s other eye opened, and his expression changed to one of consternation.

‘The aelf and the duardin both seem to be injured,’ the notary continued. ‘The aelf is unconscious.’

‘And what of the third one?’ Shal’ek asked.

‘Zelja says he is a desert trader.’

Shal’ek grunted, and stood. He offered a brief genuflection towards the hammer altar, traced the lightning sigil with two fingers and turned to the boy, who stiffly averted his eyes.

‘Show me,’ Shal’ek said.

* * *

‘I’m going to count to ten,’ bellowed a voice from beyond the temple’s timber gateway. ‘Ong!’

Shal’ek approached the entrance, glaring, the notary scurrying at his heels.

‘Tuk! Dwe!’

‘A duardin?’ the high priest demanded of Captain Zelja. The veiled commander of the temple guard was standing next to the gate, her scimitar drawn. A dozen of her men occupied the open stone parapet above, lit by the braziers lining the wall top.

‘Fut!’

‘There is a human with him, and he seems to be supporting an aelf in the garb of the Murder Temples,’ Zelja added. ‘They say she is dying.’

‘Sak! Siz! Set!’

‘Is it her?’ Shal’ek demanded. ‘One of the Order’s wretches?’

The question went unanswered.

‘Odro! Nuk!’

‘Does Weiss know?’ Shal’ek asked, stepping towards the viewing slit set into the heavy doors.

‘I have not sent anyone to wake him,’ Zelja said.

‘Don!’

Shal’ek set his eye to the slit opening. All he caught was a blur of movement, followed by an almighty bellow and a crash that made him stumble backwards. He blinked. The edge of an axe, wickedly sharp, was gleaming an inch from his nose. Had the sound of it cleaving clean through the temple’s front doors not sent him staggering back, it would have carved his skull in half.

There was a grunt from beyond the gate, and the axe head disappeared.

‘H-he’s hacking through the gate,’ Shal’ek stammered.

‘Archers,’ Zelja commanded. There was a clatter above as the guards nocked arrows to their bows.

‘I wouldn’t do that, manlings,’ bellowed the voice from beyond the gate. There was another shuddering impact, and the axe head reappeared amidst a hail of splinters. ‘I’d far rather be cutting heads instead of timber right now. Give me an excuse.’

Zelja’s guards looked to her, and she looked to Shal’ek. The high priest tried to find an answer to the duardin’s threat, but his eyes were fixated on the axe as it reappeared for a third time, hacking through just above the gate’s locking bar. Another below – delivered with a strength and force that seemed wholly unnatural – would surely break the gates wide open.

‘The aelf with you,’ declared a voice beside Shal’ek, startling him. Weiss had appeared, clad only in a night shift, his podgy face pale from lack of sleep. ‘What is her name?’

The axe blows paused. There was a hint of a growled discussion from beyond the gate. The voice called back.

‘Some damned stupid aelf name. Witchblade.’

‘And you,’ called Weiss. ‘You must be Gotrek Gurnisson.’

‘Have I found the only manling in this cursed world with an ounce of sense?’ the voice demanded.

‘It seems like it,’ Weiss said, and then, speaking to Zelja, he ordered, ‘Open the gate, and be quick about it.’

‘Are you mad?’ Shal’ek hissed. ‘That duardin is clearly insane. He will slaughter all of us.’

‘The aelf is a valued member of the Order of the Azyr,’ Weiss said curtly. ‘And the duardin, Gotrek… He is something else altogether. Something beyond anything we can comprehend.’

Shal’ek’s protestations were stilled by the opening of the scarred gate. A duardin strode in without hesitating. Weiss was right – he was unlike one Shal’ek had ever seen before. His scarred, tattooed skin bore only a single rune, crafted in the baleful image of the duardin god, and his huge rune-etched axe was wreathed in fire. The glare from his one remaining eye burned white-hot.

Shal’ek had spent his life in observance towards the gods. He had never anticipated standing before one. He whimpered.

‘Well don’t just stand there,’ the duardin bellowed, making even Zelja cringe visibly. ‘I’ve known better welcomes in the corpse-castles of Sylvania! The damned aelf wouldn’t stop talking about you – the least you can do is help her!’

The duardin gestured behind him, at the two figures limping through the gate in his wake. One was a raggedy human, a desert pack driver by the cap he wore. The other, supported awkwardly by the boy, was a pallid aelf in purple silks and dark leather. She was unconscious, but as they crossed into the temple she convulsed against the boy’s grip and was sick. There was blood in the vomit.

‘You men,’ Weiss barked at a gaggle of Shal’ek’s priests, who had come from their sleeping dorms to stare. ‘Take the aelf to the infirmary. And someone go and awaken Draz.’

* * *

Arch-Chirurgeon Abul Draz was woken by the temple’s chief leecher. He came to with a gasp, grasping the man’s smock.

‘My apologies, sellah,’ the leecher, Blemes, murmured, gently extracting himself from Draz’s clutches. ‘It is the high priest. He requires our presence.’

‘What hour is it?’ Draz asked groggily, sitting up in his cot. Blemes had come bearing a candle, its flickering light picking out the bare stone of Draz’s sleeping cell. There was only the faintest hint of light from beyond the window shutters.

‘Just after matins,’ Blemes said. ‘We have visitors, and they come bearing injuries.’

Draz pulled off his nightcap and swung his legs out over the side of the cot. The cold stone floor was a shock to his feet. The chill of the night still permeated the temple’s ancient, cracked sandstone.

‘They are in the infirmary,’ Blemes went on, turning his back to allow Draz to dress. He did so, wondering as he pulled on his robes and rubbed sleep from his eyes just who could have arrived in the night and been permitted to enter. Since explorers had started digging around the Eight Pillars there had been more and more instances of people travelling up the high gorge to the temple, seeking aid and supplies. Shal’ek, High Priest of the Lightning, had ordered them all turned away. Only Weiss, the pale-faced representative of the Order of the Azyr attached to the temple’s priesthood, had the power to overrule Shal’ek’s judgements within the temple itself, and he rarely roused himself from his reports or the celestial auguries that cluttered his office.

‘Lead on,’ Draz told Blemes, tugging his robes straight and pulling on his work smock. He followed the leecher down the narrow, dusty corridor that connected his sleeping cell to the temple’s infirmary.

The room was as small and spartan as the rest of the house of worship. It bore a washing stand, five sick cots, a cabinet of Draz’s chirurgeon supplies – tinctures and vials, crushed herbs and poultice pots – and several jars of Blemes’ leeches. It occasionally played host to a travelling pilgrim, or one of the temple’s priests or notaries if they fell prey to the ague. It had certainly never serviced as unlikely looking a trio as those waiting for Draz.

He saw the duardin first. But for a single lion-headed pauldron, he was naked from the waist up, and covered in the marks of Hysh – blistered, peeling red skin, evidence of days spent in the Bone Desert. Draz recognised the red crest of the Fyreslayers, though he seemed to bear only a single fragment of ur-gold, a bright rune buried into his chest. The thickly muscled warrior turned, and Draz gasped as he saw his face. Half of it was wizened and deformed, as though it had aged centuries ahead of the rest of the duardin’s body. The Slayer’s single eye was stony, but flickered with forge-fire as it fell upon Draz.

‘Chirurgeon,’ said Weiss. The corpulent agent of the Order of the Azyr had been standing just inside the door when Draz entered, alongside High Priest Shal’ek. He was a small, pugnacious man, forever sweating and red-faced in the desert’s heat, his embroidered, puffed sleeves, white stockings and starched ruff a garish contrast to the rustic sackcloth worn by the priesthood. He looked as though he’d dressed in a hurry.

‘These pilgrims require your skills,’ Weiss said, making a half-hearted gesture towards the duardin, who remained silent. For a moment, Draz thought he meant the Slayer’s arm – it was crudely bound in strips of linen, stained and crusted with blood. Then he realised that the bed directly behind the duardin was occupied. A pale woman – an aelf – was laid out on it. A man was sitting on a stool on the opposite side, young and wide-eyed, wearing the dirt-encrusted brown half-cape and cap of a merchant’s teamster.

‘This aelf is a servant of the Order,’ Weiss elaborated, sensing Draz’s fear and confusion. ‘She has been poisoned. The high priest and I desire that you and Blemes do all in your power to save her.’

Shal’ek, standing tall and lugubrious next to Weiss, nodded once. His sallow expression spoke volumes about his distrust towards the new arrivals, but clearly Weiss was in no mood to brook any argument – it was rare indeed to see him roused from his office.

‘You’re a healer?’

It was the duardin who had spoken, his parched voice like cracked desert rocks grinding together. Draz managed to nod. He had never heard of any form of close kinship between aelves and duardin before, yet the Slayer was standing over the stricken aelf like a guard dog. Draz eyed the wicked-looking edges of the heavy war axe slung over his back, glinting in the candlelight.

The duardin glared at him for what felt like an age, then finally stepped out of the way. Draz and Blemes approached, Draz kneeling beside the stricken aelf.

She was pale, even for one of her kind, her lips an unhealthy shade of blue. She was clad in tight-fighting leathers, though most of her arms were bared. Another strip of linen had been wrapped roughly around one, and was crusted with blood and yellow fluids.

Draz reached into his smock and pulled out a thin blade. He sensed the duardin tense at the sight of the naked steel, and he froze, but when the Slayer didn’t say anything he reached down and gently slid the tool through the stiff cloth, cutting it free.

The wound beneath was crusted with more blood. Draz moved to the washing stand and wetted a strip of gauze. Blemes was at the cabinet, fishing through his jars for his leeches with a long prong. Draz returned to the aelf’s side and began cleaning the wound. The woman stirred slightly.

‘What is her name?’ he asked, without looking up from his work.

‘Maleneth,’ the duardin said after a pause, giving the aelf name a rough Duardin inflection.

‘And yours?’

‘I am Gotrek Gurnisson.’

‘You are a Fyreslayer?’

The words came easier to Draz as he focused on removing the dirt from the aelf’s wound. They always did when he started his work. He had been a healer at the Temple of the Lightning all his life. No matter the patient, he was always willing to help those admitted by the priesthood. It was his calling in life, and he offered thanks to the Lightning every night that he had been bestowed with such a clear and simple purpose.

The duardin, Gotrek, hesitated before responding to his last question.

‘I do not know if I am a Fyreslayer.’

‘That is a curious answer.’

‘This is a curious place, manling.’

Draz washed the blood from the gauze and knelt once more to expose the bared wound. It was long but shallow, running up the aelf’s forearm. The cut was precise, the work of a thin blade expertly delivered. It was not in itself fatal, but it was clear enough that something else was seeking to push Maleneth through Shyish’s door.

‘Can she be saved?’ Weiss asked from over his shoulder. ‘She is an… agent that the Order would very much like to keep alive.’

‘I will do all I can,’ Draz responded. He placed his blade upon the bedframe then withdrew two vials from his smock. Unstoppering the first, he pinched the aelf’s nose, poured the contents into her mouth and massaged her throat until she swallowed the dark contents. ‘I have given her an antidote known to combat most poisons, but I must still take a sample of her blood in case the poison should be rare and beyond its reach.’

He unstoppered the second vial, then once more picked up his blade and made a shallow incision in the aelf’s arm, a finger’s width from the main wound. He collected a few drops of blood from the small cut, then stoppered the vial and dabbed the incision clean.

He rose, grunting slightly at the stiffness that had worked itself into his joints on the cold floor, then turned to Blemes.

‘Will you apply clean dressings? I must see to this sample as swiftly as possible.’

‘The leeches too?’ Blemes asked. He already had one of the fat, black creatures curled around his prong.

‘Yes, I don’t see how that could do any harm. Apply them around the wound. They may be able to keep the worst of the poison at bay should the antidote falter.’

‘How long?’ Gotrek interrupted.

‘Excuse me?’

‘How long until you know whether the antidote has worked?’

‘It is impossible to say just now. I may have to return for further samples.’

‘I want you to move her,’ Gotrek said.

‘Move her?’

‘You must have better beds than these,’ the duardin growled, tapping one of the cot’s legs with his boot.

‘This is a simple monastery–’ Draz began to say, but Weiss interrupted him.

‘She can have my bed chamber.’

Draz frowned and nodded, wondering again just who the travellers were. He’d never heard of Weiss offering any sort of charitable concession in all the months he’d been assigned to the temple. And who was the third figure, the young desert trader? The youth had said nothing since Draz had entered, had hardly taken his eyes off the aelf. The intensity of his gaze was almost as unsettling as the barely restrained violence exuded by the scarred duardin.

Shal’ek summoned two of the older notaries to bear the aelf to Weiss’ chamber. Gotrek and the human accompanied them, as did Blemes, with his leech jars and bandages. Draz took another corridor, down a set of worn stone steps, vial in one hand and a candle in the other. He passed under an archway at the bottom and set the candle’s flame to a brazier on the wall. The rapidly strengthening firelight illuminated a vaulted room, buried into dry bedrock. Another archway beyond led into the temple’s crypts, where generations of priests were interred in tiered niches. The looming darkness of that entrance always made Draz shudder, and he never passed over into the crypts proper – his business was with the living, and those who could still be saved.

That same business took him to the long table that dominated the otherwise bare chamber lying between the steps and the bones of the temple’s priesthood. The objects on it were covered by a series of old cloths, but he carefully removed and rolled them up, each in turn, revealing an apparatus of beakers, candles, mortars and vials. He lit the candles, checked the metal framework holding various cups and glass tinctures together was properly set, and then seated himself at the bench running the length of the table.

He was tired, and he would have preferred to check his ingredients before assessing the sample. Time, however, was not on his side. He didn’t need his years of experience to know that the aelf did not have long to live.

He unstoppered the vial of blood and allowed a drop of its contents to trickle into a beaker at the start of the connecting apparatus, murmuring a well-worn prayer to the Hammer and the Lightning as he did so. He watched the blood closely as it trickled through into another vial that had been stuffed with a grey, powdery substance. Rather than stain red, the powder turned a deep purple. Draz grunted and administered another drop, this time to a different section of the apparatus, a metal spoon held over one of the thick candle stubs. As the single droplet hissed and sizzled, Draz plucked a pinch of crushed herbs from a pot beside the candle and sprinkled them onto the spoon. He wrinkled his nose at the stink the cloying herbs gave off as they burned, but didn’t take his eyes off the little wisps of black smoke that rose from the charred remains.

Still nothing.

He had one drop left, and then he would be forced to return to the aelf to take another sample. He didn’t think either of her companions would approve of that.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, then shifted along the bench to the far end of the table. There a tincture of clear liquid was clasped in a claw-shaped holder over another candle, the stub almost lost in the sea of melted wax spread across the table’s edge. He laid the side of his hand against the tincture to make sure it was at the correct temperature, then tipped the final drop of blood into the liquid within.

It turned pink. He wrinkled his nose, and was about to mutter something under his breath when the scrape of iron-shod boots on the stairway made him jump.

The whole table and its rickety construction shuddered at the suddenness of his movements. He froze. A figure was silhouetted against the light being thrown by the brazier, occupying the only route back up into the temple. The crest of hair and the brutal outline of the war axe made him unmistakable.

‘You should not be here,’ Draz stammered. ‘I am trying to work.’

‘Are you?’ Gotrek asked, stepping into the light. The fire made his golden-red crest and beard look as though they were aflame, flickering with a heat of their own.

‘Working at what?’ he demanded, stamping down past the bench. Draz edged away.

‘I am seeking to diagnose your companion’s current state.’

‘Her current state is that she’s dying,’ the duardin said bluntly, coming to a stop within arm’s reach of Draz. He’d made no aggressive motions since appearing in the crypt, but the look in his solitary, stony eye made the chirurgeon shiver.

‘She is,’ he agreed hesitantly. ‘But right now I do not know why.’

‘Poison,’ Gotrek barked. ‘Any wanaz can see that.’

‘Yes. She has been poisoned. But not from the wound she has sustained on her arm.’

The duardin’s expression grew fiercer still, and Draz hurried to explain.

‘None of the blood I took has shown any sign of poison. Whatever blade cut her arm, it does not seem to be responsible for her current state. It is certainly not in itself a fatal wound.’

The duardin stepped around Draz, looking into the darkness of the tombs beyond the entry chamber. For a moment he wondered whether he’d not heard him.

‘I’m wanted dead, that is nothing new,’ Gotrek said slowly, seemingly to himself. ‘Nothing can bring me the doom I seek. That is also nothing new. Those are about the only things in these damned realms that I recognise. But the rats, they’ve been trying even harder than usual. By the grudges of the Eight Peaks, none of you understand. The horned one won’t stop. And neither will I.’

The rambling comments made little sense to Draz. He shrugged, not wanting to rouse the addled duardin’s anger by questioning him.

‘Many wish harm upon the servants of the Order of the Azyr,’ he said instead.

‘The Order,’ Gotrek echoed, still not looking at Draz. ‘She spoke about them a lot. Wanted to come here even. I told her I wouldn’t be lured in by her damned aelven trickery. I assumed if I took her here someone would look after her. Take her off my hands. After the last one…’

He trailed into silence. Draz shifted uncomfortably, wondering if he could reach the steps back up to the temple before the duardin. Perhaps he was drunk? He’d never been this close to one before, but everyone had heard tales of their fondness for ale. He certainly couldn’t fathom any other means of enduring such horrific sunburn.

‘The boy too,’ Gotrek went on. ‘The longer they’re with me, the greater the danger. They don’t understand anything about what it means to seek your doom. To be cast aside by the gods and to get back up and spit in their faces. It’s just a game to them. Especially to the boy. He’s watching over her right now. I should go tonight, before they realise I’ve left. Then perhaps I can find something worthy of my axe in these maddening realms. Is there not one beast or daemon out there capable of granting me a final doom?’

‘W-who is the boy?’ Draz asked, wanting to shift the conversation onto something more mundane than the Slayer’s dark ramblings.

‘A cart driver,’ Gotrek said dismissively. ‘He was our guide. Typical manling though – he was more trouble than anything else. You people in this new realm of yours, you’re even less trustworthy than the ones I left behind. Treacherous, cowardly, or just too foolish.’

‘He was guiding you to the Eight Pillars?’

Gotrek said nothing for a while, then rounded abruptly on Draz, making him cringe back.

‘You said the wound didn’t poison her?’

‘No, she hasn’t been poisoned by the cut to her arm,’ Draz reiterated. ‘I will need to take further samples, but I suspect it’s the work of ingestion. I… I believe she has consumed the poison, probably in her last meal.’

‘Her last meal,’ Gotrek echoed, his gaze igniting. He cursed. ‘It was never the rats.’

Draz said nothing, staring in fear at the duardin. For a moment, silence reigned in the crypt. Then, with a sudden burst of motion that made the chirurgeon yelp, Gotrek ran for the stairs.

Chapter Thirteen

Maleneth’s insides felt as though they were being gnawed and chewed at by a thousand hungry vermin. It was the pain that dragged her back to consciousness, making her groan and grip the bed sheets.

Bed sheets. She was in bed, in a spartan room of yellow sandstone. A clay pitcher sat on a stone table beside the bed. It seemed to still be night – the room’s shutters were closed and an oil lamp bracketed to the wall beside the door offered the only illumination.

She wasn’t alone. Aziz was in the room too, standing over her. He seemed to go still when Maleneth looked up at him.

‘The Runetamer told me to keep watch,’ the teamster said, reaching for the pitcher. ‘You must drink, sellah. The poison will dehydrate you.’

‘You came back,’ Maleneth croaked. Her throat was parched, and she flinched as fresh pain surged through her guts. She clutched her stomach with both hands and groaned.

‘When I saw the rock coming down I ran,’ Aziz admitted. ‘I found the duardin carrying you when it settled. After everything, I decided I could not leave you both.’

‘This is the Temple of the Lightning,’ she managed to say.

‘This is the temple,’ Aziz agreed, holding out the water pitcher. ‘The priesthood opened their doors to us when Gotrek showed them the token you carry. The token of the Order of the Azyr.’

Maleneth paused.

‘I have never shown Gotrek the token,’ Maleneth said slowly. Aziz didn’t reply. Instead, he smashed the pitcher he had been proffering over her head. The clay shattered and water drenched the aelf as she was smacked down into the pillow. Her vision swam, and she gasped at the fresh, sudden pain that burst across her nose and the right side of her face.

A part of her mind, an aelven instinct further honed by decades of service to the Temple of Khaine, told her to move. She couldn’t though. Everything else was pain and blinding starbursts of light. She managed to half raise one arm, slurring a curse, the subconscious part of her that was still capable of thought shrieking at her.

It had been Aziz. It had all been Aziz.

She passed out.

Consciousness was pain.

She lived.

Be still, child.

She obeyed her former mistress’ command, even as she flinched away from the dagger she expected to feel digging into her breast. With agonised slowness, her vision returned. She blinked, reached up to wipe blood from her eyes. She couldn’t. Her wrists had been bound to the bedposts.

She could taste blood. Aziz was standing at the foot of the bed, his boyish grin wicked in the candlelight. The sheets covering her were drenched crimson. She realised that almost none of it was hers.

A body was slumped against the side of the bed, the stone floor beneath it soaked. Maleneth recognised the simple habit of one of the temple’s notaries. Judging by the blood covering Aziz’s arms, he’d been the one who had murdered the boy and then carved his chest open. A heart, glistening and raw, lay in the bed beside her.

The sight of it made her shudder uncontrollably. Realisation rushed over her, turning her thoughts cold. It wasn’t the skaven behind the assassination attempts. And they weren’t directed at Gotrek either. They’d been coming for her.

There were many who wanted her dead, but none with the resources or the sadistic flare she’d witnessed since setting out for the Eight Pillars.

‘Jakari,’ she said, her voice thick with the blood clogging her broken nose.

‘Correct,’ Aziz said, offering a short bow.

‘You were working for her from the beginning.’

‘I was,’ Aziz admitted. ‘She hired me in Kalzuf. All of us, in fact, though the others proved to be… less than capable. The dragging sands, the poison combined with the avalanche, that was all my work. And here, the finale.’

‘I should have realised she was behind it all at Khaled-Tush,’ Maleneth murmured. ‘Damn the duardin and his obsession with the rats.’

‘The Seventeen Blades,’ Aziz said. ‘The dance that means so much to both of you. She felt it was a little too obvious but equally irresistible. Personally speaking, the Alharabi always charge too much. Their methods are so dramatic as well. It is far easier to just lose someone in the dragging sands.’

‘You realigned the posts marking out the path,’ Maleneth said, rage causing her to strain at her bonds. ‘You intended to run all along. You had a horse tied at that trough, waiting for you.’

‘It’s true, I didn’t expect to see you both together again at Khaled-Tush,’ Aziz admitted with a shrug. ‘I thought you’d abandon the duardin. You should’ve done. You hate him.’

‘He is too dangerous to leave to his own devices,’ Maleneth said, giving up on pulling at the ropes binding her wrists. ‘But it wouldn’t have made any difference even if I had, would it? It was never about Gotrek.’

Aziz shrugged again. ‘He has enough bounties on his head already. You know Jakari has no interest in runes or fables of demigods.’

‘She’s here as well, isn’t she? That is who I saw on the dunes, and then again from the skyship.’

‘She cares for you a great deal,’ Aziz said, his tone mocking. ‘So much so that she was willing to double my price for the delivery of this final message, before I kill you and take your heart to her.’

‘She is too much of a coward to face me on her own,’ Maleneth snarled, spitting blood.

‘Too wise to try to infiltrate an Azyr outpost when she could use an unassuming pack driver like me instead.’

‘You brought down the skyship as well, didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t have those oafs compromising my client’s wishes,’ Aziz admitted. ‘Duardin are so predictable. Their greed blinds them.’

‘And this?’ Maleneth snapped, nodding towards her arm, injured by the knife cut at the Eight Pillars.

‘Oh, that was her. I don’t think she could resist a little slice of her own.’

‘All those people at Khaled-Tush, dead because of her obsession,’ Maleneth hissed, her voice cracking with hatred. ‘This time she’s gone too far. Tell me where she is, right now, and I will kill you quickly. Refuse and I will give you to the mad duardin. You and she will both die, if only to stop others being caught up in the web of her bitterness.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Aziz smirked. ‘Unless you intend to slay us from the afterlife. And you can stop trying to loosen your bonds, murder-witch. I know how to tie a knot.’

Maleneth froze, watching Aziz as he moved to her side and drew a long, thin dagger from where it had been concealed against his hip.

‘I know when someone is just stalling for time as well,’ he hissed. ‘I expected more from a child of the temples, Witchblade.’

The sound of running feet reached Maleneth just before the blade fell. There was a crash, and she twisted her body desperately in the blood-drenched sheets as the door to the room blasted in. The knife thumped home, but not where Aziz had intended – her movement had caused it to punch into her side instead, making her grunt with pain.

The assassin didn’t have time for a second blow. Rune blazing and axe ignited, Gotrek Gurnisson came thundering through the splintered doorway.

‘Thaggaz!’ the Slayer roared, leaping the bed as he went straight for Aziz. The young killer didn’t consider meeting the duardin head-on. He turned and ran for the window, scrabbling wildly with the locked shutters.

‘I shouldn’t sully this axe with the blood of such a coward,’ Gotrek snarled. ‘You have as much courage as the ratmen, traitor. Now you’ll die like one.’

He swung.

Aziz yelped like a snared rabbit, the horrible noise cut short by a gristly crunch. The fyrestorm greataxe cleaved him from shoulder to groin, his blood gouting across the shutters. The two halves fell like sheared meat, the gore almost dousing the greataxe’s fiery core. Gotrek looked down at the grim remains for a few seconds, panting, anger still flushing his body. Then, without turning to Maleneth, he spoke.

‘Never trust anyone who can’t grow a beard.’

He turned to the bound aelf.

‘That goes for you too, murderling.’

‘If you count the Kharadrons, I think most of the things trying to kill us over the past few days have had beards,’ Maleneth responded, eyes narrowed.

The Slayer glared around the room, his one eye ablaze, as though seeking out new enemies invisible to Maleneth.

‘You worked it out then,’ she said, looking with distaste at Aziz’s remains, then flinching as her guts twisted, only this time it wasn’t down to the poison. ‘It wasn’t the vermin after all.’

‘For once,’ Gotrek muttered.

‘He was sent by a shadow of my past,’ Maleneth went on, the feeling of being broiled alive beginning to lose its intensity. ‘They all were. She won’t stop until I’m dead.’

‘I know the feeling, aelf.’

The Slayer appeared to accept that there was no one else in the room. The fires that seemed to pulse from the Master Rune and gleam in his bristling red-gold hair had dimmed. He stepped over to the bedside, grasped the cords binding Maleneth’s wrists and snapped them.

‘You brought me to the temple in the end,’ she said, rubbing her wrists.

‘Well I thought it was the only way to make you stop talking about this place and your damned Order. It was that or strangle you in your sleep, and there were enough skaz trying to do that already.’

‘You relinquished the inscription about the Axe of Grimnir,’ Maleneth said, brushing aside the duardin’s gruff attempt at humour. ‘You could have joined the party exploring the pillars. You chose to carry me here instead.’

‘If I’d known you would keep babbling like this I’d have left you in the desert.’

‘Thank you, Gotrek.’

The duardin grumbled something in his rough language, then sat heavily on the end of the bed, his doused axe laid across his lap.

‘I need someone to explain this mad world to me,’ he said quietly, almost to himself. He turned to look out of the window as the new day bled colour back into the dunes. ‘If I’d known he had sent me here, I’d have spat in Grimnir’s face.’

For a moment, the age that had once disfigured the side of the duardin’s face seemed to return, and Maleneth found herself looking at an old greybeard, his scarred flesh wizened, hunched over and alone as he stared out upon a strange reality that had been thrust upon him against his will. The illusion was gone in an instant, but the revelation it brought stayed with Maleneth. When Gotrek’s greataxe ignited and he threw himself into the fight with the Master Rune blazing, it was easy to lend credence to stories of the Slayer’s immortality. Seeing him now though, so isolated, so worn by all he had seen and all he had done, Maleneth found herself more convinced that he was no ordinary duardin than when she saw him roused to wrath. In all her time travelling the Mortal Realms, she had never known anyone or anything like him.

‘You don’t have to stay with me,’ she said. He turned back to look at her, the aged side of his face lost in shadow. ‘He was the last,’ Maleneth elaborated, indicating Aziz. ‘The last one sent to kill me. It’s over, for now.’

‘It’s never over,’ Gotrek said darkly.

They were silent, before Maleneth spoke again.

‘The Axe of Grimnir then. You said there was another way to reach the inscription in the temple.’

‘You are in no fit state to travel, even though your incessant prattling seems to imply that the antidote is working,’ Gotrek said.

‘Grant me until the morning, Slayer. You will need me if you’re to convince the Order to let you leave.’

Gotrek scoffed. ‘I wish they would try and stop me.’

‘I’m sure the likes of Weiss would try. Besides, I’m not staying either. Jakari is still out there. Waiting.’

‘You elgi,’ Gotrek said, standing. ‘If this is how you are with those you love, I cannot imagine how you treat your enemies.’

‘You cannot even begin to imagine, Gotrek Gurnisson,’ Maleneth said. The duardin let out something approximating a laugh. The crushing weight that Maleneth had seen, the one that she so rarely caught glimpses of when the Slayer’s darkest memories beset him, had gone. Gotrek slung his axe over his shoulder, blood still running from its blade.

‘I’ll go tell the manling priests they’ve got some bodies to clear up. If you’re not ready to move by the time the sun’s up, aelf, I’m going without you.’

‘If you so much as dare, I swear my fyresteel will spell your doom, duardin,’ Maleneth said. A smile ghosted across her lips as the Slayer stomped out. Then she slumped back in the bloody bed, and finally let her eyes fall shut.

About the Author

Robbie MacNiven is a Highlands-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Blood of Iax, The Last Hunt, Carcharodons: Red Tithe, Carcharodons: Outer Dark and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.

Content

Gotrek Gurnisson
The Bone Desert
(Robbie MacNiven)

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About the Author