The hammer punched a hole through the roof of his crest and pulverised a block from the wall. Masonry dust rained through the embittered shade. It painted the Slayer grey. Gotrek shook it off his head, shortened his grip on his axe, and punched it straight up into the spirit’s body. The red runes on its fyresteel blades glowed like coals plucked from a fire. The shade flickered and the fyrestorm greataxe cleaved through scraps of aether. The wraith rematerialised a dozen feet away. Swifter than Maleneth could follow it moved again, its hammer no longer there, embedded in stone beside the Slayer’s face, but here, poised above its own crackling skull at the apex of a downswing.
Gotrek threw himself to one side as the hammer stove in the flagstone he had been standing on. He landed on his back with a crunch of armour and a gravelly curse. The duardin was insanely tough, but nimble he was not.
Alanaer began to chant.
The ice that caked the stonework around Hanberra’s feet cracked and hissed. Vines groped from the thaw to tug on the harder edges of the spectre’s armour. A tendril wound its way up his leg to reach for the sleeping child.
The shade pulled Tambrin in close and hissed. ‘He’s mine. Not yours.’ It drew in a breath of amethyst-flecked magic, turned towards the warrior-priest, and screamed.
Alanaer was lifted from his feet and thrown back down the passageway. He landed on his back and rolled. Unconscious or dead, Maleneth did not know. Either way he did not get up again.
Taking full advantage of the distraction, Gotrek hacked at the shade’s ankle from prone. The fyresteel blade passed through the spirit’s leg, leaving a flickering line of blue energy and golden fire where it had crossed. The shade stuttered in and out of form, screeching in outrage. Maleneth covered her sensitive ears as the ghost of Hanberra kicked Gotrek in the ribs. There was a blast of sound and pressure as if from a thunderbolt and the Slayer was hurled across the passageway, plunging into the mist like a brick into water before crunching into the stonework behind it.
Shaking masonry from his crest, Gotrek pulled himself back up.
This is it, Maleneth thought. The Slayer’s doom.
Finally he could die. She could recover the rune from his remains and, if she was quick about it, return to Azyr late in some kind of triumph.
Hanberra drifted back. Its hammer blinked to a defensive position as Gotrek shrugged off the last of the wall and barrelled towards it with a roar. Maleneth frowned. She could see that Hanberra was not fighting to its utmost. The ghost actually seemed more intent on shielding the child in its arms than it was on actually defeating Gotrek.
And that, Maleneth thought, is just not going to be good enough.
She rifled through what was left in her various pouches and pockets. Her long mission had kept her away from the blood markets of Azyrheim, and her fruitless efforts to concoct a poison that would actually kill Gotrek Gurnisson had depleted her supplies still further. But she still had a few herbs. Poisons that she had not yet thought to try. Her fingers closed around the hard nut of a wightclove and she withdrew it from her pocket. It was tough, ridged and white as bone. She kissed it for Khaine’s blessing and then crushed it to a powder against the back of her hand.
Leaping into the midst of the contest with a yell, Maleneth struck the powder from the back of her hand and across Hanberra’s arm. The arm that held the boy.
The spirit shrieked as its arm and shoulder wavered.
A concentrated and properly delivered dose of freshly harvested wightclove would banish a spirit and, though Maleneth would not like to test it, cause severe discomfort to a Mortarch. With a single dried clove the best she could hope for was a temporary loss of corporeality, but that was all she wanted. The shade tried desperately to keep a hold of the child, but its efforts were as fruitless as those of Halik’s spirit had been on her own body. Its arm had taken on the consistency of mist. The child fell through it. Maleneth dived as the spirit cried out in anguish, intercepting the boy before he could hit the ground, and then rolled, curling to protect his body with her own.
She broke from her roll just before she hit the wall, braking with an out-turned foot. The boy lay beneath her, pudgy arms and legs spread out. Unbelievably, he was still asleep.
Behind her, the spirit raged.
Aether rose off the ragged figure like smoke. It clenched its fist, finding it once again solid, and took its massive warhammer in a two-handed grip. It stuttered back and forth around its streaming outline, screaming in rage.
‘Thambrin!’ Junas cried, but made no move to intervene.
Maleneth bared perfect teeth in a grin.
This is more like it, she thought. A little more of this and you might rid me of this burdensome Slayer yet.
Exhausted beyond even his own awesome strength, but defiant to the last, Gotrek looked up to meet his doom. His one eye met Hanberra’s and for some reason that was not immediately apparent to Maleneth, the shade hesitated. An unlikely understanding seemed to pass between ancient duardin and lost soul. A pain they had both shared. A pain that had broken one and made the other.
‘He’s mine. Not yours.’
‘No,’ said Gotrek. ‘This one is still of the living. Begone, spirit. Seek your boy in the Lands of the Dead.’
‘Dead…’
Hanberra’s hand flickered to its eye sockets. The shade’s corposant skull stared at them as if seeing them as they were for the first time in a thousand years. Its warhammer burst into a cloud of rising ash above its head. Its armour began to peel away, lightning seething about the trapped human shape underneath.
‘Dead…’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘Aye, he’s gone and it was your fault. And no. It doesn’t get any better. So begone, spirit. Begone and be at peace.’
‘Hangharth was his name,’ the spirit said, as though remembering a precious revelation it had thought long forgotten. ‘Sigmar forgive me.’ Its dissolution accelerated. There was a muffled crump, as if of lightning striking somewhere far below ground, and the ghost of Hanberra vanished in a puff of smoke, its last words a breath on a dead wind. ‘I should never have left.’
Maleneth stared at the thinning cloud in horror.
From somewhere behind her, she could hear Alanaer coughing as the warrior-priest stirred.
‘That was brave, aelfling,’ said Gotrek. The duardin picked himself up and walked stiffly towards her. She offered no protest as he bent to take the child from her. Tambrin was a stocky boy, and was clearly going to grow into a large man, but tucked into the crook of the Slayer’s huge arm he looked gangly and long-limbed. His lips smacked together as he started to stir. Gotrek shushed him with a few gravelly consonants of what might, to ears attuned to the sounds of picks on stone and hammers on anvils, have been a lullaby. A grin, unsettling in its strange lack of hostility, spread across his scarred face. ‘Maybe there’s hope for you yet, eh?’
‘Gotrek…’ said Maleneth.
The duardin’s expression hardened. ‘Come on, aelfling. Let’s go on back.’
‘Do you mean, do you honestly mean, that the ill-tempered old Slayer I knew genuinely came down here to save a human child?’
Gotrek glanced fleetingly at the child in his arms. ‘Of course not.’ Grumbling under his breath, he deposited the boy into Junas’ crushing embrace. ‘But you said I left a beer untended up there.’
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