GRAVESEND GOLD
C L Werner

 	Captain Brokrin leaned on the portside railing that framed the Iron Dragon’s deck and stared out across the cloud-swept skies. The ironclad was flying high above the desolate wadis of Droost and the dying sun set fantastic lights glimmering from the metallic desert sands. He always found the display somehow eerie, like something from another world. Those Kharadron who traded with the human inhabitants of Arlk said that the lights created strange mirages to befuddle those travelling across the desert on the ground. Brokrin was at least glad he had a sturdy ironclad to keep him well away from that hazard. 
 	While he still had her, that was. 
 	Brokrin tightened his grip on the rail, as though he could vent all the frustration and despair he felt by twisting the metal into a knot. ‘Ghazul’s curse,’ he muttered to himself. The ironclad had escaped destruction in the monster’s claws, but the bad luck that had dogged it ever since was starting to make even him start to believe in the jinx. The current voyage was looking no better than the three before it, the holds only half-filled. Crop blight, orruk raiders, even a religious festival had each made their ports of call less advantageous than they should have been. By the Ancestors! He was running out of excuses to offer his backers for their poor return on investment.
 	The sound of steps on the deck behind him brought Brokrin around. Old Mortrimm was favouring his good leg; the artificial one had been seizing up on him recently. Another weight added to Brokrin’s burden of responsibility. If these last voyages had been as profitable as they should have been, Mortrimm’s share would have been big enough to get the aether-work mechanisms inside the leg overhauled.
 	‘A word with you, cap’n?’ Mortrimm asked when he approached. Brokrin nodded and the old navigator continued. ‘Skaggi has evaluated what is in the hold,’ he said, referring to the ship’s logisticator. ‘He calculates that…’
 	‘After we share out to the backers and re-provision the ship we might each get enough to buy a flagon of beer, so long as it isn’t top-shelf stuff,’ Brokrin grumbled. He clenched his hand into a fist and banged it against the gunwale. 
 	Mortrimm shrugged. ‘Maybe not as bad as that. Probably three flagons and a trencher of broiled goat.’ The navigator ran his fingers through his beard. ‘That was a joke, cap’n.’
 	‘I’m not in a jesting mood,’ Brokrin replied. ‘The crew has worked hard on this voyage. They deserve to have something to show for their efforts.’
 	‘So do you,’ Mortrimm said. ‘But the knucklebones didn’t roll so good this time. Everybody knows there is some risk and they accept that when they sign the charter. A bit of good luck and you get a good share…’
 	‘And a sting of bad fortune sees you with an empty belly, a dry throat and boots so worn-down they can double as sandals.’ Brokrin fixed Mortrimm with a questioning look. ‘I thought things would turn around by now. I mean, we have had bad streaks before, but never anything like this. That fiasco at the lamasery with the skaven, then that run-in with the flock of manticores over Silverreach… It just never seems to end.’
 	Mortrimm wagged his finger in reproach. ‘You have been listening to all that prattle about Ghazul’s curse. Dockyard drivel, and you know it! There is not a blasted thing wrong with the Iron Dragon. Grungni’s Beard, if you want to talk about luck, consider that despite everything we have gone through, the ship is still in one piece. There is some luck for you to chew over.’
 	Brokrin scratched at his beard. ‘You raise a fair point, old friend. She has weathered hardships that would have knocked another ship out of the sky.’ He rapped his knuckles against the gunwale again. ‘Maybe we are doing all right in the luck ledger, but we sure could use something we can enter in the “coin in the pocket” book.’
 	A commotion from the ironclad’s elevated endrin brought both the captain and the navigator looking upwards. Affixed to the front of the cylindrical endrin was a metal cupola where a single endrinrigger acted as lookout. The duardin had his bronze mask lowered and was peering through a tube-like far-glass while gesticulating excitedly with his free hand.
 	‘Starboard!’ the endrinrigger cried out. ‘Down four hundred fathoms!’
 	Brokrin fished his own far-glass from where it hung from a hook on his harness. Extending the instrument, he peered over the side and followed the directions the endrinrigger was calling out. A wide stretch of canyon dominated the landscape below, a fissure through which the gleaming band of the River Chael coursed. The walls of the canyon were vibrant with colour, bands of dark mineral showing through the rough limestone and granite. Here and there a columnar butte reared up or a hardy stand of desert trees sprouted from a patch of soil, but Brokrin saw nothing to occasion the lookout’s excitement.
 	Not until he turned his glass a bit higher, near the crest of the canyon wall. There Brokrin spotted something that caught and reflected the dimming sun. The unmistakable gleam of metal. As he narrowed the focus of his far-glass, he brought the image into sharper resolution. His own pulse quickened when he recognised the outline of a ship protruding from the rock face. 
 	‘Have a look at this.’ Brokrin proffered his far-glass to Mortrimm. The navigator’s brow crinkled with surprise as he gazed at the canyon wall.
 	‘That wreck has been there a fair time, cap’n.’ Mortrimm was silent a moment, then handed the glass back to Brokrin. ‘Can’t make out her colours, whatever they were. No telling what skyhold she fared from.’
 	‘But it is a Kharadron ship?’ Brokrin asked. He turned his head and looked across the Iron Dragon’s decks. The lookout’s calls had drawn much of the crew up from below. Gotramm and his arkanauts jostled with Drumark’s thunderers for places at the rails as they tried to see what had caused such excitement.
 	‘Aye,’ Mortrimm said. ‘She is an old make, what they used to call a steam-gut for all the fumes her engines would spit. You can just make out one of the side-funnels on her hull. They stopped making that kind before my great-great grandfather was a beardling.’ 
 	Brokrin fixed the far-glass once more on the wreck. He pored over the lines of her hull, the corroded metal stabbing outwards from the cliff face. The funnel Mortrimm had described was there, its mouth shaped into the angry face of a duardin ancestor, its length banded by rune-etched rings at regular intervals. He saw the axe-like remnant of a rudder hanging off the ship’s tail, and somewhere near its topside a suggestion of a guardrail not unlike that on the Iron Dragon herself.
 	‘She is a Kharadron ship,’ Brokrin stated. He turned towards Mortrimm. ‘The Code makes it clear that we are under obligation to investigate her.’
 	Mortrimm nodded slowly. ‘Aye, unless it would prove an undue commercial burden to our voyage to do so.’
 	Brokrin laughed at the stipulation the navigator brought up. ‘This entire voyage has been an undue commercial burden,’ he grumbled. ‘But if that wreck has enough salvage on her, we might turn things about.’
 	‘She has been there a long time…’
 	‘All the more reason to see what is inside her,’ Brokrin told him. He flattened his far-glass and looked towards the horizon. ‘If we are quick, we can send a few endrinriggers down to inspect her before we lose the sun.’ Brokrin turned around and shouted to his crew. ‘There’s an old shipwreck down there, lads! So old there won’t be any question about our salvage rights! Don’t bet your beards on it, but if her hold is full then your shares in this venture will be too!’ He looked towards the wheel-house where the ship’s endrinmaster, Horgarr, was standing. ‘Get an aether-endrin ready for me! I’m going over with the lads to have a look at what we have found!’
 	Brokrin manipulated the drift of his aether-endrin, swinging around so that he could better observe the wreck. Only about a third of the old ship was projecting from the cliff face; the rest of it was buried in the rock. The amount of dust and debris that coated the deck was mute testimony to the many centuries that had passed since it crashed. He wondered what had become of the ship’s crew. Had they managed to abandon her before her fall or had they taken the final plunge along with her? He wanted to believe they’d got away. This was a lonely tomb for any duardin.
 	Horgarr and one of the endrinriggers were at work at the stern of the ship. The magnets in their boots allowed them to maintain position while they attacked the stern of the ship with aether-torches. Since time was essential, they had made the decision to force a way through the exposed stern rather than excavating the debris above to find one of the buried hatches. 
 	‘She is so worn down it is like cutting butter,’ Horgarr called up to Brokrin. ‘We can be through her before Drumark can finish his grog.’
 	Brokrin looked aside to Gotramm. The young privateer captain and a few of his arkanauts had accompanied the explorers to act as guards, each of them keeping a pistol at the ready as they watched the shadows lengthen in the canyon below. It was always prudent to be wary with night so near.
 	‘Horgarr might be going fast, but I doubt he is that fast,’ Brokrin quipped.
 	Gotramm nodded, but kept his gaze on the buttes that arose off to the left. ‘He can’t work fast enough to suit me. There is something about this place that is wrong. I can feel it in my beard. It’s like something is close. Unaware of us right now, but still dangerous.’
 	‘Any idea what you think is out there?’ Brokrin asked. Gotramm was a newer addition to his crew, but he was a graduate of the Academy and knew how to handle himself in a scrape… and to recognise when one might be in the offing.
 	‘Can’t say,’ Gotramm admitted. He darted a look at the stern and the hole Horgarr was cutting. ‘That’s why I wish he could go even faster. If you know what you are up against it is easy to gauge your chances.’
 	‘Nobody likes to fight blind,’ Brokrin agreed. He looked away towards the horizon where only the thinnest sliver of sun remained. ‘I would still like to have a look at her. A good bit of salvage right now would go far to turning this venture around.’
 	‘We’re in!’ Horgarr suddenly called out. The endrinmaster and his helper shut off their torches and pressed their hands to the rounded area of hull they had been cutting. Pushing against the improvised hatch, they sent it slamming inwards. There was a dull boom as the metal plate crashed against the floor within.
 	Brokrin glanced towards the horizon once again. The sun was gone now; only the last flicker of light lingered to contend with the growing night. A thin sliver of moon could be seen starting its slow ascent. 
 	‘We can at least have a look around,’ he decided. ‘Evaluate what is down in there. See if it is worthwhile sticking around until the morning.’
 	‘Then I am going in first,’ Gotramm said. ‘The Iron Dragon can afford to lose a privateer more than she can her captain.’ He quickly called out orders to the other arkanauts, advising them to keep a careful watch on both the wreck and the surrounding canyon.
 	Brokrin and Gotramm manoeuvred their aether-endrins to the back of the wreck. The hole Horgarr had made was large enough to admit a duardin, but not one wearing the bulky flying harness. Using their magnetic boots to secure themselves to the opening, the two explorers waited while they were unfastened from the aether-endrins. Horgarr and the endrinrigger would keep hold of the devices while Brokrin and Gotramm explored the wreck.
 	Looking at it from the outside, Brokrin found the opening into the wreck as dark and sinister as a dragon’s cave. There was, as Gotramm had observed, a nebulous sense of menace about the place. Compared to the unsettling feeling when he was unhooked from his aether-endrin with thousands of feet between himself and the canyon floor, this impression was even more foreboding. Try as he might, Brokrin could not keep the hair at the back of his neck from tingling. There was a cold and clammy feel to the air and a silence that made his heartbeats sound like thunder in his ears. If he had not already committed himself to this effort, he would have called the whole thing off. It was too late for that now. To back off at this point would mean losing face before his whole crew. Bad as his feeling was, it didn’t compare to that kind of disgrace.
 	A light showed from within the room Gotramm had entered. Brokrin followed the glow, at once impressed and unsettled by what it revealed. They were standing in a cabin – judging by the size and the corroded instruments fastened to the walls, either that of the ship’s captain or her navigator. The sextant and other tools were little more than calcified outlines against the thicker patina of decay that caked the walls. Little fingers of copper hung from the ceiling like metallic stalactites, drops of acid plopping down from them to splash against the uneven floor.
 	‘We will have to watch our footing,’ Brokrin warned Gotramm, gesturing with his own lamp to one of the dripping stalactites. ‘There is no knowing how compromised the integrity of the floor has become.’
 	‘Not a cheerful notion,’ Gotramm said. ‘Go crashing through rotten decks and straight to the bottom of the canyon.’ He glanced at Brokrin. ‘Want to call it over and head back?’
 	Brokrin shook his head and carefully approached the decayed desk that slouched in one corner. It was so choked by dust it resembled a mound of dirt, but by using his knife he was able to dig through the grime to the handful of objects sprawled across it. He found a logbook, its copper pages so decayed that they crumbled into metal flakes the instant he touched them. There was a crank-powered lantern of a design he had never seen before, but whatever power source had fed it must have gone bad and burst from its housing in a black sludge of acid. Then there was the ingot.
 	The ingot was heavy in Brokrin’s hand, much heavier than any metal he had ever handled. When he turned it around to stare at the side which he’d pried loose from the desk, he was stunned to see that there was a dark golden colour to it with just the faintest suggestion of a reddish overtone.
 	‘Deep gold,’ Brokrin muttered, his mind racing.
 	‘What was that, cap’n?’ Gotramm asked.
 	Brokrin held the ingot out to Gotramm. ‘I think this is deep gold. A rare ore the iron tyrants used to mine.’ He glanced around again at the decayed cabin. Just how long had this wreck been here? The iron tyrants died out during the Chaos invasions, taking the riddle of deep gold with them.
 	Gotramm hefted the ingot, impressed by its weight. ‘Exactly how valuable is this?’
 	‘To someone with any idea what they are doing, it is invaluable.’ Brokrin almost laughed. ‘Deep gold is the only ore strong enough to hold an edge. Tough enough that steel can’t even scratch it. Even a few ingots of that…’
 	Brokrin’s voice trailed off as excitement swept through him. Forgetting the perilous state of the floor, he hurried to the door. The portal was crusted over by corrosion, but opened readily enough when Brokrin put his shoulder to it. There was a sharp bang as the panel collapsed under his weight and crashed into the hallway beyond. Brokrin let his lamp play across the narrow corridor. The wreck might be old and of unfamiliar pattern, but there were certain rules of construction that the Kharadron never deviated from.
 	‘Cap’n, wait!’ Gotramm cried out. Brokrin could hear the privateer follow him out into the hall.
 	Brokrin did not wait for his companion, but instead hurried forwards. He could see the grisly mess of crumpled metal where the ship had dug herself into the cliff. It looked like the front third of the vessel must have been pushed back, twisted into a single snarl of wreckage. Just ahead of that tangled ruin, however, Brokrin could see a hatchway.
 	‘Get over here and help me!’ Brokrin ordered Gotramm as he started pulling at the cover. With the other duardin’s help, the hatch slowly came free of the corrosion that had cemented it to the deck.
 	‘Your light.’ Brokrin waved Gotramm to turn the rays of his lamp down into the hold. Combined with the rays of his own lantern, a big chamber stood revealed. The floor was a litter of smashed boxes and broken shelves. It was clear that the impact had tossed the contents of the hold around savagely. The corrosion and decay evident elsewhere was absent and the stale tang to the air that rose from the room made Brokrin wonder exactly how tightly it had been sealed away from the ravages of time.
 	Such questions quickly faded, however. By the light of the lamps, a litter of rectangular objects could be seen poking up from the debris. Each of the objects had a golden lustre and a faint reddish overtone.
 	‘Gotramm,’ Brokrin whispered. ‘We are rich.’
 	Brokrin could not take his eyes off the wreck. If he closed his eyes, the image of the hold filled with deep gold immediately filled his mind. Leaving it behind and letting Gotramm escort him back to the Iron Dragon was perhaps the hardest thing he had ever done. To know a fortune was there, just waiting to be taken, was a torture even the most sadistic grot could never match. 
 	Gotramm was right, of course. It would be too dangerous to try to extract the gold in the dark. A good night wind rolling off the hot sands of Droost could have aether-endrins smashing against the canyon walls. One misstep on the wreck’s rotten decks might cause the ship to break apart. Even Skaggi, greedy and impatient as he was, agreed that they needed to wait for daylight before proceeding.
 	Still, Brokrin would not feel content until the deep gold was safely aboard. That uncanny sense of menace continued to nag at him. Whatever was provoking that feeling, he wanted to be far away from it.
 	The telltale sound of Mortrimm walking the deck on his artificial leg announced the old navigator before he joined Brokrin at the rail. Mortrimm had the single ingot that had been found in the cabin.
 	‘Surprised you could pry that away from Skaggi,’ Brokrin told his friend.
 	‘There may have been some mention of what he owes me from ­knucklebones.’ Mortrimm winked. ‘Besides, if he held on to it any tighter he would have to marry the thing.’
 	Brokrin patted the ingot. ‘For once I do not blame Skaggi. This is going to solve a lot of problems. Like a gift from the gods.’
 	Mortrimm shook his head and gazed across the canyon to where the black shadow of the wreck could be seen jutting from the wall. ‘Our boon, but those poor beggars sure paid for it.’
 	‘We did not find any skeletons. It is possible they abandoned ship before she crashed.’ Brokrin found the suggestion hollow even as he said it. If it came down to a choice of saving his skin or leaving a cargo as valuable as the deep gold behind, he wondered if he could make that decision.
 	‘If they got away, they would have tried to find her again,’ Mortrimm said. He stared at the ingot. ‘This is the kind of dream you don’t easily leave behind. Even if they got off the ship, they would never have stopped trying to find her again.’
 	Brokrin felt a strange chill as he listened to Mortrimm talk. That uncanny feeling that had been dragging at him. Maybe it was nothing more than the dark of night feeding the gloom. He turned his eyes upwards as a silvery glow began to spread across the cliffs. The moon, at least, would lessen the darkness. Perhaps put things in better perspective.
 	As he watched the silvery light creep down along the cliffs, Brokrin felt a sense of dread. It was unaccountable, but also undeniable. His eyes were drawn back to the wreck, held there as though by the petrifying gaze of a basilisk. 
 	When he first spotted it, Brokrin refused to accept what he was seeing. A strange mirage was overcoming the wreck as the moonlight struck it. He could still see the darkened mass of the ship, but around it there was a translucent image, a phantasm that evoked the semblance of another ship. A ship that was whole and hale, not smashed against the cliff-face. 
 	‘Mortrimm… do you… do you see?’
 	‘Aye, cap’n,’ Mortrimm gasped. ‘I see, even though I don’t want to.’
 	While he looked on, Brokrin observed figures moving around the decks. Transparent, as wispy as morning mist, they were yet distinct enough to make out the billowy, archaic pantaloons and jackets, the broad-brimmed helms and feather-festooned hats of a bygone age. They were duardin aeronauts, and Brokrin knew he gazed on the crew of the long-forgotten wreck.
 	‘They… they walked straight into the cliff,’ Mortrimm stammered, watching with disbelief as the ghostly duardin stepped into the solid wall. They did not vanish, however, for their spectral essence could be seen shining behind the stone.
 	‘That is where the rest of their ship lies,’ Brokrin said. His gaze narrowed as he saw a blast of ectoplasmic steam spill from the funnel along the side of the wreck’s hull. The implication was clear to him, as impossible as it seemed. ‘They’re firing up the engines. They’re making ready to sail!’
 	Mortrimm shook his head. ‘That can’t be. It has to be an illusion. A trick.’
 	That sense of dread pounding in his heart told Brokrin otherwise. ‘We have to get under way. They know we boarded their ship…’ Brokrin swung around. Cupping a hand to his mouth he bellowed to his first mate in the wheelhouse. ‘Vorki! Sound all hands! Everyone to his station!’ A moment later found Vorki repeating the captain’s commands over the ship’s loud-mouth array.
 	While the crew of the Iron Dragon quickly got the ship ready, Brokrin ordered every gun on board aimed towards the wreck. He joined Arrik and the hand-picked gunners manning the huge skyhook called Ghazul’s Bane. He didn’t know if it was possible to grapple a phantom, but if the ghostly wreck made any effort to confront the Iron Dragon, they would soon find out.
 	The ironclad’s crew watched anxiously as the spectres scurried about the deck of their phantom ship. A misty cloud now rolled away from the funnels alongside her hull. Gasps of awe rose from many of the duardin as the wreck suddenly pulled free from the canyon wall. All around the derelict was a translucent image, a wispy shell that conjured the dimensions of the Kharadron vessel as it had been before its crash ages ago. Instead of a single bulbous endrin to support her, a cluster of smaller, rounded spheres loomed above her decks, helmeted ghosts scurrying along cables strung between them.
 	‘All guns, stand ready!’ Brokrin called across the ironclad’s loud-mouth array. His words boomed across the ship, echoing through the corridors below deck.
 	‘Cap’n! You can’t fire on that vessel!’ Skaggi howled in protest. The sharp-faced logisticator went rushing towards the platform where Ghazul’s Bane was mounted. ‘Think of all the deep gold in her belly!’ 
 	Drumark intercepted the logisticator before he could climb up and confront Brokrin. ‘The cap’n knows what he is about,’ the sergeant said. ‘You can’t spend gold in a ghost’s gizzard.’ He tapped the barrel of his decksweeper and gave Skaggi a stern look. ‘Unless you have a mind to give it a try.’ 
 	His face almost apoplectic, Skaggi retreated below. Brokrin watched him slam the hatch shut after him, then returned his focus to the phantom ship. There could be no mistake about it now – the wreck had extricated itself from the cliff and, buoyed up by the spectral image that surrounded it, was now turning towards the Iron Dragon.
 	‘Fire!’ Brokrin shouted, the loud-mouth array carrying his command to every corner of the ship. An instant later, a fusillade of shots rang out. Aethershot carbines mounted in the hull crackled as their gunners opened up on the phantom. Drumark’s Grundstok thunderers aimed their rifles into the ghostly wreck and began blasting away. The booming discharge of an aethercannon sent an explosive blast crashing down on the deck of the spectral vessel.
 	Yet for all the fire trained on her, the phantom ship did not falter. The Kharadron could see splinters from the wreck buried in her guts go spinning away into the night, but the ghost itself remained intact, invulnerable to the havoc loosed against her.
 	‘Cap’n, do we turn Ghazul’s Bane against her?’ Arrik asked Brokrin. The gun team stood at their stations, ready to send the giant skyhook slamming into the ghost.
 	Brokrin shook his head. ‘If we can’t shoot her down I don’t think we can pull her down.’ He stared at the phantom, watching the ghostly duardin hurrying about her decks. He noted the silvery glow that infused them and considered that the explorers had gone unchallenged when they boarded the wreck. It had been the moonlight that had aroused the ghosts. Perhaps without the moon the spectral ship would return to being naught but a rotten wreck.
 	‘Vorki! Turn us about! All power to the engines!’ Brokrin climbed down from the gun platform and joined Horgarr beneath the Iron Dragon’s endrin. ‘We need to outrun her,’ he told the endrinmaster. 
 	‘She’s an old hulk,’ Horgarr said. ‘The Iron Dragon could fly rings around her were all things fair.’ He gestured at the phantom ship as it drew away from the cliffs. ‘But you can’t expect reason to prevail against a ghost. It is more mist and shadow than steel and timber. How can you outrun something like that?’
 	‘We have to try,’ Brokrin insisted. ‘We just sent a broadside into her and it may as well have been spit for all the good it did us! But if we can keep ahead of her… stay clear of her until sunrise, we can make it.’
 	Horgarr scratched at his beard. ‘We could try a supremacy mine. Doubt it will take down a ghost, but it might slow it down some. Give us time to get clear.’
 	Brokrin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Get the mine armed and over the side. She’s making straight for us, so it should be easy to lead her right into it.’
 	While Horgarr and a few of the crew hastened to get the powerful explosive ready, Brokrin’s attention was drawn to the activity on the ghost ship. The spectres were gathering around the prow, many of them hefting weird contraptions that looked part crossbow and part musket. Even as the Kharadron continued to fire at the phantom ship, the wraiths turned their own weapons on the Iron Dragon. 
 	Wisps of silvery light shot out from the phantom ship as each duardin ghost shot at the ironclad. There was a tinny, faint echo that reached the ears of the Kharadron, like the distorted memory of gunfire. An instant later there was a sound of sharp impacts against the Iron Dragon’s hull. Long, spike-like missiles shivered against the sides of the ironclad, denting the armoured plates as they struck home. Before the stunned eyes of the crew, the silvery projectiles evaporated in a puff of mist. The holes they left behind, however, were all too real.
 	‘We can’t hurt them, but they damn sure can hurt us!’ Gotramm cursed as he aimed down the length of his pistol and tried to pick off one of the ghostly sharpshooters. The shot simply flashed through the phantasmal duardin, a bright glow amidst the silvery apparition.
 	‘Hold fast, lads!’ Brokrin barked. ‘Lose heart now and we are lost!’ He hoped he made the words more convincing to the crew than they were to him. Among the duardin, few things were as revered as their ancestors and nothing was more frightening than the thought of evoking their wrath. The ghost ship was the kind of thing designed to conjure a Kharadron’s childhood terrors.
 	Drumark stepped to the rail and turned his brutal decksweeper on the flying wreck. There was a deafening report as the weapon unleashed every barrel into the vessel. The sergeant waved his gloved hand through the gunsmoke and peered at the ghost ship. ‘You can’t fight what you can’t hit!’ he snarled when he saw the phantom was unscathed. 
 	Brokrin shouted to his duardin, his bellow so fierce he didn’t need the loud-mouth array to carry it to every corner of the ship. ‘What do you want to do? Give up? Roll over for these grave-cheating ghouls? Not me! However helpless it seems, I am going down fighting like a true son of Barak-Zilfin!’ He heard a few listless cries of support, but too many of his crew were staring at the ghosts. Whatever he said to them, it didn’t speak louder than the oncoming phantom.
 	‘Cap’n, the mine is ready!’ Horgarr called out. Brokrin swung around and gave the endrinmaster the signal to send the explosive over the side. 
 	‘A supremacy mine, lads!’ Brokrin shouted to his crew. ‘That hulk might shrug off a bit of gunfire, but a mine is another thing!’
 	This time their captain’s words brought a little bit of hope rushing through the crew. They watched with eager anticipation as the supremacy mine went soaring away from the Iron Dragon. It hung in the air behind them as the ironclad flew onwards. The glowing beacon atop the mine glimmered at them from the dark night, a little ember of light between themselves and the glowing phantom.
 	‘All speed!’ Brokrin shouted to Vorki. ‘When that spook reaches the mine, we don’t want to be caught in the blast!’ The warning was given more to reassure and remind his crew of the potency of the weapon they had set in the phantom’s course than any genuine fear their own ship would be affected by the explosion. Yet as he watched the ghost taking on more speed, he wondered if it was such an idle concern. Their pursuer would be within range of the supremacy mine much quicker than he had anticipated.
 	‘More speed!’ Mortrimm added his voice to the calls to race ahead of the impending explosion. 
 	All eyes watched as the silvery phantom sped towards the blinking beacon. The ancient vessel was oblivious to the threat that lay in its path, intent only on chasing after the Iron Dragon. Set to detonate when the enemy was only fifty yards from the mine, the Kharadron watched with baited breath as the ghosts rapidly closed the distance.
 	‘Secure yourselves!’ Horgarr yelled, putting action to words as he wrapped his arms around a stanchion. The other crewmen caught hold of rails and guide ropes, chains and hatchcovers, bracing themselves for the detonation.
 	Brokrin kept his eyes locked on the ghost ship as it closed with the mine. For just a moment, he thought its spectral substance was too little to trigger the device. The glowing prow was within only a few yards of the beacon and still there was no explosion. Then the front third of the phantom, that which replicated the crushed regions of the wreck, gave way to the rearward sections where the physical residue of the ship acted as a solid core for the apparition. A shrill note rose from the beacon, its light changing from a blinking yellow to a steady red. Brokrin opened his mouth to keep the pressure from the imminent explosion from popping his ears.
 	The supremacy mine detonated in a blinding flare of violence. The soft light of the moon was banished by the dazzling fury of a tremendous explosion. The roar rumbled through the canyons, reverberating across the landscape. Rocks crashed down from the cliffs; buttes and windswept pillars fractured and went clattering down into the valley. A thick plume of smoke, blacker than the night around it, spilled high into the sky.
 	The Iron Dragon was rocked from side to side by the explosion. Brokrin could feel the fillings in his teeth shiver as the shock wave swept through him. Buckets and tools, anything that wasn’t fastened down on the deck was sent dancing about by the impact, some of them clattering over the side to vanish into the night.
 	Brokrin shook his head and tried to clear the ringing from his ears. He released the bottom rung of the ladder beneath Ghazul’s Bane and forced himself back to his feet. Firmly he walked across the still-shuddering deck and stared out at the dark plume of smoke. No sign of silvery phantoms now, only the mephitic residue left by the supremacy mine.
 	‘See, lads,’ Gotramm shouted to his arkanauts. ‘The cap’n was right! All it needed was a proper application of violence!’
 	The Kharadron slowly gathered at the ironclad’s rails, staring out across the night. The dreaded phantom was nowhere to be seen. The immense power of the supremacy mine had blasted it out of the sky.
 	Brokrin climbed the ladder back to the gun platform where Arrik and his team were making a quick inspection of Ghazul’s Bane to ensure the great skyhook had suffered no damage from the explosion. They snapped to attention when the captain came towards them.
 	‘Keep her aimed at that smoke,’ Brokrin told them. He wanted to believe the phantom had been destroyed by the explosion, but that sense of nagging uneasiness was still there. A vessel that defied the laws of time and mortality was one that might not obey the violence of a Kharadron mine.
 	‘Nothing could have survived that…’ Arrik began to protest. The gun commander’s good eye opened wide as he turned towards the smoke. ‘Grungni’s Beard,’ he moaned.
 	Just visible through the smoke was a silvery shape, a glow that echoed the moonlight. The phantom wreck was steaming through the column of smoke, its ghostly crew still clustered about its deck. 
 	Brokrin opened his far-glass and trained it on the phantom ship. His skin crawled when the lens brought the wraith-like crew into focus, their archaic clothes and withered faces, their hungry, empty eyes. Hastily he turned the glass downwards, fixating upon the solid wreck at the core of the apparition. What he saw little resembled the derelict he had boarded. It was a jumble of ruptured plates and shattered timbers, busted crates and smashed planks. The supremacy mine hadn’t hurt the phantom, but it had delivered a crushing blow to the ­material foundation inside it.
 	The observation gave Brokrin a desperate idea. ‘Arrik, aim Ghazul’s Bane at the wreck inside that spook!’ he ordered. ‘If we can’t blast it out of the sky, maybe we can drag it down!’
 	Arrik and his team hurried to get the great skyhook ready. At a signal from the gun commander, the huge weapon was turned to the oncoming phantom. The massive skyhook growled as it was hurled from the gun, its heavy chain unspooling behind it. 
 	For a tense moment, Brokrin watched the giant harpoon streak towards the phantom. Then there was a satisfying crunch of splintering wood and shattered metal as the skyhook ripped into the wreck. The phantom shivered in mid-air, winking in and out of view like a sputtering candle. With the skyhook embedded in its guts, the ghostly ship stopped moving, its menacing approach arrested.
 	A fierce cheer went up from the Iron Dragon’s crew. Brokrin smiled and gazed at the horizon. It was still several hours before the moon would set, but if they could keep the phantom at bay until then…
 	‘The ghosts!’ the lookout in the endrin’s cupola shouted. ‘They are doing something!’
 	Brokrin put the far-glass back to his eye. He fixated once more on the hollow-faced apparitions that stood upon the phantom’s deck. As the lookout had said, the ghosts were doing something. Something Brokrin recognised only too well. Quickly he turned to the loud-mouth array. 
 	‘All hands! Prepare to repel boarders!’
 	Brokrin looked across the black gulf of night that separated the two ships. He saw the ghostly duardin draw battleaxes and pikes, cutlasses and crude bolt-throwing pistols. Then, as though the ships were side by side, the wraiths threw themselves up and over the gunwales of their phantom vessel. The spectral company did not plummet earthwards, but instead billowed across the open air, drifting inexorably towards the Iron Dragon.
 	‘Lay into them!’ Drumark howled as the ghostly boarders drew close. He punctuated his command by discharging his reloaded decksweeper into the oncoming throng. The foremost of the wraiths burst apart in the vicious hail of gunfire, but the silvery wisps of their substance came fluttering back again. In only a few heartbeats they resumed the shapes Drumark had fired into.
 	The fire from the other Grundstok thunderers and from Gotramm’s arkanauts was equally ineffective. As the first of the duardin ghosts surged up onto the deck, Mortrimm lashed out at them with a skypike, but the heavy blade passed through the creatures as though they were naught but smoke. One of the wraiths brought its spectral cutlass chopping down against the heft of the skypike. Mortrimm cried out and stumbled backwards, clutching at his arm.
 	‘Cold,’ the navigator gasped. ‘So cold…’
 	Brokrin leapt down to defend Mortrimm before the ghost could press its attack. His axe flashed through the wraith with as little effect as the skypike. When it struck back at him with its cutlass, he parried it with the flat of his axe. At once he felt an icy chill sear through his body, as though every nerve was aflame with cold fire. He staggered back and struggled to keep hold of his axe with his suddenly numbed fingers.
 	Across the ship the other Kharadron were likewise beset by the ghosts. Gotramm fired his pistol into one wraith, then tried to bring his cutter slashing into its chest only to have the spectre’s broadaxe block his blow. Drumark drove the butt of his decksweeper into the withered face of a boarder only to be knocked back by the unfazed creature’s pike. Horgarr brought an aetheric torch searing into the eyes of a ghost only to have the flame extinguished by the aethereal chill of the apparition.
 	Brokrin saw the plight of his crew. There seemed nothing that would harm the spectral invaders, but true to his earlier conviction, he would not let them take him without a fight. Tightening his grip on the axe he held, Brokrin started towards the ghost that had struck him.
 	Before he could reach the apparition, the wraith drew back. Brokrin saw that the other ghosts were likewise falling away from the Kharadron, not pressing their attacks against the crew. A moment later he saw why. A bearded ghost wearing a tricorn hat swept over the Iron Dragon’s side and down onto the deck. The spectre’s hollow eyes fixated upon Brokrin. Without looking away from Brokrin, it gestured at Mortrimm and the ingot of deep gold thrust under the navigator’s belt.
 	‘Cap’n? You can’t give it to him!’ Skaggi’s voice raised in protest. The call to repel boarders had brought the logisticator on deck, but he seemed more upset over losing the deep gold than the ghosts themselves.
 	Brokrin nodded to the ghost-captain and crouched over Mortrimm. ‘Looks like they want it back,’ he apologised to the navigator.
 	‘Would have been easier if they’d just asked,’ Mortrimm grumbled as he handed the ingot over to Brokrin.
 	Brokrin held the deep gold out to the ghost-captain. The wraith gestured to the phantom he had been fighting. Brokrin felt the same chill course through him as before when the spectre took the ingot from him. Fighting down his discomfort, he kept his gaze fixated on the ghost-captain.
 	‘You have what you wanted,’ he told the wraith. ‘Now get off my ship.’
 	The ghostly captain returned his gaze with its hollow eyes. Behind it, the spectral duardin continued to finger their weapons. The phantom captain raised its hand and in its grip there suddenly appeared a book. Battered and worn with age, far more trim and slender than the copious tome Brokrin knew, it was still recognisable as the artycles of the Kharadron Code. The wraith held it towards him, the pages fluttering until they settled upon a particular passage.
 	‘They want wergild,’ Skaggi grumbled. The logisticator had come forward in some futile effort to stop the exchange of the deep gold. Now, close to the spectres, he thought better of defying their demands.
 	‘Wergild?’ Mortrimm muttered.
 	‘Restitution for damages done to their ship,’ Skaggi explained.
 	‘But she was a wreck before we even laid eyes on her!’ Mortrimm objected.
 	Brokrin shook his head and stared into the hollow eyes of the ghost. There was just the faintest twinkle in them now, the gleam of a duardin about to haggle for a deal. However many centuries lay between the ghosts and their old lives, they were still Kharadron.
 	‘What do you expect as payment?’ Brokrin growled.
 	The ghost-captain jabbed its thumb towards the forward hold, the hold that held the gems and perfumes the Iron Dragon had gathered from the humans of Farnost. It represented the bulk of the trade they had been able to draw over the course of the voyage.
 	‘Why not ask for the whole blasted ship?’ Brokrin hissed.
 	The ghost pointed off towards the silvery phantom, as though explaining to Brokrin that it already had a ship. What it wanted was cargo.
 	Resigned, Brokrin bowed his head. As he did so, the ghosts began to vanish one after another. The spectral captain was the last to dissipate, a suggestion of a smile pulling at its withered face before it faded away.
 	‘Arrik!’ Brokrin called out. ‘Draw in the skyhook!’ While the gun crew began drawing the chain back, Brokrin turned his far-glass on the phantom. The ghost ship’s decks were again filled with activity, only this time the spectres were not getting ready to attack the Iron Dragon. Instead they were conveying all-too-familiar cargo into their aethereal holds. Brokrin stifled a moan of disgust as he watched the solid cargo fall through the ghostly shell of the ship and hurtle into the canyon far below.
 	‘There’s a grim lesson to be learned here,’ Mortrimm said, still massaging his numbed arm.
 	Brokrin ground his teeth together as he watched the phantom ship build up steam and fly away into the darkness.
 	‘Yes,’ Brokrin agreed. ‘The lesson is that you can’t haggle with ghosts.’