The assassin didn’t have time for a second blow. Rune blazing and axe ignited, Gotrek Gurnisson came thundering through the splintered doorway.
‘Thaggaz!’ the Slayer roared, leaping the bed as he went straight for Aziz. The young killer didn’t consider meeting the duardin head-on. He turned and ran for the window, scrabbling wildly with the locked shutters.
‘I shouldn’t sully this axe with the blood of such a coward,’ Gotrek snarled. ‘You have as much courage as the ratmen, traitor. Now you’ll die like one.’
He swung.
Aziz yelped like a snared rabbit, the horrible noise cut short by a gristly crunch. The fyrestorm greataxe cleaved him from shoulder to groin, his blood gouting across the shutters. The two halves fell like sheared meat, the gore almost dousing the greataxe’s fiery core. Gotrek looked down at the grim remains for a few seconds, panting, anger still flushing his body. Then, without turning to Maleneth, he spoke.
‘Never trust anyone who can’t grow a beard.’
He turned to the bound aelf.
‘That goes for you too, murderling.’
‘If you count the Kharadrons, I think most of the things trying to kill us over the past few days have had beards,’ Maleneth responded, eyes narrowed.
The Slayer glared around the room, his one eye ablaze, as though seeking out new enemies invisible to Maleneth.
‘You worked it out then,’ she said, looking with distaste at Aziz’s remains, then flinching as her guts twisted, only this time it wasn’t down to the poison. ‘It wasn’t the vermin after all.’
‘For once,’ Gotrek muttered.
‘He was sent by a shadow of my past,’ Maleneth went on, the feeling of being broiled alive beginning to lose its intensity. ‘They all were. She won’t stop until I’m dead.’
‘I know the feeling, aelf.’
The Slayer appeared to accept that there was no one else in the room. The fires that seemed to pulse from the Master Rune and gleam in his bristling red-gold hair had dimmed. He stepped over to the bedside, grasped the cords binding Maleneth’s wrists and snapped them.
‘You brought me to the temple in the end,’ she said, rubbing her wrists.
‘Well I thought it was the only way to make you stop talking about this place and your damned Order. It was that or strangle you in your sleep, and there were enough skaz trying to do that already.’
‘You relinquished the inscription about the Axe of Grimnir,’ Maleneth said, brushing aside the duardin’s gruff attempt at humour. ‘You could have joined the party exploring the pillars. You chose to carry me here instead.’
‘If I’d known you would keep babbling like this I’d have left you in the desert.’
‘Thank you, Gotrek.’
The duardin grumbled something in his rough language, then sat heavily on the end of the bed, his doused axe laid across his lap.
‘I need someone to explain this mad world to me,’ he said quietly, almost to himself. He turned to look out of the window as the new day bled colour back into the dunes. ‘If I’d known he had sent me here, I’d have spat in Grimnir’s face.’
For a moment, the age that had once disfigured the side of the duardin’s face seemed to return, and Maleneth found herself looking at an old greybeard, his scarred flesh wizened, hunched over and alone as he stared out upon a strange reality that had been thrust upon him against his will. The illusion was gone in an instant, but the revelation it brought stayed with Maleneth. When Gotrek’s greataxe ignited and he threw himself into the fight with the Master Rune blazing, it was easy to lend credence to stories of the Slayer’s immortality. Seeing him now though, so isolated, so worn by all he had seen and all he had done, Maleneth found herself more convinced that he was no ordinary duardin than when she saw him roused to wrath. In all her time travelling the Mortal Realms, she had never known anyone or anything like him.
‘You don’t have to stay with me,’ she said. He turned back to look at her, the aged side of his face lost in shadow. ‘He was the last,’ Maleneth elaborated, indicating Aziz. ‘The last one sent to kill me. It’s over, for now.’
‘It’s never over,’ Gotrek said darkly.
They were silent, before Maleneth spoke again.
‘The Axe of Grimnir then. You said there was another way to reach the inscription in the temple.’
‘You are in no fit state to travel, even though your incessant prattling seems to imply that the antidote is working,’ Gotrek said.
‘Grant me until the morning, Slayer. You will need me if you’re to convince the Order to let you leave.’
Gotrek scoffed. ‘I wish they would try and stop me.’
‘I’m sure the likes of Weiss would try. Besides, I’m not staying either. Jakari is still out there. Waiting.’
‘You elgi,’ Gotrek said, standing. ‘If this is how you are with those you love, I cannot imagine how you treat your enemies.’
‘You cannot even begin to imagine, Gotrek Gurnisson,’ Maleneth said. The duardin let out something approximating a laugh. The crushing weight that Maleneth had seen, the one that she so rarely caught glimpses of when the Slayer’s darkest memories beset him, had gone. Gotrek slung his axe over his shoulder, blood still running from its blade.
‘I’ll go tell the manling priests they’ve got some bodies to clear up. If you’re not ready to move by the time the sun’s up, aelf, I’m going without you.’
‘If you so much as dare, I swear my fyresteel will spell your doom, duardin,’ Maleneth said. A smile ghosted across her lips as the Slayer stomped out. Then she slumped back in the bloody bed, and finally let her eyes fall shut.
About the Author
Robbie MacNiven is a Highlands-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Blood of Iax, The Last Hunt, Carcharodons: Red Tithe, Carcharodons: Outer Dark and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.