Out on the Eventide, the ghouls were slipping and tumbling across the waves, and some had reached the Spindrift. The ship was drifting so low that the creatures were able to bound up its hull and clamber over the railings.
The Gravesward raised their shields as slavering wretches slammed into them.
Aurun leapt into the fray, howling orders. Scythes flashed, scattering limbs and sending ghouls toppling from the ship.
‘It’s moving!’ cried Maleneth, dodging a headless mordant as it slapped onto the deck. She looked around in wonder as the Unburied burned brighter and the ship screeched into motion, turning around its central dome.
Prince Volant crowed in triumph, bathed in arcane light as he beheaded the screaming monster. It thrashed its vast, bat-like wings, then flipped backwards, crashing into the crowds of ghouls.
The prince swooped across the deck. ‘Lash yourselves to the ship! Tie yourselves down!’
As the Spindrift picked up speed, lots of the monsters fell back onto the waves below, but some were still loose on the deck.
While the soldiers obeyed the prince and began tying themselves to masts and gunwales, Lord Aurun strode across the decks, hacking furiously at the ghouls and hurling them over the railings.
Maleneth dashed to his side, opening the throat of a mordant that was about to pounce on him from behind. Aurun turned in time to see her rip the blade out and kick the gasping creature over the railings. He nodded in thanks before striding past her to return the favour, slicing his scythe through a ghoul that was about to leap on Maleneth.
They weaved across the deck, protecting the Erebid as the ship gained speed, juddering and rolling so violently that Maleneth felt as though she were drunk, reeling and staggering as she fought.
‘Bravely done, aelf,’ gasped Lord Aurun as he stumbled past her, making for the dome. ‘Now tie yourself to something!’
She fell backwards, the motion of the aether-ship wrong-footing her, sending her plummeting through the air towards the Eventide.
A hand locked around her wrist, jolting her arm painfully in its socket as someone hauled her back onto the deck, lashing her quickly to the ship before it lurched again.
‘You’re making a habit of this,’ she gasped when she realised who her saviour was.
Trachos nodded as he checked the ropes he had used to secure her. ‘I’ll take that as a thank you.’
His turn of phrase was so natural she laughed in surprise. ‘Was that a joke?’
He made a sound that might have been a laugh.
‘What happened to you?’ She tried to peer through the eyeholes in his helmet. Hearing Trachos speak so normally seemed even more miraculous than the power ripping through Gotrek and Lhosia.
When he had finished checking his knots, Trachos sat back against the railings, shaking his head. ‘Your plan is working. The Unburied are somehow directing the rune-fire down into the engines. Aether-gold is flowing freely through the engine.’
Maleneth shook her head in disbelief. The last thing she had expected was that her absurd plan would work. She gripped the railings as the decks turned faster around the dome.
Trachos looked over to where the bone-white Slayer was still sitting with the priestess, surrounded by a nimbus of aetheric currents. Unlike everyone else on board, they were calm, not tied down in any way, fixed to the spot by the energy burning through them, linking their brittle shells to the cocoons lying around the ship.
‘He…’ said Trachos, shaking his head as if unable to complete his thought.
‘Gotrek?’ Maleneth frowned. ‘He what?’
Trachos sounded confused. ‘I was forged in the light of Sigendil, by the will of the God-King. Sorcery has no power over me. And yet I feel the Slayer has changed me in some way.’
‘Something has changed. You sound almost intelligible.’
‘The Slayer had faith in me,’ he muttered. ‘When I did not.’
Maleneth laughed in disbelief. ‘I have never understood humans, Stormcast Eternals even less so. You sound like those dispossessed duardin who wanted to pray to him.’
‘I raised the gatehouse,’ Trachos replied gruffly. ‘I freed those cocoons, when the Erebid thought it was impossible. I made this vessel move.’ He looked up at the spinning stars. ‘I felt Sigmar’s power working through me again, as surely as I did when I was first forged in Azyr.’
Maleneth leant closer to him, lowering her voice. ‘So?’
He laughed. The sound did not seem at home, coming from his battle-scored faceplate. ‘I think, perhaps, I am starting to make peace with my god. And it would not have happened without the Slayer.’ He looked back at Gotrek. ‘What is he, Witchblade?’
Maleneth was about to mock his reverent tone, but as she glanced at Gotrek, hurling the Spindrift through the dark, haloed by the souls of the Unburied, the words snagged in her throat.
Chapter Twenty
The Lingering Keep
Maleneth was shocked to realise that she had fallen asleep. The motion of the Spindrift had settled into a steady, loping rhythm, and she had gone untold days without rest, but she still cursed as she woke, grabbing her knives and glancing around for attackers.
Trachos was at her side, his massive, battered armour shielding her from the wind. Beyond the ship the darkness was absolute, but Gotrek and Lhosia were still engulfed in a dazzling corona, scattering splashes of purple and gold over the Eventide.
The grinding of the engines was unchanged, but there was a new sound rising, an oceanic roar that Maleneth guessed was the reason she had awoken.
‘What is that?’ she asked, but as the decks completed another rotation, her question was answered. Up ahead, just a few miles away from the prow of the Spindrift, was a colossal fortress. It was the largest structure she had seen since arriving in Shyish, and it was built in the same style as the Barren Points – a tangled briar of iron and bone, curving and bur-like with looping, knotted towers. It burned purple on the horizon, like a sinking violet sun.
‘The capital,’ replied Trachos. His voice had regained some of the automaton-like coldness. ‘They call it the Lingering Keep.’
‘That noise.’ She frowned. ‘Is that cheering?’
He nodded and pointed past the prow.
A few hundred feet ahead of the ship, Prince Volant was flying through the flashing lights, leading his honour guard of mounted knights. His scythe was held victoriously over his head, and the crowds on the city walls had raised their voices in tribute.
‘You’d think he’d won a war,’ she sneered. ‘Rather than organising a hasty retreat.’
‘He has returned to them. Perhaps they did not expect him to.’ Trachos pointed at the cocoons on the deck. ‘And he has returned with these.’
They both fell quiet as they watched the city rushing towards them, taking a moment to study the strangeness of the place. As its sharp, thorny details grew clearer, Maleneth realised just how vast it was. It was almost on the scale of the free cities built by her own order. There was a curved, tusk-like tower right at its centre, many hundreds of feet tall, soaring over the rest of the barb-like structures, glittering with narrow arrow-slit windows. ‘Prince Volant’s palace, I presume,’ she said, pointing it out.
‘No. I heard Lord Aurun talking while you were asleep. That tower is called the Halls of Separation. That’s where the Erebid need to take their ancestors.’ Again, he surprised Maleneth with how normal he sounded. ‘How unique those buildings are. I have never seen such strange architecture. I wonder if in all of Shyish there are two underworlds that look the same. We all have such a different idea of what lies beyond the grave.’