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.