Gotrek Gurnisson
One, Untended
(David Guymer)
From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.
Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.
But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.
Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.
The Age of Sigmar had begun.
Master,
The artefact is within my grasp, but there have been complications and I am unable to report to you as requested. I can only hope that this note will be recovered by another of your agents and returned to you in my stead. I am still within the bounds of the Twin-Tailed City and appear likely to remain so for some time. I just need more time.
I will not fail you.
Still and eternally the faithful servant of Azyr,
Maleneth Witchblade
‘Get back, aelfling,’ Gotrek scowled. ‘This is not something that your pretty little eyes need to see.’
Maleneth rolled her ‘pretty little’ eyes as Gotrek bent over the open sewer that ran along the back yard of the Missed Striking, one hand on the ivy-scrawled corner of a brick wall. She watched with a casual anatomist’s fascination as the immense muscle groups that corded his back rippled and flexed. The duardin turned to look over the single plate of black armour fixed across his left shoulder.
His one good eye was virulently bloodshot, his preternaturally aged skin slacker and more haggard even than usual. His huge blade of gold-struck orange hair drooped over the armour’s leonine features, sodden with stale beer where he had slept with his head against a trestle table. ‘I told you–’ His throat suddenly clenched. His face blanched. Red light from the street lamps slithered across it. ‘Grungni’s beard.’
Then he was violently, messily sick into the sewer.
Maleneth patted the thickly creased skin at the back of his head.
‘There, there.’
‘I hate you, aelfling,’ Gotrek said between ructions. ‘I hate you and all your darkling kin.’
‘I know.’
After a few minutes the duardin’s heaves subsided, and he spat the last chunks of a green sausage and ghyrvole egg supper into the ditch.
‘This has never happened to me before.’
‘I am sure that you say that to all of the girls.’
Gotrek glared at her.
‘A joke,’ she said.
‘I think there was something nasty in my beer,’ Gotrek complained.
Maleneth nodded sympathetically. There had indeed been something nasty in the Slayer’s beer. Several somethings. Duardin were notoriously resistant to poisoning, but the amount of gravelock, heartcease and scarlet clover that Gotrek Gurnisson had obligingly consumed over the last day and a half would have killed a gargant. He should have been curled up on the weed-filled yard bleeding out of every orifice rather than complaining of an upset stomach.
Maleneth looked up at the night sky, trying to judge the time.
The moons were swathed in autumnal colours. Even the realm’s cohort of satellites responded to the life song of the Everqueen, and on a clear night Maleneth could see foliage stirring in another world’s winds. This was not such a night. Scraps of dark cloud raced across their faces. A thin mist shrouded the creaking wooden tenement runs and lean-tos of the Stranglevines, and even Maleneth’s inhumanly chill breath fogged the air in front of her face. It was past midnight.
She sighed as the Slayer began to dry retch over the ditch. He should have been dead three times over already. But even in his current condition she was not sure that she wanted to risk hurrying things along. She had fought the duardin twice before, and on both occasions had barely escaped with her life. And that had been before he had acquired the fyreslayers’ master rune, multiplying his already formidable strength severalfold. The rune smouldered quiescently from the scarred, fire-ruined meat of his chest. Occasionally, when the Slayer had drunk enough to pass out and sleep, it also whispered, though not in any language that Maleneth had ever heard. No. She belonged to a fantastically long-lived race. Barring a knife in the back she could afford a little patience.
‘Come on, Gotrek,’ she said. ‘I think you left a beer untended in there.’
‘Give me a moment here, damn you.’
Before she could try to cajole the duardin any further, the tavern’s back door opened. Another posse of drunks stumbled through the rectangle of wobbly warmth and light and into the moonlit yard. They appeared to be armed, in some distress and without exception, drunk. Not an agreeable combination in Maleneth’s experience, even in the most salubrious of establishments. And even in the Stranglevines of Hammerhal Ghyra, establishments did not come more insalubrious than the Missed Striking. Gotrek had found his way through its doors the way a blind woman found her own bed.
Eager to avoid any trouble with the local ruffians, Maleneth nodded across the yard to them, as though standing over a retching duardin in the dead of night was the most natural activity in Ghyran. To her relief they ignored her utterly, too intent on their own whispered arguments to mark even Gotrek’s outlandish appearance.
A young woman in a nightdress and a thin shawl ran barefoot into the yard after the gang of armed drunks. Tears streamed down her reddened cheeks as she screamed something about a ‘Tambrin’. It was her distress, rather than her peasant prettiness and state of undress, that made Maleneth forgo her earlier misgivings about attracting attention and turn to watch. She had come a long way from the girl who would murder the row’s cats and kidnap the neighbours’ children, but she still found other people’s pain arresting. A burly man in a sweat-stained linen vest tried to put a coat over her. His head looked like an executioner’s block, all nicks and bloodstains with strange chunks missing. The woman beat her fists against his chest until he gave up. The other drunks, clearly as embarrassed by the display as Maleneth was enthralled, fussed over strappings and buckles.
There were two of them, both human, both what Maleneth would call old despite being at least a century her junior.
One was clad in leaves of delicate, lightly scuffed mail that appeared to have more of a decorative function than offering any real protection. A laurel of dried leaves and flowers sat nestled on a coarse stubble of grey hair. He carried a long-handled hammer. The next step in the cultural surrender of Ghyran, Maleneth thought. Azyrite might was irresistible, in all its forms. The old faiths had adapted to and appropriated from the doctrines of Azyr to remain relevant to the new order, or else had simply been assimilated wholesale into the Sigmarite faith. The warrior-priest of Alarielle was an extreme example.