The Bone Desert

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.