‘You’ve no idea who or what I am,’ I say. ‘I could drink this for days and still be ready to fight. My flesh was forged in the Anvil of the Apotheosis, not prised from the womb of…’ I hesitate, struggling to imagine what he was prised from.
The rune in his chest glimmers slightly, flashing in his eye, turning it crimson. Then he laughs and throws another skin at me.
‘Let’s see,’ he says, grabbing another skin for himself and poking at part of my armour. ‘What does this do?’
The aelf is somewhere back down the gulley, taking her turn to watch for drakes, so I allow myself to relax. Since I started drinking, the voice in my mind has fallen quiet and I’m feeling a little more at ease. Once the duardin is dead, I can dig the rune from his remains and be on my way. My return to Azyr will be far more glorious than I had expected if the aelf is even half right about the power of the rune – and by the way my instruments are behaving, she is. The witch is a fool to have let the Slayer live so long. He openly derides Sigmar, along with every other god he knows the name of. He’s an enemy of the God-King. And he’s an animal. Just like the drake he left steaming in the hollow. All he cares about is which of us can hold the most ale.
After another hour of drinking, I begin to feel odd. Gotrek’s face shifts in the half-light, swelling and leering like a gargoyle. ‘What is this?’ I say, frowning at the skin I was drinking from.
‘The first decent ale I’ve found in this sweaty armpit you call a realm.’ He wipes froth from his beard with a forearm that looks like a thigh. Beer glistens on his scarred skin.
I have the disconcerting feeling that I’m drunk.
Gotrek lets out a deep, rattling belch.
‘I need to rest,’ I mutter, falling back against the tree stump, feeling as though the mountain is swaying beneath me.
Gotrek grins, revealing a jumble of broken teeth, then slumps back against a rock, reaching for another skin, ignorant of everything beyond the satisfaction of out-drinking me.
‘So now you’re murdering duardin?’
I wince as I walk. My head is already pounding from the ale I drank last night and the voice in my mind feels like fingernails scraping across the inside of my skull.
I’m not murdering anyone. He wants to reach the Neverspike and I’m taking him there.
‘You know what will happen to him if he approaches the Amethyst Prince. Nagash put him there as punishment for defying him. He’s there as an example. As soon as Gotrek touches him he’ll be ripped apart by death magic.’
If he dies, it’s because he’s a fool. A dangerous fool. And a blasphemer to boot. He talks of killing the gods. Who would blame me for letting someone so stupid destroy themselves?
‘The witch.’
I look around. She’s clambering up the slope behind us, her eyes locked on me. She has spent all this time in service to an impious lunatic and she has done nothing to take the rune. When the duardin is dead, I’ll deal with her. My fingers brush against one of my hammers. I already have a good idea how.
‘Manling!’ bellows Gotrek from further up the slope. ‘You’ve earned your beer!’
I pick up my pace, clambering quickly over the rocks to reach the Slayer’s side. We’re perched on a ledge looking out over another drop and the sight that greets me is horribly familiar. Another world has been smashed into this one: Shyish. The Neverspike is an icy, iridescent spear of rock that juts from the mountain, completely alien from the sun-bleached crags that surround it. The rock is shimmering and rimy, edged with patches of ice. It has no place in the Realm of Fire and the air knows it, billowing around the shard in flickering, static-charged spirals. If we had approached from any other direction, the Neverspike would have remained hidden from view. It is clearly the work of a divine intelligence. Even in Shyish, the shard would not have been a natural formation – it is a single curved talon of rock, and at its summit there is a tall alcove that looks like a shrine. There is a fire burning in the alcove, purple and blue, death magic, engulfing the figure within. It’s impossible to see the prince clearly from here, so I take out one of my looking glasses and turn the shaft until the prince comes into focus.
I grimace. He’s rigid with pain, but still alive, after all these long centuries. The flames are burning him, causing his skin to blister and peel, but he cannot die. His eyes are gone, melted into blackened sockets and his flesh looks like living ash, crumbling and flickering in the blaze, but his agony is eternal – a warning to all who would challenge the so-called God of Death.
I hand the looking glass to Gotrek and he mutters something in the duardin tongue, shaking his head as he sees the prince.
The Slayer is minutes away from death. Nagash’s magic will not preserve Gotrek as it has done the prince; it will simply immolate him. It fascinates me that he can walk so blindly to his death.
‘Why do you seek him?’ I ask. ‘What do you want?’
‘Vengeance,’ he snarls, taking the looking glass from his eye and handing it back to me. ‘The gods lied to me, manling. They promised me a worthy doom, then stole it from me. They brought me to your wretched realms with no explanation. So I’m going to make them bloody pay.’
I am about to explain to Gotrek that the Amethyst Prince is not divine, and never was, when I realise the absurdity of arguing with someone who thinks he can kill gods. The Slayer is insane. I knew it the first moment I laid eyes on him. I look at the rune in his chest. The ur-gold is forged to resemble the face of a deranged, psychotic Slayer. It looks almost identical to Gotrek.
I nod and gesture to a narrow bridge. It leads across a sheer drop to the Neverspike. It’s a single, slender arch of stone, soaring across the chasm like a hurled rope, suspended by some unseen artifice.
The aelf joins us as we make the final approach, grimacing as the air seems to attack us, lashing and hissing around our faces as we cross the bridge.
We are only halfway across when shapes assemble on the far side.
‘Aye,’ laughs the Slayer. ‘Show us what you’ve got.’
As we get nearer, I see that the figures are corpses – the remains of men and women, lurching from the rocks that surround the spike. They are charred beyond recognition but they move with silent purpose, gripping swords and axes as they shuffle onto the bridge. I mutter a curse as I see that the whole spike is spawning similar figures. There are hundreds of them struggling to their feet.
Gotrek roars in delight and thunders across the bridge, his axe flashing as he raises it over his head.
Maleneth hisses a curse and barges past me, drawing her knives as she sprints after him.
I take my time, slowly drawing my hammers as Gotrek crashes into the blackened husks.
He burns brighter than the prince, hacking and roaring through the crush. Blackened bodies fly in every direction, tumbling into the crevasse. Gotrek barely breaks his stride, carving a path through the undead husks with Maleneth keeping pace, lunging and stabbing.
By the time I reach the end of the bridge, dozens of the revenants have been hacked to pieces, but there are plenty left to attack me. I stride out onto the Neverspike, hammering corpses aside, smashing the sorcery from their lifeless flesh.
We fight towards the burning prince, and the battle is bathed in the violet light of his pyre. Gotrek grows even more excited, hacking through the throng with even more ferocity.
‘Hurry, manling!’ he cries, waving me on.
I oblige, picking up my pace. When Gotrek dies, I need to be close. The aelf is not a worthy guardian of the rune. I must be on hand to pluck it from his ashes.
As we approach the alcove holding the Amethyst Prince, it becomes hard to see. The death magic is dazzling, bleeding from the tormented prince and flashing through rows of shuffling corpses, scattering light like strands of purple lightning.