One, Untended

Master,

The artefact is within my grasp, but there have been complications and I am unable to report to you as requested. I can only hope that this note will be recovered by another of your agents and returned to you in my stead. I am still within the bounds of the Twin-Tailed City and appear likely to remain so for some time. I just need more time.

I will not fail you.

Still and eternally the faithful servant of Azyr,

Maleneth Witchblade

‘Get back, aelfling,’ Gotrek scowled. ‘This is not something that your pretty little eyes need to see.’

Maleneth rolled her ‘pretty little’ eyes as Gotrek bent over the open sewer that ran along the back yard of the Missed Striking, one hand on the ivy-scrawled corner of a brick wall. She watched with a casual anatomist’s fascination as the immense muscle groups that corded his back rippled and flexed. The duardin turned to look over the single plate of black armour fixed across his left shoulder.

His one good eye was virulently bloodshot, his preternaturally aged skin slacker and more haggard even than usual. His huge blade of gold-struck orange hair drooped over the armour’s leonine features, sodden with stale beer where he had slept with his head against a trestle table. ‘I told you–’ His throat suddenly clenched. His face blanched. Red light from the street lamps slithered across it. ‘Grungni’s beard.’

Then he was violently, messily sick into the sewer.

Maleneth patted the thickly creased skin at the back of his head.

‘There, there.’

‘I hate you, aelfling,’ Gotrek said between ructions. ‘I hate you and all your darkling kin.’

‘I know.’

After a few minutes the duardin’s heaves subsided, and he spat the last chunks of a green sausage and ghyrvole egg supper into the ditch.

‘This has never happened to me before.’

‘I am sure that you say that to all of the girls.’

Gotrek glared at her.

‘A joke,’ she said.

‘I think there was something nasty in my beer,’ Gotrek complained.

Maleneth nodded sympathetically. There had indeed been something nasty in the Slayer’s beer. Several somethings. Duardin were notoriously resistant to poisoning, but the amount of gravelock, heartcease and scarlet clover that Gotrek Gurnisson had obligingly consumed over the last day and a half would have killed a gargant. He should have been curled up on the weed-filled yard bleeding out of every orifice rather than complaining of an upset stomach.

Maleneth looked up at the night sky, trying to judge the time.

The moons were swathed in autumnal colours. Even the realm’s cohort of satellites responded to the life song of the Everqueen, and on a clear night Maleneth could see foliage stirring in another world’s winds. This was not such a night. Scraps of dark cloud raced across their faces. A thin mist shrouded the creaking wooden tenement runs and lean-tos of the Stranglevines, and even Maleneth’s inhumanly chill breath fogged the air in front of her face. It was past midnight.

She sighed as the Slayer began to dry retch over the ditch. He should have been dead three times over already. But even in his current condition she was not sure that she wanted to risk hurrying things along. She had fought the duardin twice before, and on both occasions had barely escaped with her life. And that had been before he had acquired the fyreslayers’ master rune, multiplying his already formidable strength severalfold. The rune smouldered quiescently from the scarred, fire-ruined meat of his chest. Occasionally, when the Slayer had drunk enough to pass out and sleep, it also whispered, though not in any language that Maleneth had ever heard. No. She belonged to a fantastically long-lived race. Barring a knife in the back she could afford a little patience.

‘Come on, Gotrek,’ she said. ‘I think you left a beer untended in there.’

‘Give me a moment here, damn you.’

Before she could try to cajole the duardin any further, the tavern’s back door opened. Another posse of drunks stumbled through the rectangle of wobbly warmth and light and into the moonlit yard. They appeared to be armed, in some distress and without exception, drunk. Not an agreeable combination in Maleneth’s experience, even in the most salubrious of establishments. And even in the Stranglevines of Hammerhal Ghyra, establishments did not come more insalubrious than the Missed Striking. Gotrek had found his way through its doors the way a blind woman found her own bed.

Eager to avoid any trouble with the local ruffians, Maleneth nodded across the yard to them, as though standing over a retching duardin in the dead of night was the most natural activity in Ghyran. To her relief they ignored her utterly, too intent on their own whispered arguments to mark even Gotrek’s outlandish appearance.

A young woman in a nightdress and a thin shawl ran barefoot into the yard after the gang of armed drunks. Tears streamed down her reddened cheeks as she screamed something about a ‘Tambrin’. It was her distress, rather than her peasant prettiness and state of undress, that made Maleneth forgo her earlier misgivings about attracting attention and turn to watch. She had come a long way from the girl who would murder the row’s cats and kidnap the neighbours’ children, but she still found other people’s pain arresting. A burly man in a sweat-stained linen vest tried to put a coat over her. His head looked like an executioner’s block, all nicks and bloodstains with strange chunks missing. The woman beat her fists against his chest until he gave up. The other drunks, clearly as embarrassed by the display as Maleneth was enthralled, fussed over strappings and buckles.

There were two of them, both human, both what Maleneth would call old despite being at least a century her junior.

One was clad in leaves of delicate, lightly scuffed mail that appeared to have more of a decorative function than offering any real protection. A laurel of dried leaves and flowers sat nestled on a coarse stubble of grey hair. He carried a long-handled hammer. The next step in the cultural surrender of Ghyran, Maleneth thought. Azyrite might was irresistible, in all its forms. The old faiths had adapted to and appropriated from the doctrines of Azyr to remain relevant to the new order, or else had simply been assimilated wholesale into the Sigmarite faith. The warrior-priest of Alarielle was an extreme example.

Maleneth felt herself uniquely qualified to judge – a shadowblade of Khaine, now an agent of the Order of Azyr. Or at least she had been. Her failure to return to the Order with the master rune would have done little to ease her superior’s understandable distrust.

The second figure was more difficult to make out in detail. She kept to the darkest parts of the yard, as if out of habit. Her hood was drawn tight against the cold, not a single strand of hair falling free. Her cloak was made from woven leaves, and real ones, not the steel likenesses worn by the warrior-priest. They changed colour with the light, turning from black to autumnal red with the streaking of the clouds across the moons. Despite that exotic quality the garment was well worn, stained by sweat, soil and beer, and had probably never been anything but functional to begin with. The only thing to distinguish the woman from another common footpad or down-on-her-luck highwayman was a string of campaign badges on her collar. They marked her as ex-Freeguild. Perhaps even one of the Living City Rangers, judging by the raiment, well known throughout Ghyran as the best scouts and trackers in the Mortal Realms. Maleneth recognised some of the battles. The most recent had been fought about fifteen years ago.

‘What’s going on over there?’ said Gotrek.

‘Nothing.’

‘Really? Because it sounds as if someone’s mislaid a child.’

‘As I said,’ said Maleneth. ‘Nothing.’ But the Slayer was already stomping towards the armed gathering. Maleneth swore. Talk about something that he actually wanted to hear and Gotrek’s ears were as keen as any darkling aelf’s.

‘You were supposed to be watching them while I visited the night market, Junas,’ the distraught woman yelled as Gotrek walked over.

‘It was a rough-looking crowd tonight, Madga,’ said the big man, Junas, defensively. ‘Helmlan wanted more help on the door. What was I supposed to say?’

‘Speaking of rough-looking crowds,’ muttered the warrior-priest, his eyes widening at the sight of Gotrek’s sagging crest. He shuffled smartly out of the Slayer’s way.

‘I hear that someone has lost a child,’ said Gotrek, in a tired voice that sounded like a slab of granite dropped into a conversation.

‘What’s it to you?’ said Junas. ‘I don’t know who you are.’

Madga slapped him. Maleneth saw the brawler’s biceps tense. Her hand strayed to her knife belt, but whatever anger he was containing he found room for a little more.

‘I know you,’ said the ex-Freeguilder, slowly. ‘You’re the fyreslayer that slept the night on Helmlan’s table.’

A glitter of malice in Gotrek’s one eye made the old veteran step back.

‘I am no fyreslayer, woman.’

‘My mistake, master duardin.’ The ranger bowed.

‘Aye. It was.’

‘My name is Madga,’ said the young woman, wiping the tears from her face on the sleeve of her nightdress as though to make herself presentable for the permanently dishevelled Slayer. ‘This is my husband, Junas.’ The tavern brawler crossed his arms over his chest. Maleneth recognised a display of threatened masculinity when she saw one. All bulging neck muscles and scowls. Like a feral alley starwyrm. ‘The priest is Alanaer.’ The older man painstakingly put together a drunken bow, leafmail twinkling under the light of the moons. ‘The Freeguild ranger is called Halik.’ The woman so named nodded curtly. ‘Anyone who drinks often enough in the Missed Striking to be on first-name terms with my husband isn’t the sort I’d want to trust my family to, but anyone who’d drop it all in the dead of night to go looking for a boy can’t be all bad, can they?’

Maleneth did not think that the girl had intended it as a question, but the hopeful inflection she gave it made it sound like one. The priest, Alanaer, smiled faintly, as if remembering the last time he had been spoken of so highly.

‘Do you have children?’ Madga asked.

Gotrek scoffed. ‘Take another look, girl. If this one ever got her claws on a child, she would probably skin it alive. And eat it.’

Maleneth nodded.

The young woman blanched. ‘I… I actually meant you, master duardin.’

Gotrek grimaced, as though pained by an old tooth. He grumbled something in his own archaic form of the Dispossessed tongue, his breath misting the midnight air. He stamped his boots on the cobblestones, taking small but obvious comfort in crushing the small flowers that sprouted between them.

‘It is quite the collection of arms you carry for a missing child,’ said Maleneth.

‘Someone saw the boy heading towards one of the catacomb entrances,’ said Halik.

Gotrek raised an eyebrow, and turned to Junas. He shook his head slowly. ‘You live a stone’s throw from the entrance to such a place and you would leave your child untended?’

The big man coloured. ‘The entrances are all locked,’ he protested. ‘And patrolled by the watch.’

‘It was the ghost of Hanberra!’ Madga wailed. ‘He’s taken my Tambrin.’

Some of the gloom lifted from Gotrek’s complexion.

Trust the Slayer to be revived by talk of spirits and monsters, Maleneth thought. ‘Ghost?’ she asked, casting a furtive look over her shoulder.

There was not much in this world that she truly feared. It was coldness, she often supposed, rather than genuine courage. But as a devotee of the God of Murder, the undead stirred a peculiar revulsion in her which, on a night as dark as this one, might have been mistaken for fear.

Alanaer shook his head. ‘A folk myth, pedalled by some of the Sigmarites.’

‘It’s true though,’ Junas murmured. He touched the small hammer he wore around his neck. ‘Hanberra was a hero of the old city. The one that stood here before Hammerhal. Before the War Storm. He fell defending it from Chaos. Sigmar tried to take him, for his Stormhosts, but he refused, because there were still folk in the city he could save.’

‘His children,’ cried Madga. ‘He defied the lightning to go back for his children. And he looks for them still.’

‘It’s just an old tale,’ said Alanaer. ‘One the Azyrheimers have latched on to, to warn about what happens to those who turn their backs on Sigmar.’

Halik, Maleneth noticed, looked unconvinced, but she nodded. ‘True or not, Tambrin was seen alone. Heading towards the Downs.’

Madga started to sob.

‘I’m going to bring him back, Madga,’ said Junas.

Halik and Alanaer both grunted their agreement.

‘Please, master duardin,’ Madga sniffed. ‘Will you help? Please?’

Gotrek scowled, but nodded. ‘Aye. I’ll help find your boy.’

Maleneth sighed.

With any luck, a little light exertion would be just what the various poisons in the duardin’s body needed to do their work. And failing that, there was every chance that the monsters of the catacombs or the ghost of Hanberra could do what she had been unable to.

Kill Gotrek Gurnisson.

The stairs into the catacombs went down forever. It seemed that way to Maleneth, at least, after a second hour had elapsed with no end in sight.

Maleneth wondered if Madga was still up there, waiting. Probably. For a moment it had looked as though the peasant woman would come with them, and it had only been a word from Alanaer that had dissuaded her.

At least there was little chance of her being discovered and moved on by the watch. Their patrols were laughably infrequent, and could almost have been designed to give the entrances to the catacombs as wide a berth as possible. Maleneth had not harboured any elevated expectations of the local law enforcement and so had not been disappointed.

Maleneth tried to recall the pretty, tear-soaked face that had watched them disappear into the old sewers beneath the Stranglevines Downs, but could not seem to call it back to memory. She sighed. She could have used some cheering up.

Even this deep under the earth of the city, the brickwork was florid with life. Weeds and scruffy flowers matted the steps. Tuberous roots broke through the walls and ceiling, forcing everyone except Gotrek to walk with a crouch lest they strike their heads. More than once a particular brute of an obstacle funnelled the adventurers down to single file to slither over the crumbling, weed-carpeted steps on their bellies. Maleneth appreciated those interludes even if Junas, Halik, Alanaer and Gotrek manifestly did not. They were a chance for her to sit down and rub her aching thighs while the others caught up, struggling and cursing behind her.

What sustenance do these plants draw from this grey place? Maleneth wondered. Where do they turn in lieu of sunlight? In Azyrheim, too, the days were often dark. The city had no sun, but bathed in the light of Sigendil, the High Star, at the very heart of the cosmos, it shared in the brilliance of a trillion stars. Perhaps it was the song of the Everqueen alone that bade them grow.

She could see in near-perfect darkness. Her senses of hearing and intuition were so acute that she could fare reasonably well even without vision. But even she was starting to miss the cheap, imported illumination of the Stranglevines’ street lamps.

The ranger, Halik, bore a torch, but she had not lit it.

There had been no need.

The only light that had followed them into this forgotten corner of Alarielle’s realm was that of Gotrek’s axe. Zangrom-thaz, it was called, in the language of the unbaki fyreslayers who had crafted it. The forgeflames bound up in the huge fyrestorm greataxe licked at his flesh and at the hairs of his beard without finding a purchase on either. Another effect of the fyreslayers’ ur-gold on his body, Maleneth thought. She could feel the axe’s heat perfectly. Sweat beaded her forehead. The palms of her hands were damp, to the extent that she almost feared she would be unable to draw a weapon should the need arise. The tangling vegetation shrivelled back from him, much to the Slayer’s childish glee.

The weight of rock above Maleneth’s head seemed to close in. It dawned on Maleneth that it was this, rather than the darkness, that was truly disturbing her.

In her duties for the Temple there had been no dungeon so deep that she could not penetrate it, no arcane fortress warded so completely that she could not reach its heart. There was an aspect of killer instinct at play there, but largely it came down to preparation. Since she had been an acolyte, Maleneth had known never to open a door without first knowing of at least two others by which she could flee. Following Gotrek wherever the idiot duardin chose to swing his axe denied her that. It was simply not possible to carry the same sigmarite-clad self-assurance that she was accustomed to when she had no idea where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.

Her hand strayed over the array of knives sheathed to the lightweight, drakespawn leather plate of her thigh. Her neck itched as though she were being watched. Like a zephyrat in a sadist’s maze. She almost feared to look back, stricken by the bizarre certainty that she would see a million tons of Ghyranite rock crashing over the stairs behind her if she did.

Forcing herself to swallow her phobias and face them, she glanced over her shoulder. Junas walked behind her, hunched, scared, stroking the hammer pendant that hung from his neck and muttering a prayer to Sigmar. For himself or for his child, Maleneth could not quite make out. Maleneth’s hand moved involuntarily from her knife belt to the device at her own neck. The locket was in the form of a silver heart bound in chains. A small window between revealed a quantity of blood inside.

It had belonged to her former mistress.

‘What other choice did I have, my lady?’ she whispered. ‘Let the Slayer go? Return to Azyrheim empty-handed? The Order would cast me onto the streets and to the tender mercies of the Temple. I fear that the last person who would have granted me a painless end died when I murdered you.’ She smiled, heartened somewhat by the memory of the last Lady Witchblade drowning in the blood of her own cauldron.

‘Who are you talking to, aelfling?’ said Gotrek.

‘The dead,’ she said.

The Slayer snorted, but for several hours thereafter said no more.

The vegetation started to become yellower and sicker. Halik drew her hood tighter. Junas’ mashed-up face contorted further in disgust, finding breathing into his own elbow pit preferable to the rancid sweetness of the decaying plantlife. Alanaer spoke prayer after prayer until his voice gave out, but only the axe-fire of Zangrom-thaz seemed able to purge the plants of their blight. This mercy Gotrek delivered with apparent relish and no sign of weariness.

Maleneth’s sense of smell was many times keener than any of theirs, and she decided not to mention how deep into the stones the contagion ran. If she did then even Junas might have second thoughts and turn back. Getting the Slayer killed was one thing, but surviving long enough to cut the master rune from his flesh and escape with it was another. It was a task that would undoubtedly benefit from having another warrior or two between her and whatever monster it was that had finally bested the old duardin.

‘A corruption has taken root here,’ Halik murmured.

‘Really?’ Maleneth asked, as a cackling Gotrek Gurnisson burned another mushy curtain of vines from their path. ‘What makes you think that?’

The ranger pursed her lips, but said nothing.

Maleneth decided not to rile the woman any further. Sometimes, she just could not help herself.

‘Who built these stairs?’ Gotrek asked. He looked down. The steps wound on away from him, as if a gigantic god-beast had driven a drill into the heart of Ghyran only to see it become entrapped in its rich soil. ‘They bear the mark of dwarven craftsmanship. The age of these worlds of yours is hard even for one who’s seen as much as this dwarf to conceive. Even the works of my people would falter if abandoned for such a span of years.’

‘That’s impossible,’ said Junas. ‘The folk of the Mortal Realms lived in ignorance until the first coming of Sigmar. He taught them how to raise their cities and to build great monuments.’ The big man looked defensive as Halik and Alanaer turned to him. ‘I can’t read, but you think I can’t listen?’

‘Maybe that’s so,’ Gotrek mused, sniffing at the great depth of blackness beyond the reach of his axe. ‘But who do you think taught him?’

Gotrek lowered himself gruffly to one knee, rubbing at his thigh with a scowl.

The ground at the base of the stairs was buckled. Pale weeds and stalk-like flowers had pushed the flagstones out of true. But after the hours they had spent on the stairs it looked as though it had been levelled flat by the Six Smiths of Grungni themselves. Alanaer sat against one of the mossy pillars that framed the mouth of the stairwell, red-faced, mouth hanging open, his knees pulled up to his leafmail coat. He was probably regretting the beer he had consumed earlier. Or perhaps he was simply regretting following Junas and Halik at all.

Maleneth realised that she did not know her companions on this adventure very well. And if the catacombs were half as dangerous as she had heard them to be then she probably never would.

Even the Stormcast Eternals had been unable to cleanse them of all evil.

Gotrek thumped his thigh and issued a curse in consonant-heavy Dispossessed duardin.

‘Cramp?’ Maleneth asked.

‘I’d like to see how spry you are when you get to be this age, aelfling.’ Gotrek nodded his flattened crest towards the tumbledown architecture around them. His nose chain tinkled loudly in the enclosed space. ‘I’m twice as old as this ruin. I think I’ve held up well, all things considered.’

Halik lowered her torch to the rune-fuelled brazier at the heart of Gotrek’s fyrestorm greataxe and lit it. She lifted it as she padded past. Its wavering light pushed into the darkness, revealing a hallway flanked by massive granite columns. Some of them had been carved into figures. Their identities however had been long hidden beneath blotching mould and withered creepers. Like the staircase before it, it seemed to go on forever.

‘Could the boy have… have got this far?’ Alanaer panted, sitting up with effort.

‘He could be no more than an hour ahead of us,’ said Junas.

Which means he has been dead for no more than an hour, Maleneth thought, but chose to keep it to herself.

‘We’ve not passed him,’ said Halik. ‘A small child may have been able to move faster. He would have had less difficulty on the stairs.’

‘You are talking about a four-year-old boy,’ Maleneth said aloud. ‘Walking alone for hours in the dark. Why would he not stop? Or turn back?’

No one had an answer. At least, not one they liked.

‘I don’t know,’ Halik admitted.

The ranger crouched with only a slight protestation of old bones, and brushed worn fingertips over a patch of flattened stems and crushed flowers. Maleneth knew that she was not the equal of a Living City Ranger when it came to the tracking of quarry, but she knew how to read a spoor. It was a footprint. A small footprint. Such as might be made by a child.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Maleneth. ‘He really did come this way.’

‘If you doubted it, aelfling, then why come?’ said Gotrek.

Maleneth chose not to dignify that with an answer.

‘There are some older prints here.’ Halik waved her hand over the pale grasses. ‘But Tambrin’s is the only one to have been made recently.’

‘So he wandered down here alone,’ said Junas, relieved.

‘It looks like it,’ said Halik, rising stiffly. ‘And much less than an hour ahead of us I would say.’

‘Let’s be moving then,’ said Gotrek.

‘Tambrin!’ Junas yelled.

After the hours they had spent with just the occasional furtive whisper between them, the sudden shout startled Maleneth. The syllables rang from the columns and down the hall. Even Halik’s torch seemed spooked, cavorting back from the out-breath, making shadows flap around them like bats. Maleneth swore in Druhirri, reaching for her knife belt, even as Junas ran past her to charge bow-legged down the desolate hall.

‘Tambrin!’ he yelled.

‘Quiet, you idiot,’ Maleneth hissed.

‘Let him shout, aelfling,’ Gotrek grumbled. ‘Sound travels in strange ways below ground. And if the ground-sniffer says the boy’s close then he’s probably close.’

‘And if something else hears?’

Gotrek grinned, broken teeth flashing yellow and red in the firelight. ‘Good.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Maleneth. ‘So long as we understand one another.’

‘Tambri–’

A wooden club swung out from behind a pillar before Junas could finish. It mashed into the middle of his face with a horrible wet sound. The big man dropped like a sack of grain. A squeal went up as the brawler hit the flagstones, rat-man warriors pouring from myriad hiding places amidst the crumbling stonework and hanging plant life. Their robes were soiled and mangy. Deep hoods concealed their faces but for dripping noses and rotten, elongated mouths filled with cracked and yellowing teeth.

‘Skaven!’ Maleneth yelled. ‘Plague monks!’

It dawned on her that the monks had selected this hall for their lair with good reason. They would have known that any would-be adventurer wishing to brave the catacombs from the Stranglevines Downs, already exhausted by the descent, would have first to pass through it. The preponderance of clubs and nets in their scabrous paws told her the monks’ intentions for such fools.

‘They mean to take us alive,’ she said.

‘Hah!’

With a roar Gotrek barrelled towards the oncoming horde, his axe held high. Fire trailed from the monstrous weapon like a comet’s tail. A single blow cleaved a plague monk in two and incinerated it. Three more armed with quarterstaves and maces pounced on him while he was still wreathed and half blinded by crimson smoke.

Maleneth heard a rapid flurry of blows, followed by an angry shout.

She decided to leave the Slayer to it.

A plague monk charged at her with a squeal.

Yellow froth bubbled up from toothless black lips, staining the creature’s hood. Maleneth let it come within arm’s reach, then vaulted its hunched back with an aerial cartwheel. With one hand she drew a knife. With the other she took hold of the foetid folds of cloth at the back of the monk’s hood. It shrieked in dismay, but was still running as she landed. She yanked back. The monk’s footpaws flew out from under it as it fell backward onto its tail. She dropped to one knee and then turned, plunging the knife into the belly of the monk that had been scurrying in behind the first. Its own momentum drove its heart and lungs down onto the blade. Forged from celestite and etched with the murderous blessings of Khaine, a nick was enough to kill even those most resistant to death.

Except for the one life she most wished it to take, it seemed.

Maleneth relished the horror on the plague monk’s face as it expired.

She turned again.

The monk she had thrown to the floor was already on its footpaws. Skaven were fast. As fast as her, if not faster. It came at her with bared teeth, on all fours like a rabid dog. There was a hiss, a thunk, and an arrow exploded from the monk’s eye socket. It jerked once, as though surprised by something on its shoulder, and then fell over.

Halik grunted, as if surprised to see that she was still strong enough to draw a bow and sharp enough to aim it, then turned to loose a second arrow into the fray.

It skewed high.

Maleneth’s lips pricked into a smile. With a long fingernail, she tapped on the silver talisman at her collar. Little wonder that the Azyrite Hags go to such lengths to stay young.

The skaven appeared to be focusing their considerable numbers on killing Gotrek. The monks’ leaders had apparently concluded that despatching the Slayer quickly would allow them to capture the three humans and the aelf more easily. They were probably right. Maleneth would have come to a similar conclusion in their position.

A monk in more ornate robes than the rest crouched on a pedestal of rubble just at the limits of Gotrek’s wildly dancing axe-light. It wore creamy yellow robes and a mitre, decorated with fly eggs, dung pellets and spider’s silk. With two bandage-wound paws it waved a censer-topped stave, the effect of which was to fill that end of the corridor with greenish fumes that drove the monks caught in the haze to new heights of rabid insanity.

Gotrek bellowed, trying to get at the skaven priest, but found himself hemmed in by the sheer mass of foes that surrounded him.

From the stairs behind them, Alanaer began to chant, words of sylvanspeak that had the diseased roots behind the walls writhing in agony. Dust rained from the ceiling, and for a moment Maleneth feared that the warrior-priest meant to bring the entire hall down on their heads.

Then the grey-haired priest lifted his open palm to his lips and blew. A mighty gale flurried down the halls with a swirl of sepulchral leaves. The battering-ram force hurled skaven from their footpaws, bludgeoning through a corridor all the way to their malefic leader. The plague priest hacked as the fumes from its own censer were blown back into its face by the warrior-priest’s scouring wind.

Maleneth saw the opening and took it.

She sprinted, hurdling stricken monks between herself and their priest as they picked themselves off the ground. She was fast, practically a blur as she covered the hundred or so feet in a matter of seconds. The last dozen she turned into a leap, a knife appearing in her off-hand as she dropped.

‘For Khaine!’

She slashed the knife across the skaven’s throat, intending to gizzard it, only to see her blade thunk into the mouldy wood of the priest’s staff. Its reflexes were astonishing. The priest hissed, fangs bared, and swung up the butt of its staff. Maleneth twisted to one side. The staff whooshed across her chest. The priest spun, cackling like a fanatic, his censer emitting a weary drone as he spun it overhead, then turned to bring it whirring back towards her.

‘For Sigmar!’

She roundhoused the priest, a heel-kick across the snout, deliberately unbalancing herself and falling to the ground as the plague censer droned overhead. The big bronze censer crushed the flagstone behind the one she was sprawled over. Whizzing fragments ripped her drakespawn leathers. Noxious fumes rushed over her. Her eyes filled with stinging tears. The skin bared by her torn armour itched. Coughing, she crawled away from the plague fumes on her back.

The priest tittered as it jumped off its rubble mound to follow.

This was, she acknowledged, not turning into the incisive decapitating stroke that she had envisioned.

Already, the monks that Alanaer’s prayer had thrown down were rallying. Several were even peeling away from Gotrek, drawn by the commotion and their priest’s shrill laughter. She cursed, glancing back at the Slayer, and in doing so identified another good reason for the wilier of the plague monks to abandon that particular prize in search of another.

Gotrek Gurnisson was on fire. He was liquid gold, sparks hissing, poured into the cast of a duardin form. The flames grew fiercer as the Slayer butchered his way through the squealing plague monks, feeding off his fury and feeding it in kind. His greataxe moved with such speed that it looked to Maleneth as though he wielded two of them, the air around him webbed with fiery after-traces. The heat was so incredible that Halik and Alanaer could no longer even contribute to the fight at all. They had retreated to the shelter of the stairwell. The occasional refrain of a prayer rose over the roar of the flames, but otherwise the Slayer had effectively cut off his, and Maleneth’s, only means of aid. It was a testament to the unholy durability of the plague monks that they were able to endure the Slayer’s proximity and still fight.

With an ugly snarl, Maleneth tore her gaze from the approaching plague priest and looked around. A way out. A place to hide. Anything. What she found, recessed behind two thick, ivy-strangled columns, was so subtly worked into the wall and well-hidden that she almost failed to see it at all. It was an arch. A feeling of bleakness and unreasoning dread emanated from it, a chill finding its way through her violet eyes, and from there along rarely used ways to her heart. Her snarl became a shiver. Something about the arch urged the eye to move on, and discouraged any thought of approaching. But Maleneth had nowhere left to run.

Even as she ignored her own disquiet to sprint towards it, the rat-men on her heels fell off the chase with squeals of terror. Maleneth turned to look over her shoulder. The plague priest jabbed a claw at Maleneth and shrieked at the cowering monks. Maleneth did not understand the chittering speech, which was a small tragedy on the priest’s part for it was one of the last acts it would ever perform.

Gotrek reared up behind it.

The Slayer had grown massive. Muscles bulged with rune-forged might. His good eye blazed like a freshly minted coin. Even his eyepatch was limned by a halo of golden brilliance. Flames wreathed him.

Maleneth had known many great wielders of power. She had witnessed the awesome rituals performed by the magisters of the Collegiate Arcane, and had ended the life of more than one rogue wizard in her time. But even the last, desperate conjurations of sorcerers driven mad by the promises of Chaos had been tame and controlled compared to what Maleneth beheld now. It was as though someone, or something, breathed dragonfire against the thin skein separating Ghyran from the aether that swirled beyond its sphere in the cosmos. Unveiling the dead stars and wrathful deities that lingered there in all their awful magnificence.

The sooner I get that rune out of him the better, Maleneth thought.

With a howl that shook the roots of Ghyran, Gotrek cut the plague priest in half. The two halves of its diseased body consumed themselves in flame before they could hit the ground. The Slayer breathed it in, exhaling it like sparks from a furnace. Those skaven bright enough to have been directing their efforts elsewhere squealed in terror at the sight. They broke, scampering off down the long hall.

Maleneth did not expect them to come back. She noted, however, that despite being for many the closest avenue of escape, none of them had tried to flee down the side tunnel behind her.

With a deep breath, Halik emerged from her hiding place behind the stairs. She cast a wary look at Gotrek as she padded down the hall. But the Slayer did not move. He was hunched over the rubble of the priest’s pedestal. It was a cairn now, burnt to twisted plates of unreflective glass by the intensity of the heat and magic that he had unwittingly unleashed upon it. The glassy lump creaked under Gotrek’s weight, splintering and popping as it cooled. He was breathing hard, steam curling off his crisped, cooling skin.

It was probably optimistic to hope that it was the cocktail of poisons in his blood finally starting to tell. If there was a toxin anywhere in the planes of existence that could have endured such runefire then it was under the jealous protection of the Hags of Azyr – held against the day that Sigmar himself needed to feel the knife of Khaine.

‘What in Sigmar’s Storm was that?’ said Halik.

Maleneth smiled weakly and shook her head. That was a longer story than she had the strength for, and one that she was not entirely sure of the end of herself.

Alanaer crouched by Junas.

‘He’s alive,’ the warrior-priest declared. He pulled the big man up to sitting, and smiled ruefully as the brawler spat out another tooth. ‘But I doubt he’ll be breaking any more young ladies’ hearts with this face.’

Halik managed a nervous chuckle. ‘Skaven,’ she muttered, as it left her.

‘More of Thanquol’s craven minions, I expect.’ Gotrek moved like a statue taking life, slowly, vitrified gore and dust trickling from his shoulders. He drew in a shuddering breath, then coughed it up. He wiped blood from his bottom lip on his thumb, then lifted it to his eye. He grunted and stuck it in his mouth. ‘Leftovers from the war on the other side of the Stormrift Gate. With skaven you never can kill them all.’

‘No.’ Alanaer shook his head. ‘The servants of the Great Corruptor have long coveted my Queen’s realm. I expect that their presence here predates the Grey Lord’s invasions of Hammerhal Aqsha by some time.’

‘What have you found here, darkling?’ Halik looked up at the archway that Maleneth had discovered. Her footsteps slowed noticeably as she looked on it. She shivered as she reached out to run her hand along the inside of the stone arch, hesitating, finally bringing the hand back to her side unused. ‘Tambrin passed this way,’ she breathed. ‘The ground here is marked, and not by skaven paws. And.’ The ranger paused, ear cocked. ‘Can you hear that?’

Maleneth listened, then nodded, impressed. The ranger was good.

For a human.

‘Footsteps,’ she said.

‘And still only one set,’ said Halik.

‘He has somehow bypassed a locked door, a watch patrol and now a skaven ambush as well,’ said Maleneth. ‘He belongs in a temple of Khaine, this child.’ She turned to join the old ranger in her study of the arch. ‘It reeks of soulblight and carrion. Whatever dwells beyond this portal, I fear it is beyond even Khaine’s reach now. Such things are best left buried.’

Gotrek heaved himself to his feet with a clink of gold chain and a dying splutter of half-seen flame. Maleneth had to marvel at his determination. And all this for the myth of an ancient ghost, for surely Gotrek Gurnisson cared less for this Tambrin boy than even she did, and she cared nothing at all. It was with a mixture of amazement and frustration she was lately becoming painfully familiar with that she watched the Slayer limp towards her.

‘What are you all standing about for?’ he said. ‘There’s black work ahead of us yet.’

After what he had inflicted on the plague monks, nobody felt inclined to argue.

A chill blue light shone from the passage beyond the archway. The languid movements of the mist that filled the corridor diffused and scattered it. It was like being submerged in water. Maleneth felt her breath starting to come quick and shallow. She studied the walls. Frost prickled the weeds and mosses that encrusted their ancient stonework. But aside from the chill the plants looked healthy. The air in this part of the dungeon smelled clean. For some reason, that pristine quality troubled her more than the rank despoliation in the chamber that had preceded it. It was the sterility of abandonment. Nothing had moved in to claim these halls. That alone was enough to give Maleneth’s heart jitters.

There was a tired creak as Halik raised her bow.

The ranger’s aim wavered.

‘Sigmar preserve us.’

Maleneth drew her hand from the frost-stippled wall and looked up. Her eyes were sharper than those of the human ranger. At that precise moment she wished they were not.

Between her looking away and turning back the mists ahead had parted. Or rather, something had drawn them apart. They clung to the walls of the passage in a way that was wholly unnatural, trembling like cold skin, and bathed in blueish light. A taller-than-human figure stood revealed in the ankle-deep mist. Its body was formed of crackling energy. A long cloak and a suit of ribbed, holly-like armour filtered its fell glow. It turned its head to look back over its shoulder and Maleneth felt that her heart would stop. A black helmet masked its face with coiling shadows. In one fizzing blue hand it led a small boy. Were one to mentally unbox the ears and reset the nose then the resemblance to Junas would have been striking. For all that he was standing upright, the boy seemed to be sound asleep.

‘Thambrin,’ said Junas, the most recent break to his nose making his voice come out as a frightened honk. ‘Praith Thigmar.’ He shook off Alanaer’s supporting arm and tottered forwards, hand outstretched to his son. ‘I’m here, Thambrin.’

The shade drew the boy in close.

‘Begone, spirit.’ Gotrek hefted his axe. Its forgefires chased the shadows from his face, filling its creases with new ones. ‘Release the child and walk amongst the living no longer.’

The shade turned to regard them fully, pushing the boy behind its back. It flickered rather than moved, its outline stuttering in and out of focus with a horrible vibration as though it were only weakly tethered to the living realm.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Junas snarled. ‘Thoot it.’

Maleneth was not sure if Halik did as Junas demanded or if terror had simply loosened her hold on her bowstring.

A foot away from the ragged armour of its chest her arrow disintegrated. Aged a thousand years in the blink of an eye, the shaft fell to dust like a stick fed into a Kharadron steam-shredder. A brittle wedge of rusted and barely recognisable steel dinked on the spirit’s breastplate and dropped to the floor. The apparition crunched it under one icy boot. It looked up. Maleneth gasped in horror as its helmet melted back. A skull face glared out from a hood of shadow, eyes blazing with malefic lightning. The breath that Maleneth had taken caught. It refused to come out. She felt it freeze in her lungs where it hid, icicles creeping outwards into her heart. Her mouth stretched into a silent scream, her black hair turning slowly white.

Then the ghost screamed.

It hit Maleneth like a lightning bolt. Something inside her braced, clinging on to meat and bone like a drowning woman to a wrecked ship in a storm. From the corner of her eye she saw Halik as her soul was blasted from her body. Pale and ephemeral, its hands grasped for the ranger’s body, but passed through, unable to prevent the corpse from toppling. With a plaintive wail the disembodied soul dissolved into the aether. Maleneth grit her teeth. Junas had folded to the ground, his hands over his ears. Alanaer was screaming. Over and over. As if to block out the banshee cry with the terrified sound of his own voice.

‘It is the ghost of Hanberra!’ the warrior-priest wailed, holding his hammer before him as if its crossed shadow would ward the visitation from his sight. ‘By the light of my Queen, it is true. The hero who broke free from Sigmar’s lightning to go back for his family!’

Even without the benefit of a dark legend, Maleneth would have known that this was no ordinary shade. The empty halls. The skaven’s terror. Its bearing and raiment – all made it clear that this had been the spirit of a great hero in life. But death had eroded him until only the deepest core of the warrior’s former personality remained.

A solitary purpose.

‘I said unhand him,’ said Gotrek.

Unlike the others, the Slayer simply looked weary, as though having been burned once by the purple sun of Uthan Barrowalker, the winds of Shyish could no longer touch him. Maleneth looked for the warning flicker of runefire, but in vain. The master rune was cool in the Slayer’s chest. It was, perhaps, a sign of the tremendous power it contained that once unleashed it took time to recharge. Not that that came as any great solace to Maleneth at that moment.

‘Give me my thon,’ snarled Junas. ‘He’th mine, not yours.’

‘He’s mine. Not yours.’

The words echoed back at them as if from a deep well.

Maleneth shuddered.

The ghost of Hanberra did not move. One moment it was upright. Then it was turned away, hunched over the sleepwalking boy. And then it was facing its mortal pursuers again, the boy held in its arms, drifting away from them as though drawn on the freezing in-breath of the deep earth itself.

‘Thambrin!’

Junas lurched into a charge.

Gotrek caught his scuffed and damaged wrist with one hand. Despite barely coming up to the big man’s chest, the duardin stopped him without effort.

‘Don’t be an idiot, manling,’ he said in a voice like stone. ‘You’ve failed the boy once today already. Don’t fail him again by dying now.’ The Slayer pulled back on Junas’ arm, dragging him easily to the floor at his feet. He looked down the passageway towards the towering wraith. ‘Your boy is dead, spirit, as are you. Unhand this one and face a dwarf nearer your own age. My axe will grant you the release you seek.’

The spirit issued a sepulchral moan.

‘Release.’

Its cloak flapped about it like the wings of a bat and a warhammer of truly monstrous proportion appeared in one gauntleted fist. With the other hand, it cosseted the still-sleeping infant to its chest.

Then with a hiss it swung.

Gotrek ducked his head at the last moment.

The hammer punched a hole through the roof of his crest and pulverised a block from the wall. Masonry dust rained through the embittered shade. It painted the Slayer grey. Gotrek shook it off his head, shortened his grip on his axe, and punched it straight up into the spirit’s body. The red runes on its fyresteel blades glowed like coals plucked from a fire. The shade flickered and the fyrestorm greataxe cleaved through scraps of aether. The wraith rematerialised a dozen feet away. Swifter than Maleneth could follow it moved again, its hammer no longer there, embedded in stone beside the Slayer’s face, but here, poised above its own crackling skull at the apex of a downswing.

Gotrek threw himself to one side as the hammer stove in the flagstone he had been standing on. He landed on his back with a crunch of armour and a gravelly curse. The duardin was insanely tough, but nimble he was not.

Alanaer began to chant.

The ice that caked the stonework around Hanberra’s feet cracked and hissed. Vines groped from the thaw to tug on the harder edges of the spectre’s armour. A tendril wound its way up his leg to reach for the sleeping child.

The shade pulled Tambrin in close and hissed. ‘He’s mine. Not yours.’ It drew in a breath of amethyst-flecked magic, turned towards the warrior-priest, and screamed.

Alanaer was lifted from his feet and thrown back down the passageway. He landed on his back and rolled. Unconscious or dead, Maleneth did not know. Either way he did not get up again.

Taking full advantage of the distraction, Gotrek hacked at the shade’s ankle from prone. The fyresteel blade passed through the spirit’s leg, leaving a flickering line of blue energy and golden fire where it had crossed. The shade stuttered in and out of form, screeching in outrage. Maleneth covered her sensitive ears as the ghost of Hanberra kicked Gotrek in the ribs. There was a blast of sound and pressure as if from a thunderbolt and the Slayer was hurled across the passageway, plunging into the mist like a brick into water before crunching into the stonework behind it.

Shaking masonry from his crest, Gotrek pulled himself back up.

This is it, Maleneth thought. The Slayer’s doom.

Finally he could die. She could recover the rune from his remains and, if she was quick about it, return to Azyr late in some kind of triumph.

Hanberra drifted back. Its hammer blinked to a defensive position as Gotrek shrugged off the last of the wall and barrelled towards it with a roar. Maleneth frowned. She could see that Hanberra was not fighting to its utmost. The ghost actually seemed more intent on shielding the child in its arms than it was on actually defeating Gotrek.

And that, Maleneth thought, is just not going to be good enough.

She rifled through what was left in her various pouches and pockets. Her long mission had kept her away from the blood markets of Azyrheim, and her fruitless efforts to concoct a poison that would actually kill Gotrek Gurnisson had depleted her supplies still further. But she still had a few herbs. Poisons that she had not yet thought to try. Her fingers closed around the hard nut of a wightclove and she withdrew it from her pocket. It was tough, ridged and white as bone. She kissed it for Khaine’s blessing and then crushed it to a powder against the back of her hand.

Leaping into the midst of the contest with a yell, Maleneth struck the powder from the back of her hand and across Hanberra’s arm. The arm that held the boy.

The spirit shrieked as its arm and shoulder wavered.

A concentrated and properly delivered dose of freshly harvested wightclove would banish a spirit and, though Maleneth would not like to test it, cause severe discomfort to a Mortarch. With a single dried clove the best she could hope for was a temporary loss of corporeality, but that was all she wanted. The shade tried desperately to keep a hold of the child, but its efforts were as fruitless as those of Halik’s spirit had been on her own body. Its arm had taken on the consistency of mist. The child fell through it. Maleneth dived as the spirit cried out in anguish, intercepting the boy before he could hit the ground, and then rolled, curling to protect his body with her own.

She broke from her roll just before she hit the wall, braking with an out-turned foot. The boy lay beneath her, pudgy arms and legs spread out. Unbelievably, he was still asleep.

Behind her, the spirit raged.

Aether rose off the ragged figure like smoke. It clenched its fist, finding it once again solid, and took its massive warhammer in a two-handed grip. It stuttered back and forth around its streaming outline, screaming in rage.

‘Thambrin!’ Junas cried, but made no move to intervene.

Maleneth bared perfect teeth in a grin.

This is more like it, she thought. A little more of this and you might rid me of this burdensome Slayer yet.

Exhausted beyond even his own awesome strength, but defiant to the last, Gotrek looked up to meet his doom. His one eye met Hanberra’s and for some reason that was not immediately apparent to Maleneth, the shade hesitated. An unlikely understanding seemed to pass between ancient duardin and lost soul. A pain they had both shared. A pain that had broken one and made the other.

‘He’s mine. Not yours.’

‘No,’ said Gotrek. ‘This one is still of the living. Begone, spirit. Seek your boy in the Lands of the Dead.’

‘Dead…’

Hanberra’s hand flickered to its eye sockets. The shade’s corposant skull stared at them as if seeing them as they were for the first time in a thousand years. Its warhammer burst into a cloud of rising ash above its head. Its armour began to peel away, lightning seething about the trapped human shape underneath.

‘Dead…’

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘Aye, he’s gone and it was your fault. And no. It doesn’t get any better. So begone, spirit. Begone and be at peace.’

‘Hangharth was his name,’ the spirit said, as though remembering a precious revelation it had thought long forgotten. ‘Sigmar forgive me.’ Its dissolution accelerated. There was a muffled crump, as if of lightning striking somewhere far below ground, and the ghost of Hanberra vanished in a puff of smoke, its last words a breath on a dead wind. ‘I should never have left.’

Maleneth stared at the thinning cloud in horror.

From somewhere behind her, she could hear Alanaer coughing as the warrior-priest stirred.

‘That was brave, aelfling,’ said Gotrek. The duardin picked himself up and walked stiffly towards her. She offered no protest as he bent to take the child from her. Tambrin was a stocky boy, and was clearly going to grow into a large man, but tucked into the crook of the Slayer’s huge arm he looked gangly and long-limbed. His lips smacked together as he started to stir. Gotrek shushed him with a few gravelly consonants of what might, to ears attuned to the sounds of picks on stone and hammers on anvils, have been a lullaby. A grin, unsettling in its strange lack of hostility, spread across his scarred face. ‘Maybe there’s hope for you yet, eh?’

‘Gotrek…’ said Maleneth.

The duardin’s expression hardened. ‘Come on, aelfling. Let’s go on back.’

‘Do you mean, do you honestly mean, that the ill-tempered old Slayer I knew genuinely came down here to save a human child?’

Gotrek glanced fleetingly at the child in his arms. ‘Of course not.’ Grumbling under his breath, he deposited the boy into Junas’ crushing embrace. ‘But you said I left a beer untended up there.’