The Bone Desert

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.