The railing. Maleneth stopped trying to fight the tipping sensation, and instead allowed herself to drop to the metal rungs. For a moment they were the only things between her and a plummeting drop, the desert laid out at a dizzying, stomach-turning angle. She forced herself not to look down, but planted two feet on one of the rungs and, from a crouch, leapt for the edge of the brig hatch.
She almost cleared it. Her hands, still bound together, clamped over the edges, the impact of her body against the unyielding metal of the hull almost driving the wind from her lungs.
‘The hatch!’ she heard Aziz still screaming. The angle of the ship was such that it had almost tipped him and Gotrek out into the open air.
‘I am trying, you fool,’ she hissed back. The brig’s hatch lever was set into the deck just to her right, but reaching it would be impossible with her hands bound, at least if she wanted to avoid losing her grip.
She grimaced. When had a servant of Khaine ever had doubts when playing these games of life and death?
She flung herself to the side, letting out a yell of effort as she did so. As her grip left the hatch and her stomach lurched at the void opening out beneath her, it seemed as though she’d thrown herself to her death. Time slowed as she arched her back and thrust her arms out towards the lever. She saw the bonds slide up and over it as her jump reached its apex and, as it seemed her momentum would drag her back down over the side of the tipping deck, the cords caught and snagged.
They held her weight only for a second before snapping around the lever, but by then she had her hands around it. She thumped into the deck again as her fall was arrested once more, the weight dragging the lever down with a heavy click. She was left dangling again, her arms straining. But it was done. The locking mechanism had engaged.
She heard a crack and something smacked off the deck next to her head. She realised one of the duardin, anchored below her by a grappling hook, had fired an aetherlock up at her. Above, the brig had started to clatter as the hatch rattled shut over the hold.
She had a couple of seconds at best before she was locked outside.
Muscles burning with the unrelenting strain, she hauled herself up onto the lever block. The cords had bitten deep into her wrists, but with her hands free she suddenly felt more confident. Perched like a feline on the narrow block of metal, she gave herself a split second to gather her strength and focus, ignoring the horrifying angle of the ship as its flank approached ninety degrees to the desert floor far below.
She leapt, shrieking as she did so, though she barely realised it. The hatch yawned before her, its grate sliding shut, just a few yards left before the whole brig was locked off.
She was trapping herself in the bowels of an arkanaut frigate that was plummeting towards the desert. But it was that, or tumble from the open deck when it finally tipped all the way upside down.
She dropped in through the hatch, a hair’s breadth from the grate’s locking spikes, not even hitting the deck below before she heard it clang fully shut. She slammed into the metal beneath with a grunt and was then almost immediately thrown to one side. What had once been the bottom of the brig was now one of the sides, and the wall they had previously been lying against was now the floor. The hatch, now barred, was to her right. Through it the desert was swinging ponderously into view, the horizon stretching dizzyingly away.
The realisation of just what was happening caught up with Maleneth.
‘Hag’s spite see me safe, that I might claim more lives for the Bloody-Handed,’ she intoned.
‘Hold on to the bars!’ Aziz was screaming, barely audible over the death-shrieks of the crumpling, rupturing endrins. The teamster had managed to work his way free of his own bonds, and had braced himself up against the corner of the hold.
The skyship turned over on its axis. Maleneth was thumped against the bars of the hold, now the floor. Beneath them was nothing but the desert. She clung to the grate, her stomach turning. A duardin hurtled past, his grip on the ship’s deck gone, his scream whipped away by the wind and the earache of the endrins. She could see others dangling by grapnels and sky pikes, hooked to the rigging or railings. The dunes below were rushing up to greet them.
‘Hope you don’t get air-sick, aelf,’ she heard Gotrek say. He was balanced against the grate, arms braced against one of the corners. It sounded as though he was enjoying himself.
She screwed her eyes shut and tried to drive out the juddering fall of the skyship with words of spite and murder, an old lullaby of the Hidden Temples. She was going to die, a part of her had already accepted as much. Her only hope was that it would be Khaine who claimed her soul, and not some other cruel deity.
The sound of the endrins’ torture reached fever pitch, driving out all conscious thought, reducing anyone still on board the falling frigate to base, primal terror. Maleneth found herself opening her eyes again, and saw a dune directly ahead, caught for a second in perfect clarity, serenely still in the burning heat.
The world seemed to calm around Maleneth. The gut-wrenching shuddering and the plummeting sensation went, along with the pain of the endrins. All she could hear was the rapid tattoo of her own heart, the blood in her ears, the breath rasping in her lungs.
‘Khaela mensha adrathi Khaina,’ she said, reciting her temple’s last rites.
The skyship struck.
Chapter Eight
She remembered being told by a human warrior, Bayzor, a fellow member of the Order of the Azyr, that whenever he awoke after being struck unconscious, it was the pain that let him know he was still living. Apparently in whatever afterlife he believed in, there was no pain, so its presence indicated that he was not yet dead.
Maleneth had no such certainties. The temples of the Black Courts and the Shadow Covens preached little other than pain, and the cold murder that eased it. As she woke, acutely aware of the spikes of agony in her side and throbbing in her skull, her sluggish thoughts wondered whether she was about to face her final trials before the Bloody-Handed, and perhaps reckon one last time with her old mistress.
A part of her, distant and icy as a Shyish morning, hoped Jakari had already crossed over, and was waiting for her.
The God of Murder would permit no such mercies. Maleneth’s eyes fluttered open, and she found herself looking once more at Gotrek’s scarred, blunt face. She started, trying to push herself away from the duardin and realising when she did so that she was sitting up with her back to the skyship’s hull. A section of copper pipes, ruptured, had been digging into her side, slicing her leathers. She groaned as her movements teased the dozen cuts and bruises she had gained over the previous day.
Gotrek stood, turning away from her. He had recovered his axe from somewhere, and she thought she caught a rare hint of amusement in his eye. She tested her throbbing head, touching it tentatively. Neither the lump on her scalp nor the bruises from the pipework seemed dangerous, but being flung around the hold seemed to have opened up the wound in her side given to her by the Alharabi dancers. She noticed as Gotrek moved away that his arm was injured too. Something had cut his right bicep to the bone, and the wound was still pulsing fresh blood, leaving his arm a sheet of glistening crimson.