The Bone Desert

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.