Ghoulslayer

Chapter Six Morbium

‘Ditch maid!’ roared Gotrek.

Maleneth was in darkness, but the Slayer’s bludgeoning tones could only mean one thing – she was still alive. She had mixed emotions about this.

‘It’s Witchblade,’ she muttered, struggling to sit up. She was tightly bound and her arms were numb from blood loss. She cursed herself for not killing the priestess.

‘Aye,’ replied Gotrek, sounding infuriatingly cheerful. ‘Ditch maid. Get off your arse. Look at this.’

Someone moved towards her, and there was a grind of shifting stones. As her face was uncovered, she saw the heavens whirling overhead. The strange black stars had vanished, replaced by the usual glittering constellations, but they were hazy and faint, as though seen through a gauze.

Maleneth’s neck was stiff with cold, but she managed to turn and see who had uncovered her. It was Trachos, starlight shimmering over his battered mask.

‘The priestess was telling the truth,’ he said.

‘This is Morbium,’ said the priestess. Maleneth could not see her, but she recognised her taut, furious voice, coming from somewhere up ahead in the darkness. ‘Soul prominent. Last bastion of the Gravesward and the royal demesne of Prince Volant, nineteenth heir to the Sable Throne and Morn-Prince of the Lingering Keep.’

Trachos moved more stone off Maleneth, and she managed to stand, slapping her legs and arms, summoning blood back into her limbs. The stone was the remnants of the shrine. Its thorny limbs were in pieces and the corpse cages shattered, leaving the bodies to spill onto the ground, where they now lay motionless.

She looked around. They were on a ruined quay, but it was a quay that hung out over the strangest sea Maleneth had ever seen. Its towering waves were all motionless, as though they had been hammered from iron. She stared at the bizarre view for a moment, wondering if the water was frozen, but while the air was chilly, she was sure it was not cold enough to freeze an entire ocean. The waves just seemed to be paused in a moment, like a sea that had been made for a stage set.

Piers jutted out across the lifeless tides, constructed from the same fractured bones as everything else. The scale of the place was shocking. Maleneth had seen nothing so grand since leaving Hammerhal. Behind her, the quay joined an iron road, or a bridge of some kind, that led out across the sea, trailing off into the shadows.

‘I haven’t seen craftsmanship like this since the Hearth Halls of Karaz-a-Karak,’ muttered Gotrek, staring out at the grand, crumbling piers. He almost sounded impressed. ‘Who built this?’ he asked, his breath coiling around him in the cold air.

The priestess was still picking her way from the ruined shrine and dusting her robes down, too dazed to realise she was being addressed. Maleneth noticed that she was mouthing words as she moved – numbers, by the look of it, as though she were counting something.

Gotrek repeated his question in even more bombastic tones, and the priestess looked up. ‘The Morn-Prince,’ she said. ‘The first Morn-Prince, at the dawn of the Amethyst Princedoms.’

Gotrek stooped and picked up a piece of mangled metalwork. Even broken it was beautiful – intricately scored bone inlaid with strips of silver that depicted skulls and insect wings. ‘Not bad for a bunch of ghost-botherers.’

‘We do not “bother” our dead.’ The priestess looked at her scythe, still tucked into Gotrek’s belt, her eyes smouldering. Her face was flushed with anger, and Maleneth could see that she was struggling not to attack Gotrek. ‘We watch over them just as they watch over us. We revere our ancestors.’

Maleneth nodded at the corpses slumped in the shrine’s broken cages. ‘Did you revere them?’

The woman sneered. ‘They were mordants. I wiped their minds and turned them on their own kind. There are not worthy of anything more.’

‘You’re a witch?’ Gotrek looked as though he had tasted something unpleasant.

‘I am Lhosia, High Priestess of the Cerement. Spiritual adviser to the Morn-Prince.’ She nodded towards the scythe at her belt. ‘What power I have is tied to the ancestors.’

‘Sounds like ghost-bothering to me,’ grunted Gotrek, picking rubble from his mohawk.

Maleneth had climbed from the ruined shrine, and she stepped out towards Gotrek and Lhosia. ‘This Morn-Prince you serve. We were told he could lead Gotrek to Nagash.’

The priestess frowned. ‘Why would you seek the necromancer? Most people would do anything to avoid him.’

At the mention of Nagash, Gotrek’s expression had soured. ‘The gods owe me a doom. I don’t care if it’s the bone-head or the thunder-dunce – someone’s going to give me what I was promised.’ He waved his axe, causing its brazier to flicker. ‘Either way, this thing will end up embedded in a god.’

Lhosia laughed in disbelief. ‘You’re at war with the gods?’

‘We all are, lass. I’m just taking the fight to them.’

‘The necromancer promised you something?’ Lhosia glanced at Maleneth with a baffled expression.

Maleneth shrugged.

Gotrek’s beard bristled. He stomped across the ruined metal, muttering in an archaic duardin tongue. ‘I don’t know who promised me what anymore,’ he snapped, ‘but I know I was robbed of my doom. Nagash knows what I’m owed. He’ll remember me.’

There was a note of desperation in the Slayer’s voice. Maleneth had the impression that Gotrek was propelled by fury more than facts. How much could he really remember? Was he seeking Nagash for revenge or because he didn’t know what else to do? Did he just want to find someone who might know who he was? Since the moment she had met him, Maleneth had sensed that Gotrek was unsure why he was still alive. He was like a hound that had been kicked, bloodied and readied for the hunt, then thrown into a cage.

As Gotrek stormed around the ruins, swinging his axe and cursing, the rune in his chest started to glow.

‘Can you get us to this prince of yours?’ he demanded.

‘I can,’ said Lhosia. ‘I have to reach him. He sent me to check that the borders of the princedom were sound, and they’re in tatters. And if the mordants have breached the Iron Shroud, they could be anywhere.’

‘What is this place?’ asked Trachos. As usual, he seemed two steps removed from the conversation, consumed by whatever strange thoughts rattled around his helmet. He unclasped one of his devices from his armour and pointed its notched ellipses at the architecture. ‘Why did you bring us here in particular?’ He looked around at the empty streets and toppled buildings.

‘It’s my home,’ Lhosia said. ‘It was the easiest place for me to conjure from memory. Besides, before I do anything else I have to warn my family. The Iron Shroud is breached. Morbium has been revealed. I have to make sure our Unburied are safe.’

‘It’s a port,’ said Gotrek.

She nodded. ‘Some of your duardin kin used to pilot aether-ships here, before the fall of the princedoms. They called themselves Kharadron. They used to ship ore here. My ancestors fused it with bone to construct our temples.’

‘There were dwarfs here?’ Gotrek frowned, looking around the ruins with a suspicious expression.

Maleneth laughed. ‘He’s quite the celebrity amongst his own kind.’ She lowered her voice to a mock whisper. ‘They think he’s a god. Oh, the irony…’

Lhosia stared at Gotrek’s scarred, filthy muscles, looking even more baffled. ‘A god? Why would they think that?’

Maleneth rolled her eyes. ‘Because he crawled out of a hole and claimed it was the Realm of Chaos.’

‘Slayers do not lie,’ said Gotrek. ‘The gods promised me a doom in the Realm of Chaos. Then the faithless bastards forgot about me. Now I’m here.’ He peered into the ruins. ‘Do dwarfs… I mean, do duardin still come here?’

Lhosia shook her head. ‘No one comes here. When the other princedoms fell we built the Iron Shroud. Through the wisdom of the Unburied we hid ourselves from the necromancer and even from the Dark Gods. But without the Kharadron we lost contact with the other realms. We are alone.’ She glanced at the corpses next to the shrine. ‘Or, we were.’

‘How can we reach your prince?’ asked Maleneth.

Lhosia nodded to a building that looked more intact than the others. It resembled the bleached bowl of a skull, gleaming and chipped. ‘My family is stationed here, guarding the ruins. They will have already seen that I’m here. It is only a small temple, but we have many Unburied loaning us their sight.’ She waved for the others to follow as she began picking her way through the rubble towards the building.

‘Unburied?’ asked Maleneth. It was a strange word, and every time Lhosia spoke it there was reverence in her voice.

‘The ancestors,’ said Lhosia, glaring at her. ‘The reason we are here. We exist to ensure their future. Our world is an antechamber to theirs – the world that is to come, where we shall join our forebears.’

Gotrek glanced up at that, seeming intrigued. He was about to speak when Lhosia faltered and came to a halt, squinting through the gloom at the building at the end of the pier.

Maleneth gripped her knives. ‘What?’

‘No light.’ Lhosia’s voice sounded odd. She nodded to the curved bone-white walls of the temple. The building was swathed in shadow and looked abandoned. She staggered on, looking dazed and troubled.