‘He is a fool,’ Maleneth growled back, but moved her blade away from the Kharadron’s throat. Gotrek released her arm.
‘Let us make haste then,’ she said, standing. ‘Or we could wait until he’s fully awake. Will you let me kill him then?’
Gotrek said nothing, but motioned to Aziz, standing uncertainly nearby.
‘The Eight Pillars, manling. Lead on.’
Chapter Nine
Durbarak’s arm was broken. He had cracked it back into place and formed a makeshift sling from a length of endrin cord. The pain was a dull, constant throb, a distant second to the anger that burned through him.
The Draz Karr had been wrecked beyond repair. The hull was buckled and split and the endrins shattered. Twisted wreckage littered the Bone Desert.
Bodies littered it too, crewmates who had failed to tie themselves to the deck before the skyship had capsized. Not all those who had done so had survived either. He’d already found Stromm and Borin, both crushed by one of the endrins when the remains of the crumpled orb had come down after the frigate had ploughed into the desert.
Durbarak’s livelihood was in ruins and his crewmates were dead. Someone would pay. He’d already checked the hold, but the Draz Karr’s collision with the desert had ruptured the hull and left a tear in the brig’s flank. There were three sets of prints leading from the downed skyship, three sets headed east, over the dunes. Durbarak had pulled off his ancestor mask and was staring after them, cradling his broken arm and trying to stop himself shaking with anger.
They’d taken the water with them too. He’d managed to find a single flask, half-empty, in the brig’s remains, but that was all. He would have to go, and soon. A part of him simply wished to remain with his frigate’s wreckage.
He heard a sound carried to him by the whispers of the desert wind. At first he thought it was the low groan of the skyship’s remains settling, then he realised it was a voice, a voice that he recognised. He turned and moved back in amongst the hold, struggling in the sand that had been ploughed up by the Draz Karr’s impact.
He found Throm lying in the shade of one of the broken endrins, its misshapen sphere half buried in the sand. The Kharadron’s legs were broken – bone and cartilage were protruding from his dusty sky-suit, and the sand was speckled with blood, a trail marking where he had dragged himself from the shattered decking plates nearby. Scraps of armour and his ancestor mask lay scattered around him, discarded in the infernal heat. He was only half conscious.
Durbarak trudged to his side, unhooking the water flask from his belt as he went. Throm’s eyes flickered, and he blinked up at his crewmate.
‘Captain?’ His voice was a dry, deathly croak.
‘Easy, lad,’ Durbarak said, kneeling beside him and pressing the flask to his lips with his good hand. Rather than drinking, Throm turned his head away.
‘You’ll need it more than me, captain. I’m done.’
‘I’m going to find the one who did this,’ Durbarak said. ‘Some oath-breaking thaggoraki has betrayed us.’
‘The ship,’ Throm murmured. ‘The ship would never have gone down like that. Someone… someone had uncoupled the valve lines.’
Durbarak’s response was interrupted by the sound of a horse’s neigh. He froze. Throm had heard it too, his expression becoming clearer.
‘Was that–’ he began to say.
‘Stay here,’ Durbarak growled. He left the flask in Throm’s lap and, after checking one of his pistols was still loaded and wedged in his belt, started to move towards the main section of the Draz Karr’s wreckage. The sound had come from the other side of the skyship’s carcass.
He trudged around it warily, eyes creased against the glare of the sun and the streamers of sand being carried from the baking hull by the wind. He rounded a broken propeller that had lodged itself upright in the dirt, and found himself staring at a horse.
Even to a duardin it was a fine-looking beast, white and ill-tempered, tugging at reins that had been tied around the propeller’s broken spoke. Durbarak drew his aetherlock, expecting the rider to be nearby, but there was no sign of anyone close to the beast. It snorted at him angrily and let out another shrill neigh. Only then did he notice the saddle on its back, and the device on its cloth. He turned and started to run back to Throm, stumbling and cursing as he went.
He heard a cracking sound – the discharge of another pistol, echoing back from the Draz Karr’s remains. Cursing more loudly, he reached the broken endrin once more, his shattered arm in agony.
He was too late. Throm slumped on his side in the dirt, gagging and choking, beard and hands slippery with his own blood as he tried in vain to hold shut his slit throat. A figure stepped away from the dying Kharadron, the wind snapping at its cloak. It sensed Durbarak and spun as he brought his pistol up.
‘You,’ the former captain of the Draz Karr snarled. The assassin didn’t respond, reaching into its cloak instead.
Durbarak fired, but by the time he had squeezed the trigger a throwing star had thudded in between his eyes, killing him instantly. His shot went wide and he fell straight back, spread-eagled in the sand, eyes staring sightlessly into Hysh’s fiery glare.
The assassin retrieved the throwing star and then crouched next to Throm, watching with apparent fascination as the last surviving crew member of the arkanaut frigate slowly bled to death. When his eyes had finally glazed over, the killer made one last circuit of the wreckage site, ensuring every last wounded duardin was dead, before returning and remounting its horse. It turned the white steed east and, leaning low in the saddle, set off after Gotrek, Maleneth and Aziz.
Chapter Ten
They caught sight of the Eight Pillars as darkness crept over the dunes once again. Maleneth, moving ahead of the other two, crested a rise of craggy desert rocks and found it sprawling abruptly below them – the towering, sand-blasted pillars that gave the place its name, and the great pyramid structure that lay at the end of the ancient colonnade, the final resting place of some human desert lord and, according to the seer coven in Barkash, the site of an inscription bearing the location of the Axe of Grimnir. The crumbling structures lay at the end of a long gorge, flanked by sheer walls of arid yellow stone.
When they had first set out from Barkash on the back of Aziz’s cart, the pack driver had told them that long ago a town had clustered around the pyramid, forever in the shadow of their entombed master. The slow, insidious work of the desert had wiped away any trace of the old settlement, but the recent affluence of the Triumvirate Cities had aroused interest in the Bone Desert and its potential secrets. Adventurers, artefact-hunters and looters had begun flocking to the Eight Pillars, lured by tall tales relating to the wealth the pyramid’s founder had supposedly been buried with.
Their arrival had resulted in a new town springing up. Like Khaled-Tush, it was largely ramshackle, a conglomeration of wagons that had been converted into dwellings. Tents and lean-tos and rough huts of dirt and stone clustered like growths around the bases of each of the eight great pillars, the spaces between teeming with people. The sound of voices and the crack of picks and shovels rose up on the humid wind.
‘It looks like trouble,’ Maleneth said darkly, surveying the dilapidated camp-turned-settlement.
‘No more than usual,’ Gotrek said.
They descended to the bottom of the gorge and moved along the craggy path to the outskirts of the Pillars. Hysh was setting, and the cliffs on either side provided relief from its burning gaze. Maleneth was too weary to offer any sort of thanks for the reprieve. She was bone-tired and ravenous. A part of her wished she’d perished in the skyship crash. Surely whatever fate awaited her beyond death was preferable to the heat that had scorched and burned her arms, neck and face, the ache that had worked its way into her limbs, the thirst that had turned her throat raw or the hunger that gnawed at her insides.