‘Take him to the Tithekeeper,’ said the old woman from across the street, and started deliberately forwards. She pulled a long knife from the sleeve of her gown. The rest of the townsfolk followed a step behind, drawing in from every shopfront and porch step.
‘I’m beginning to like this town,’ said Gotrek. ‘Tell me again what it’s called.’
The old woman flashed her knife across the duardin’s arm. He bent lazily into the blow and took it across the snarling beast maw emblazoned on his shoulder plate. He produced a crooked grin of ale-brown teeth, and with an explosion of neck strength head-butted the old woman in the chest. She flew back as though kicked by a gargant, skidding the last few yards to rest by her front door.
‘Hammer of Sigmar!’ Nieder made a clumsy hash of a twelve-pointed star across his chest.
‘You can’t just cry to whichever god suits,’ Gotrek roared, blood splattering his monstrous face. ‘Pick one and pray like hell that you picked right, like the rest of us do.’
Cackling mercilessly, Gotrek ducked the swing of a butcher’s cleaver, broke the arm that wielded it, then hoisted the man by the belt and hurled him headlong into a dozen others, scattering them all like pins. Cockspur, the skinner, leapt on Gotrek from his blind side and rammed a knife into the muscle of his neck. Gotrek simply shrugged him off and raised his axe. Nieder sprang up with a shout. Gotrek flung back an elbow without bothering to turn, parting him from his cudgel and dropping him to the floor with a face full of broken pieces. Unstoppable, the duardin’s axe clove the skinner from neck to hip. The man screamed for longer than a dead man ought, fire gouting from his open mouth as the weapon’s power devoured him from the inside out. The duardin shouldered the crisped meat aside and swung his axe to meet the war-scythe that crashed into the cheek of the blade.
Nieder gawped over his broken jaw at the sight of the Tithekeeper roused to battle.
He was a strong man, beneath his dark robes, broad and tall, his features concealed behind a ghoulish sack mask. It was an old tradition, to separate the man from the grisly task, but in practice there was no one who did not know who he was or bless him for the service he gave.
Gotrek shoved back with a savage grunt. The Tithekeeper rode the push and spun, his war-scythe flickering. Gotrek sidestepped at the last, and a blow that would have claimed any other mortal’s head whispered across the metal plate of his shoulder. Gotrek countered with a crude punch of his axe butt. The Tithekeeper parried it. Sparks flew where the weapons met.
The Tithekeeper was Skeltmorr’s greatest fighter. He needed to be. He was the one who undertook the perilous trek to the place of tribute. He was the one it fell to, to take action when, despite the best efforts of the entire town, the sum of the tribute again fell short. Once, years ago, Nieder had thought that he had had what it took to be the Tithekeeper. The champion had put him on his back with a single move.
Now, he watched as Gotrek and the Tithekeeper traded blows, daring to blink only as the champion’s charred body hit the ground and his head rolled towards the tannery.
Gotrek spat on his beaten rival, and after another few seconds had dispatched everything else in the street that was not yet smouldering and still of a mind to fight. The Wislass sisters launched a further flurry of arrows, a few of which were shallowly buried in Gotrek’s chest, while the duardin moved on from slaughtering the living to set about tearing down the front wall of the women’s house. The happy crackle of flames took up roost in the half-timber frame and quickly spread, smoke pouring into the street.
The duardin stepped out from the spreading inferno, unburnt. Nieder peeled himself up off the ground. He stood before Gotrek with his head bowed, as he would before his god or his king. Talking felt like chewing on a lit coal, but he did it anyway.
‘I’ll take you to your friend.’
The belfry at the top of the mound wasn’t the largest building in Skeltmorr. That burden of honour rested on the Bone Drake. Or it had. The inn’s timber skeleton was still burning. But the old church was considerably older. It had been erected on the site by the followers of Sigmar, long before there had been a town on these hills, a brotherly gift of devotion to the faithful of the God-King’s dearest friend and ally. The bell had not tolled in generations and would not, so the legend went, until Nagash sought penance from his spurned brother and had forgiveness granted. Hummocks of turned earth dotted the climb towards its gates, regular as soldiers, as though a regiment of Graveswatch had been turned to crumbly ash-grey soil by the decree of the Bone King.
‘What is this unhallowed ground?’ Gotrek breathed, gripping tightly to his axe.
‘Where we buried our dead.’
The duardin shook his head but spoke no more aloud. Nieder led him along the winding path to the church’s threshold. Articulated columns of rough-hewn black stone framed its pallid gateway. Old and faded runes marked the bleached wood, Sigmarite spells to ward off the predations of skull-faced gods.
‘Shoddy stonework,’ said Gotrek.
‘It’s older than the hills.’
‘So am I.’
Nieder had no answer.
‘Is it locked?’ said Gotrek.
‘Always. And warded against–’
‘Good,’ said Gotrek, and kicked it down.
He stomped through. The stark light of his axe-metal sent claws of shadow deep into the crumbling masonry of the inside. A pair of smaller doors, mottled by wood mould and hanging from their hinges like rotten teeth, led to small rooms long fallen to disuse. At the end of a short corridor was a well of stairs leading up to the belfry and down to the cellar where the priests of old had stored beer and communed with the dead. Dusty hummocks of what looked like mouldering coats lay across the far end of the corridor around the mouth of the well.
‘Down it is,’ said Gotrek.
Nieder looked across. ‘Why not up?’
The duardin gave a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t care to test my weight on that floor above us, and I’ve been looking to meet my doom since your god cheated death for the first time. Trust a dwarf. It will be down.’
Nieder said nothing, hanging deliberately back as Gotrek forged ahead.
One of the skin heaps stirred.
The Bone Kings of Nagash demanded endless tribute. Of blood. Of bone. Even of souls. But most of the human body, they shunned. Skin. Hair. Teeth. Materials that generations of Tithekeepers and a people hardened to despise waste had learned to make use of.
Nieder smiled through the pain of his face as the first skin hound rose up off the ground and sank its collection of human teeth into Gotrek’s calf. The duardin bellowed in surprise as he fought to shake the thing loose, his efforts inadvertently rousing the rest of the pack from their torpor. There were nine in all. Each doggerel beast was a unique creation, a mangle of spliced parts put together in the most horrifically slight approximation of the canine they had been named for.
Gotrek succeeded in yanking the first creature’s bloody jaws from his leg, just as the rest of the pack attacked. With the first hound held at arm’s length, he tore open the leathery chest of the second with a blow from his axe. Stuffed innards of human hair went up like dried kindling, the golem beast bouncing off the near wall and scrabbling for footing, gummy jaws clapping even as it collapsed into flame.
Six more buried him in skin.
The ninth and last circled. It padded towards Nieder. Its head, sculpted into a canine snout, remained chillingly human. Its eyes, one brown and one blue, glimmered with lost intelligence, the faint wetness of an innocent on the brink of tears.
‘No,’ Nieder mumbled, struggling to speak clearly through his broken mouth. He held up an open hand as if to show the golem he was unarmed. He had lost his club in the street and had not thought at the time to pick it up. ‘I brought him for you. I’m not with him.’ The last words came out of him as a yelp as the skin hound lunged.