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‘How long was I unconscious?’ Maleneth asked, having to swallow before speaking. Her throat was parched.

‘Since you were captured,’ Gotrek said, without a hint of humour.

‘And how long ago was that?’ she snapped, anger flaring up from the pain suffusing her body.

‘Last night. You new aelves are just the same as the old ones. One hit and you crumple.’

‘Would that I had the strength and fortitude of the great Gotrek. He would never have allowed himself to succumb to a pack of sky pirates,’ Maleneth hissed. ‘Unless that was you, laid out and netted on their deck when I last saw you…’

Gotrek rounded on her, and she thought he was going to lunge at her before she saw his bonds – heavy metal clamps, rather than the cords that bit into her own wrists. Clearly their captors were well aware of the Slayer’s deadly potential.

‘Have you tried to negotiate?’

‘And why would I do that?’ the Slayer growled. ‘The only thing I would negotiate is whether their blood feeds my axe’s thirst now or later.’

‘They’re duardin, for Khaine’s spite. They’ve not killed us, so they must want something. They’re not just assassins, or if they were they’ve disobeyed their directives. So negotiate with them.’

‘I-I think I heard something about a ransom, sellah,’ Aziz stammered. ‘These sky dogs, sometimes they take people from the trails, usually wealthy traders. They do not follow their kindred’s code.’

‘Then why did they take you too?’ Maleneth demanded.

‘They think he’s with us,’ Gotrek said, looking up and frowning at the endrin orbs above. ‘I told them he wasn’t. Told them they should just throw him over the side of… whatever this thing is.’

‘It is a skyship,’ Aziz said, wringing his tied hands together.

‘Not like any skyship I’ve been on before. And I’ve known one or two.’

A tremor ran through the cold decking plates surrounding them. A moment later a figure loomed at the edge of the brig’s entrance, followed by two more. Maleneth looked up into the grim, unyielding ancestor masks of their captors. One was pointing the gleaming barrels of an aethermatic volley gun down at them. She remembered waking up on the skyship just as it had been about to pull away from the inferno that had once been Khaled-Tush. The duardin had spoken about taking them alive. In the hands of the Kharadron Overlords, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

One of the captors pointed at Maleneth. He had Gotrek’s axe slung over his back.

‘Bring her.’

One of his companions tossed a grav-ladder down from the edge of the hold. Covered by the volley gun, he swung in and snatched Maleneth, gauntlet clamping around her arm. She didn’t try to resist. Now was not the time. Aziz whimpered but Gotrek remained unmoving, his eye still on the endrins overhead, as though oblivious to what was happening around him.

The duardin holding Maleneth pushed her up the grav-ladder. It was difficult negotiating it with her hands tied, but near the top the Kharadron above snatched her beneath the arms and hauled her up. The wind hit her properly, making her flinch, and her feet touched the main deck just as another tremor ran through the ribbed metal. She was sure she heard one of the endrins skip a beat.

‘This way, aelf,’ the duardin snarled, a hand in the flat of her back pushing her towards the skyship’s external railing. She staggered, her stomach lurching as she became aware of just how high up they were. The Bone Desert stretched out in every direction, like a Hysh-bleached sheet, each of the thousands of tiny ripples spreading away below her one of the great dunes that covered the desolate expanse.

‘Who is that?’ the duardin demanded, pointing down past the rear endrin latched to the skyship’s stern. Maleneth frowned against the wind, unable to discern anything amidst the distant haze.

‘I do not see anyone.’

‘You’re not using my spyglass, murder-aelf,’ the duardin snarled. ‘You’ll throw it overboard. Put that famous eyesight to use, or we’ll see how long you enjoy being dangled by your toes over the side.’

The Kharadron pointed again and Maleneth gripped the skyship’s railing, staring down into the endless desert. Eventually she began to discern a shape, dark against the pale ochre, a distant spec that seemed to be following in the frigate’s wake.

‘A rider,’ she said, having to shout over the wind and the endrin’s throb.

‘Who?’ the Kharadron demanded.

‘I don’t know! I have no companions besides the duardin and the boy!’

‘Then you won’t mind if we give him a Kharadron salutation. Skori, prime the skycannon and bring us about.’

Before the duardin’s orders could be obeyed there was a metallic pinging noise, followed by a shriek of escaping steam. Maleneth looked up to see the rivets had burst around one of the rubberised pipes leading to the endrin domes. Steam was now jetting from the opening, and a thick, oily substance was drooling from cracks further up the metal orb.

‘Dregg, get aloft!’ the Kharadron gripping Maleneth shouted, gesturing towards an endrinrigger emerging from the ship’s forecabin, lugging a half-welder and a cog-toothed hammer.

‘Another one’s about to go!’ shouted a second Kharadron, pointing towards another of the endrin’s valves. The entire sphere was beginning to visibly buckle and deform under some sort of internal pressure, as though a vast, invisible fist had closed around it and was crushing the metal shell.

‘Grungsson’s oath,’ the Kharadron beside Maleneth managed to swear, before the whole ship lurched.

The motion threw the entire crew, Maleneth included, hard to the right. She banged against some rigging cables, her natural poise undone by the cords pinning her wrists together. She spat a curse of her own as the ship lurched back violently in the opposite direction, banging her off the railings protecting the edge. Her duardin captor grunted as he held his own balance, the spikes on his boots helping him dig into the deck.

‘Check the endrin readings!’ he barked. Since the first rupture the tone of the orbs keeping the skyship aloft had changed noticeably. Gone were the steady vibrations, replaced by an ugly sputtering, clattering sound. The noise seemed to grow even more harsh and irregular as Maleneth listened to it, and a note of panic had entered the voices of the duardin around her as they hurried to sign in from their stations. She couldn’t decipher all of the gruff reports, but none sounded positive.

The skyship shook again. This time it wasn’t with sudden fury, but with an even more terrible, slow sense of slipping. Maleneth, attuned as she was to her surroundings, was the first to sense the slight change in the slope of the deck. She was able to hook her bonds over the railings along the edge of the hull as the angle continued to shift, and the duardin finally noticed.

‘Throm, the stabiliser gauge!’ the duardin next to Maleneth bellowed. ‘She’s going to capsize!’

The two remaining endrins were vibrating, their agony audible as an ear-piercing scream. The metal all around Maleneth was juddering violently, steam pouring from the skyship’s ports and hatches, wreathing the stricken frigate as it continued its slow, inexorable roll.

‘The hatch!’ Maleneth heard another voice, rising above the barks of the duardin and the shriek of their crumpling ship. It was Aziz.

The cart driver and Gotrek were both still in the brig. Even more importantly, the brig had a hatch.

The duardin appeared to have forgotten her. Several had flung grapnels to the far side of the hull and were using them to scale the tipping deck with surprising dexterity. Others were using cutlasses, daggers and boarding pikes to anchor themselves to the ship, trying to claw their way back to the tiller and the gauge that appeared responsible for the craft’s aerial buoyancy. One lost his grip on the rigging and plummeted back, slamming into the railing running along the edge of the ship with a grunt.