That had surprised her. She had been preparing for the day when Gotrek would demand they part company, rehearsing her own arguments. Speaking in terms that a duardin would understand, she was oathsworn to protect the Master Rune, even if it was currently hammered into a mad Doomseeker’s heart. She could not leave an item so precious to the Order of the Azyr unguarded, and thus she could not leave Gotrek.
But God of Murder, she wished she could.
Focus, Witchblade, whispered the voice of Maleneth’s former mistress, bound to the blood vial she wore around her neck. Now is not the time to let the heat take you.
She opened both eyes to regard the Slayer and the rune on his breast. Forged in the grim likeness of the god Grimnir, it blazed with a deep golden lustre, as though drinking in the heat of the desert. The same could not be said for the rest of Gotrek’s body. His exposed arms and torso were burned red raw from Hysh’s unyielding light, his swirling tattoos almost lost amidst the flaking skin. Yet he showed no discomfort in the heat, even though she was certain she could see blisters forming on his inflamed skin. She had told him to at least don a cloak, had even offered her own, but he’d ignored her. According to the Slayer, fancy cloaks and clothing were for umgi, not dwarfs.
The duardin shifted. He had noticed Maleneth’s attention. His single eye moved from the fyrestorm greataxe slung across his lap, and she found herself dropping her gaze before it met her own. That was a feeling she had rarely experienced since leaving the Murder Temples. There was something about his one remaining eye – more than grim resolve, more than stony determination, a fire that seemed able to burn bare the very thoughts of those it touched. It was the eye of a being that had witnessed a great deal more than it should have. The eye that, for all the private scorn she held for such a view, could well have belonged to a deity not of the Mortal Realms.
‘Drink, aelf.’
It was a statement, not a question. Maleneth realised Gotrek was holding out a water skin. She reached over the meal sacks that separated them in the back of the wagon, and took it.
She hadn’t realised how thirsty she was. Dehydration was just one of the desert’s thousand dangers. To live in such places was to defy the odds. Here in the Bone Desert especially, nothing lived beyond the wagon’s flank, bar the shaven tusker that was dragging it. All was a sea of undulating, bleached yellow dunes, punctuated only by the skeletal remains of vast beasts. Some said those carcasses were what gave the desert its name. Others claimed the sand itself was bone-dust, blown fine as powder from the realm of the slaughter-god on a burning furnace wind.
It didn’t do well to ponder such things. Maleneth had begun the journey with just one hope – that they would use the opportunity to stop at the outpost maintained by the Order of the Azyr deep in the desert’s heart, close to the monument city known as the Eight Pillars. Gotrek had already brushed the suggestion off. His destination was the Pillars themselves, driven by the rumoured presence of an inscription detailing the location of the Axe of Grimnir within the ancient ruins. An axe the duardin claimed was once his while the dead world lived.
‘Finish it,’ she said, tossing the half-empty water skin back to Gotrek. The Slayer let it land in his lap without catching it. Maleneth fought the urge to snap at him.
Aziz had sworn to take them as far as Khaled-Tush, the oasis settlement a day’s journey from the Pillars. They had found him in the market at Barkash, a young tusker pack driver and teamster who shifted trade stock along the desert trails for one of the local merchant cartels. A single gold coin from Gotrek had been more than enough to allay his reservations. Now, three and a half days since Barkash’s fertile river basin had given way to the desolation of the endless sand dunes, Maleneth was beginning to consider riding ahead once they reached Khaled-Tush and bringing the servants of the Order of the Azyr directly to Gotrek. The Master Rune had to be examined and Gotrek’s true abilities assessed. If even half the rumours already spawned about him were true, he was too valuable and too dangerous simply to be wandering the Mortal Realms.
She didn’t relish the thought of telling him that.
You are afraid of the duardin, hissed Maleneth’s mistress, the disembodied echo-voice slipping into her thoughts. No true child of Khaine would hesitate because of that brutish race.
‘I would like nothing more than to see if this Khainite could rip out your heart, mistress,’ she muttered darkly. ‘If only you still had one.’
There was no response from the blood vial around her neck, and she tried to put her mind elsewhere. The wagon lurched uncomfortably. Anywhere that wasn’t coarse and burning hot. The lurch came again, and the tusker hauling the wagon let out a bellow.
‘What is happening?’ she demanded, pulling back her hood and rising onto her knees to look ahead. They had entered a shallow depression between two dunes, following the line of Hysh-bleached wooden stakes that marked out the route in the event of a sandstorm. They trailed away over the next rise directly ahead, but the tusker seemed to be struggling.
‘Esha, esha!’ Aziz was snapping at the beast, poking its stubbly rear with his goad. ‘Maliki esha!’
‘It’s trapped in the sand,’ Maleneth said as the tusker let out another fearful bellow. ‘We are sinking.’
‘But the posts,’ Aziz said. ‘We are still on the correct route, sellah. This cannot be the dragging sands!’
‘Well, clearly this route is the wrong one,’ Maleneth snapped. ‘Gotrek, get up. We must abandon this wagon. Now.’
The duardin had strapped his axe across his back and was leaning over his side of the wagon, peering at the sand around them. The wheels were already half-submerged, and the tusker was now floundering visibly.
‘The dunes must be stable,’ Maleneth said. ‘Grab the water skins, and jump.’
‘We cannot leave the produce!’ Aziz said, scrambling into the back of the wagon with Maleneth and Gotrek and trying to heft the meal sacks. ‘I cannot lose them! They will beat me if I fail to bring them even one less than I am signed for!’
‘You’ll be delivering them straight to Shyish and the God of Death himself if you stay,’ Gotrek snapped, grabbing a pack and the two nearest water skins and tying them around his waist. Even now, it still sounded strange to hear him trying to pronounce the names of the Eight Realms.
‘Gotrek, the boy first,’ Maleneth said.
‘Hold still, manling,’ Gotrek grunted, and grabbed Aziz around his skinny waist. The pack driver struggled, then let out a terrified wail as Gotrek braced himself on the wagon’s side, and flung him. Aziz thumped into the sand on the bottom of the dune to the right of the trail, rolled with surprising dexterity and stared back at the wagon. He didn’t sink.
‘Go, you oaf,’ Maleneth said to Gotrek. The timber around them was beginning to creak and groan at the pressure exerted on it, and the tusker was going wild, lowing and goring the yielding ground beneath it. Gotrek scowled at Maleneth for a moment, then mounted the wagon’s side and, with a bellow of exertion, flung himself. The rune on his chest burned brighter than ever, and he cleared far more ground than Maleneth had expected. He slammed into the sand half a dozen feet short of Aziz.