by Warhammer
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 th
e 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.