He dodged across the corridor. The skin hound hit the wall and rebounded, its tough hide rippling over soft-stuffed insides as it came back around. Nieder threw a punch. His fist walloped the side of its head and snapped it around, doing no damage whatsoever. Dead jaws champing, the skin hound snapped for his face as it bore him to the ground. Nieder got a hand under its throat and pushed it back, squeezing a last long-dead breath from its mouth and gagging on the stench. It heaved its weight against him and gnashed its teeth. Nieder beat against the side of its head with his other fist. It was like punching a bag of straw.
Suddenly the weight pushing down on him was no more. In its place came heat and a shower of stinking ash that had him coughing, then retching. He shook it off himself, and then sat up. In disbelief he looked around at the sight of eight skin hounds lying strewn and smouldering over the floor.
The ninth slid to the ground, its head mashed to a rag-doll flatness between Gotrek’s fist and the wall. The duardin turned to glance at the skin hound with which Nieder had, prior to his intervention, been wrestling.
‘Well fought, manling.’
Nieder tried to throw back something insulting, but the pain in his jaw turned the words to a hot-tempered gurgle that he spat, mixed with blood, onto the neck of his boot.
The duardin nodded as though agreeing with the sentiment, and then headed off for the stairs. Nieder picked himself up and followed.
There was another dead body at the bottom. This one was human, sprawled face down, half over the final two steps and half in the doorway that stood open at the bottom. Gotrek stepped over him and proceeded inside. Nieder crouched by the body. It was his junior partner, Hamnil. There was a slender knife stuck neatly between his shoulder blades. Nieder folded his fist around the delicate throwing handle and pulled it out in a spurt of blood.
‘Well, well,’ came Gotrek’s rough voice from inside. ‘I should have known you wouldn’t need all that much saving.’
Leaving Hamnil where he lay, Nieder got up, knife in hand, and followed the duardin inside.
He had been inside the Tithekeeper’s preparation room before. Many times. Though he had spent as little time there as he could get away with, and had never seen it properly as he did now. Ceramic urns marked with the dead hieroglyphic characters of the Bone Kings were stacked up high against the walls, filled, he supposed, with bone and neatly packed phylacteries of souls. Human skins, stretched taut over wooden frames, faced the tiny windows, there to cure in the weak Shyishan sun, though it was firelight that flickered in the ancient panes now. At the centre of the basement chamber was a table. The belfry’s original priesthood had probably had a more innocent use for the drain that lay beneath it.
The aelf woman sitting cross-legged upon the table glanced up as Gotrek and Nieder entered, as though distracted from the important task of scraping blood from her fingernails.
‘You took your time, Gotrek.’
‘Well, if you wander off in the middle of the night and get yourself kidnapped…’
‘Tears of Khaine, Gotrek, how much more of that rat poison did you drink after I left? I did not wander off.’ She shook her head in mock despair. ‘I went to take a look around. The appraising looks. The strange comments these people would make to one another when they were happy no human could still hear them. Only this one decided to follow me out.’ She nodded to the corpse by the door. As though recognising Nieder’s presence for the first time, she held out her hand and smiled the most insincere smile he had ever seen. ‘Be a darling and give me that knife you found, would you?’
Nieder hung his head and meekly handed it back.
‘I don’t recall any of this,’ Gotrek huffed.
‘Sweet thing,’ the aelf said to Nieder. ‘Any friend of Gotrek’s is a friend of mine.’ She turned to the duardin and scowled. ‘Somehow I do not have it in me any more to be surprised.’
‘You don’t have any more sharp objects hidden away under all that do you?’ said Gotrek.
‘A lady needs to have some secrets.’
Gotrek snorted.
‘He’s dead,’ Nieder mumbled, looking across to where Hamnil lay in the doorway.
‘Yes,’ said the aelf. ‘Pity. But he made two unfortunate life choices. The first was attempting to tie up and drug a Shadowblade of Khaine. The second was failing to tell me anything at all about this Bone King and his legion when I asked.’
‘Oh well,’ said Gotrek. ‘We’ve done our good deed for the week the way I see it.’
The aelf shrugged, sitting upright on the cutting table and licking the throwing knife clean with every sign of delight before stabbing it back into its concealed sheath.
Gotrek made an ugly face. ‘You make me sick, you know that? Like a vampire bloody kitten.’
The aelf laughed, as beautiful as broken glass, and turned to examine the urns stacked against the wall. ‘What do you propose we do with these?’
‘Can you read what’s written on them?’ said Gotrek.
‘The dead languages of darkest Shyish were not a part of the temple’s curriculum.’
‘Then here’s what I propose…’
Before Nieder could realise what the duardin intended, Gotrek had cracked open the closest urn with the flat butt of his axe. Bits of bone and pottery spilled across the chamber floor, following the shallow decline towards the blood drain. He broke another. Then another. Moving with a grim and set intent until the entire floor was carpeted in broken pottery. Nieder watched it happen. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Wondering how many urns the bodies left in the Bone Drake and in the street outside of it would fill. How many more would need to be found before the Bone Kings came over the Marrow Hills and crossed the Sunken Sea in search of their tribute.
‘Another grateful town saved,’ said Gotrek, clapping the dust and grime of evil deeds well done from his enormous hands. He bared his big, blunt teeth at Nieder. ‘I wonder if there’s anywhere left in this town that does breakfast.’
About the Author
David Guymer’s work for Warhammer Age of Sigmar includes the novels Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and The Court of the Blind King, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio dramas Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, and the Primarchs novels Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa and Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.