Volant glanced at Gotrek and Lhosia.
Gotrek shrugged and looked at Trachos. ‘Blame the manling.’
The captain had not looked at Gotrek or Trachos properly until that moment. He now stared at them in surprise.
‘Your companions, your majesty. Are they the cause of the problems at the docks?’
Trachos shrugged. ‘The old Kharadron devices form a network across your whole princedom. In triggering the duardin mechanisms at the Barren Points, it’s possible I have also triggered engines here.’
‘Triggered them?’ said the captain. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If that’s everything, I will inspect the walls,’ said Volant, ignoring the captain’s question and waving to the door.
‘One minute.’ Gotrek held up his hand, and Prince Volant halted. ‘We had a deal. I saved your corpse eggs. Now it’s time to keep your side of the bargain.’
‘Nothing is saved yet,’ replied the prince. ‘The mordants will be here within hours. We need to hold these walls until the high priestess and I have performed our rite, or the Unburied will be destroyed along with everything else.’
Gotrek narrowed his eye. ‘Get them to the capital. That was the deal. You owe me a god.’
‘You swore to save them,’ said Volant, speaking softly despite Gotrek’s bullish tone.
Maleneth noticed that the prince spoke to the Slayer very differently to the way he addressed the captain. The impatience was gone. He was talking to Gotrek as an equal.
‘You have shown bravery and skill beyond anything I would expect to see in a non-Erebid. And there is power in you that goes beyond my understanding. I thought you were insane when you spoke of challenging Nagash, but now…’ Volant shrugged. ‘Now I think you might just be destined for something greater than the rest of us, Gotrek Gurnisson.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ he muttered, ‘but I did not come here to fight your wars.’
Volant shook his head. ‘I am not asking you to fight our wars. I would ask only this – lend me your axe and your courage one last time. Today will either rob us of thousands of years of tradition or see us victorious, preserving the dignity of our elders as the rest of Shyish falls to ruin. If you will help my knights hold the city walls, I can go with Lhosia to the Halls of Separation and make my forefathers proud, either by my triumph or by my glorious death.’
Gotrek looked at the shields mounted in the alcoves and the poems carved into them. There was a long, tense moment as he seemed to forget about his surroundings. ‘I lost everything,’ he said finally, his voice low. ‘And now I’m stuck in this shoddy, mannish age.’ He scowled at Maleneth. ‘Surrounded by people who care nothing for tradition and respect.’ He met the prince’s eye and nodded. ‘It would do me good to fight for something again. To fight alongside someone who wishes to preserve rather than change.’ Gotrek nodded. ‘I’ll hold the wall for you, Morn-Prince.’
He stepped closer and tapped his axe on the prince’s armour. ‘But know this. I will also hold you to your oath. When those cocoons are safe, you send me to Nagash.’ He spat on the floor. ‘Or you will have something worse than ghouls to worry about.’
Prince Volant nodded. ‘We have an understanding.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The Ghoul King
The Morn-Prince ordered Lord Aurun to accompany Lhosia and the Unburied to the Halls of Separation, promising to join them shortly, then led Gotrek to the battlements above the city gates. As Maleneth and Trachos followed, they received shocked glances from the soldiers who lined the steps. Maleneth smiled at them, conscious of how white and hungry her grin would look in her bloodstained face. She was probably the first aelf they had ever seen. She was keen to make the right impression.
‘We spied the mordants even before we saw you approaching,’ said Captain Ridens as they climbed the stairs inside one of the thorn-like towers that lined the walls. ‘Every survivor who reached us brought news of them, explaining that the prominents had been taken.’ He grimaced, shaking his head. ‘They described terrible things, all of them. But it was not until two days ago that we started to see what they were talking about.’
They reached the top of the tower and stepped out onto the curtain wall. A chill wind lashed against Maleneth, and ranks of soldiers backed away, bowing, as they made space for the prince to approach the wall.
He stared out into the darkness. ‘What do you mean? I can’t see any mordants out there.’
The captain nodded to some soldiers further down the wall, standing beside a catapult the size of a house. They leapt into action, lighting tapers and fastening bundles of dried wood to the weapon. There was a rattle of whirring cogs as the catapult sent an arc of fire towards the stars. It landed with an explosion of sparks, half a mile from the city, splashing light over the Eventide.
Maleneth hissed in disgust. Lit up briefly by the explosion were lines of ghouls. She had seen plenty of the creatures by this point, so it was not their crooked, hunched bodies that shocked her, nor the gore dripping from their wasted arms. It was their lack of movement. Every ghoul she had seen was frenzied, but the light had revealed lines of motionless flesh-eaters. They had gathered in ranks, like a normal, reasonable army. Seeing them like that, standing with such a vile pretence of sanity, was worse than watching them leap and claw.
‘How long have they been like that?’ she said as the light faded, leaving her with a disturbing after-image.
Captain Ridens looked at Prince Volant, who nodded.
‘For five days.’
‘They’ve been standing there for five days?’ Maleneth laughed in disbelief. ‘Doing nothing?’
The captain nodded. ‘Survivors from the other prominents say this is unusual – that the mordants are not usually so well ordered.’
‘Damn right,’ she muttered. ‘What is this?’ she asked Gotrek. ‘What are they doing?’
The Slayer shrugged. ‘Looks like they’re waiting for a command.’
‘A command from whom? And how would they follow an order even if it came? They have no minds.’
Prince Volant replied without taking his gaze from the darkness. ‘The histories talk of such behaviour. It is not unheard of. Mordants have been known to act with reason in the presence of a…’ He hesitated, looking for the right word. ‘A leader of some kind.’
‘A leader?’ Maleneth was incredulous. ‘You saw them. They’re like wolves fighting over a carcass. They can’t recognise leadership skills. They couldn’t distinguish a leader from a thigh bone.’
The prince looked past her to Trachos. The Stormcast Eternal had taken out his square-framed spyglass and was adjusting its nest of lenses, flipping clasps and turning rows of polished brass cogs. He held the device up to one of the eyeholes in his helmet.
‘Can you see in the dark with that machine?’ asked Volant, but Trachos did not answer. He stood in silence for several seconds, looking in different directions, until he spotted something and gave a grunt of recognition.
He handed the device to Gotrek and pointed out past the wynd that led to the gates.
Gotrek looked where Trachos was indicating and laughed. ‘Well, would you look at that. He’s impressively ugly.’
Maleneth snatched the spyglass from him and stared through the lens. By some cunning artifice of its Azyrite makers, the device was able to penetrate the pitch dark. It was not true vision but a ghostly approximation of sight. Lines of ghouls simmered into view, as if they were painted in smoke, faint, ephemeral and grotesque.