And began to sink.
‘Khaine’s bloodied blades,’ Maleneth swore. She leapt. Lithe as a feline, she landed in a crouch next to Aziz. Without missing a breath, she turned and slid the belt from around her waist. Gotrek was already half-gone, sinking like a lodestone. He let out a roar that eclipsed even that of the tusker, clawing in vain for firm ground, seemingly more angry than panicked. Maleneth darted forward until she felt the yielding sand begin to drag at her feet. She knelt a pace back, and flung the belt out towards the duardin.
‘Is that all you have?’ Gotrek bellowed as the strip of aelf-cured hide reached him.
Maleneth smiled. ‘Take it or drown. It matters not to me. I can always recover your corpse and dig the Master Rune from you cold flesh.’
Gotrek snatched the end. Maleneth stood, dug her feet into the sand as best she could, wrapped the belt’s end around both fists and began to pull. It was like trying to drag a Khainite sacrificial slab single-handedly.
You should leave him, her mistress hissed. He is a mad fool.
‘Help me,’ Maleneth snarled at Aziz, then realised he was no longer at her side. The teamster was sprinting along the bottom of the dune, headed away from them.
‘I will seek help!’ he yelled back at her.
‘There’s no time, you fool,’ Maleneth barked after him, but to no avail. He kept going.
She cursed the boy’s cowardice, every muscle straining as she leaned back. The belt was taut and quivering, but she was certain it would hold. She had strangled the life from enough people with it to be sure.
Gotrek’s downward motion was arrested and, with agonising slowness, reversed. He began to rise up out of the dragging sands and, with a last roar of effort, dug his fists into the edge of the firm ground and hauled himself from the mire like some primordial earth-god returning to the Mortal Realms. Maleneth collapsed backwards, panting.
Behind them, the tusker was gone. The two stood and watched in silence as the rear of the wagon, upended now, was dragged under inch by slow, creaking inch. Eventually there was a final sucking sound and the whole thing was gone. The sand lay silent and undisturbed, as though the wagon and its tusker had never existed.
‘We must leave, Gotrek, son of Gurni,’ Maleneth said. ‘If we wish to reach Khaled-Tush before nightfall.’
‘What happened to the beardling?’
‘He ran,’ Maleneth replied. ‘He probably thought you were going to eat him for leading you astray.’
‘Better than stabbing him in the back, aelf.’
‘Only in your deranged imagination am I forever murdering those who are trying to help me, Gotrek.’
Gotrek levelled an axe at her. ‘I saw enough of your kind’s treachery in the world before.’
‘The world before is dead,’ Maleneth hissed, rounding on him. ‘And it pains me that you did not die with it.’
He didn’t offer a retort, and she assumed he was struggling to master his anger at having to be saved from so ignominious an end as the dragging sands. When she caught his gaze, though, she realised his focus was elsewhere.
There was a figure atop the dune behind them. It was little more than a silhouette, dark against the cloudless blue of the heavens. She saw it only for a second before it disappeared back beyond the rise, clearly sensing their attention.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
‘I know not, aelf. But they have been following us since we left the city.’
‘Since Barkash?’ Maleneth snarled. ‘Why didn’t you say something, you foolish dolt? Do you not think it’s even slightly relevant that there is someone hunting us?’
Gotrek shrugged. ‘They were keeping well back – we couldn’t have caught them unless we laid up some sort of ambush, and I’m in no mind to linger in this place when I have my axe to find. Besides, they were mounted, meaning they weren’t the Grey Lord’s vermin.’
‘They are not skaven, so you do not think they are relevant?’ Maleneth demanded. ‘And just what if they are being recompensed by him?’
Her words were only an attempt to mask her anger. She hadn’t seen the figure before, and she had never known a duardin to be more attentive to his surroundings than her. Then again, she had never known a duardin like Gotrek Gurnisson.
‘Let us move, as the day is wearing thin,’ she said, then realised Gotrek had already begun to stomp off. She rolled her eyes, bound her belt around her waist and followed.
Chapter Two
They walked. The heat raged against them like a physical force, a beast that sought to bear them down into the shifting sands. They followed the tops of the dunes running parallel with the trail markers. Maleneth didn’t trust them not to end in the dragging sands once more, but they were the only apparent clear route to Khaled-Tush.
They hadn’t gone far before they stumbled across the last thing Maleneth had expected to find in the desert – water. In a cleft between two dunes they discovered a timber trough, its bottom full. Next to it was what looked like a hitching post, the rope tied around it lying abandoned in the sand.
‘A waypoint for message riders?’ she wondered out loud. Gotrek said nothing. They filled up the water skins and carried on, the shadows cast by the dunes starting to stretch.
They reached Khaled-Tush just as the bone-chill of deep night was beginning to creep over them. Chamon and Ghyran were ascendant overhead, soaring half-lit spheres amidst the constellations spread across the ink-spill of the aetheric void. The lights above were mirrored by the lights below, a thousand campfires creating a flickering firmament surrounding the mirror sheen of the great oasis of the Khaled.
The trading post’s veiled guards intercepted them as they approached the outer wagons, peering at the strange travellers by the light of raised torches. One of Gotrek’s coins saw them safely through.
Ahead, Khaled-Tush sprawled, a great encampment of desert traders, tribespeople and travellers. What had once been little more than a watering hole for those moving between the cities of Barkash, Hedina and Merport had become a settlement in its own right. Ranks of wagons, carts and covered caravans surrounded wooden structures constructed from the trees that clustered around the banks of the oasis – counting houses and taverns, brothels and guard posts, the heart of an ever-expanding trade hub on a route made rich by the astute ruling councils of the Triumvirate Cities, and the wares of the duardin known by the desert peoples as the Great Karagi.
‘I didn’t think I could find a more miserable kruk of a place than the Unbak lodge,’ Gotrek grumbled as they halted on the edge of an opening between the circled wagons. ‘But it seems this mannish age knows how to disappoint.’
Ahead of them lay a dirt square formed between the idle caravans and a row of ramshackle buildings. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was bustling with trader stalls, haggling booths and merchants selling wares from the backs of their carts. The cool night air was thick with the aromas of spices and perfumes, and lit by the light of braziers and firepits.
‘We trek for half a day through blistering desert, with no food and little water, yet the sight of this place dulls your spirits?’ Maleneth demanded. ‘Hysh must have cooked whatever remains of your addled brains, duardin.’
‘I’d wager they’d still be more filling than whatever this place has to offer,’ Gotrek muttered.