As they proceeded down the tunnels they encountered a number of smaller hivers carrying goods and food on their backs, each of whom reared up ready to defend the hive. The Queen in Waiting took the lead and the fortress’s residents calmed and then ignored the intruders.
Their hiver ally paused at a new passage, her antennae trembling, single remaining wing rustling in agitation. “Hive smells wrong. Sick. Few guards.” She clicked and hissed, spitting what the humans could only imagine were the foulest of hiver curses. “You must kill the diseased queen.”
“Just get us in there,” Maeven replied. “We shall do the rest.”
The tunnels twisted down through a maze of chambers hollowed out of the bedrock. The temperature swiftly increased until the necromancer’s face was slick with sweat.
Lorimer abruptly stiffened, head bobbing as he sniffed the air. “Beware.”
The tunnel walls exploded on either side of him. Two hivers snapped at Lorimer’s throat with their wicked mandibles but found only air as he slipped between them. His claws ripped the eyes from one. It screeched, briefly, before the Queen in Waiting leapt on it, a savage bite crunching through its hard head into its brain.
Lorimer spun and grabbed a hold of the other’s mandibles, pitting his vampiric might against hiver strength. He grunted and snarled as it thrashed in his grip. Its jaws inched towards his skull.
Maeven summoned her death magic, held her hand out and clenched. The hiver spasmed and dropped like a stone, reeking fluids gushing from its mouth.
Lorimer scowled at her. “I was not done with that.”
“Yes, yes, I know you could have killed it whenever you wanted. We don’t have time for contests of strength.” She peered closely at the two dead guards, noting the fungus and filth crusting their carapaces.
“She is near,” the Queen in Waiting said, limbs trembling and wing rustling. “Straight ahead. I can go no further. The diseased queen’s commands are… difficult to resist. I will now spray confusion to mislead guards.”
The two companions left her spitting on the walls and moved on down the tunnel. Soon the rustling and chirping of hivers grew into a hiss of noise, and the darkness retreated before a faint septic-green glow. Maeven dimmed her ring as they crept forward.
The tunnel opened up high on the wall of a vast cavern. Phosphorescent fungus was growing on the mouldering bulk of the hiver queen at the heart of the chamber below, granting a horrific view of the writhing mass of her malformed spawn surrounding her. The bloated, fleshy body was barely even recognisable as a hiver queen. Rot and fleshy growths covered her spindly limbs and yellowish pus oozed from sores to coat the floor and her grotesque, scuttling brood.
Maeven doubled over as the stink wafted up to her. She was accustomed to the stench of death and decay but even she gagged and clapped a hand to her mouth, lest her retching alert the horde below.
The vampire cricked his neck. “That is truly disgusting. It’s even worse than you. No wonder your odd friend wants to replace that rotting thing.”
Maeven swallowed and straightened. “Let’s get this done, retrieve Jerak Hyden and get out. When we kill that thing, I expect the rest will go quite mad.” She considered the distance. “I don’t suppose you could hit that thing with a glass vial?”
He shook his head. “It would be too light, and at this range I could not hit anything with enough accuracy. Judging from the fungal growth and slime below us, I’m not sure it would even break.”
“So be it,” she replied, and behind them came the clicking sound of two reanimated hiver corpses.
She shrugged at his inquiring look. “It would seem the best way to infiltrate the hive below and get close to their queen is with one of their own. Their familial scent should allow us to deliver death. Unless you wish to go down there yourself?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I will happily bow out of this particular mess.”
She slipped a vial from her pocket. “Perhaps you remember this little creation of mine?”
“Ah yes,” he said. “You thought to threaten me with that toy.”
“Only if you left me no other choice,” she replied, settling it carefully into the oozing grip of a reanimated hiver. “Now you will witness the exquisite thing I created. I wonder if even you could survive it.”
They watched from the lip of the tunnel as the two corpse-ants slowly made their way down the wall and began to cross the swarming, slimy floor of the queen’s chamber. At first the living hivers paid them no heed, but as they moved closer to the diseased queen, a number of larger hivers armoured in steel plate rose to their feet. These elite guards were the same size as their own ally, the Queen in Waiting, and lacked the under-developed limbs and clouded eyes of the queen’s newer spawn. Stubs of wings jutted from their backs, probably snipped off by the rotting queen’s bite.
“An honour guard of sorts,” Lorimer whispered. “They look to be fearsome foes.”
“It won’t matter how big they are,” Maeven replied. “If they live and breathe, they will die here.”
The larger hivers watched the zombie ants’ plodding progress, and began chirping at them, growing agitated when they received no answer – Maeven didn’t know how.
The queen’s amorphous head turned towards the zombie ants. A bubbling hiss escaped from the ruin of her mouth. Every hiver in the room jerked upright as if their strings had all been pulled. They swarmed the reanimated corpses, tearing them apart with their mandibles.
As one of Maeven’s puppets fell, its jaw parts clenched, crushing the glass vial. The liquid began to froth and boil, wisps of yellow smoke rising into the air.
A thick yolk-coloured fog rolled across the floor of the chamber below. Hivers began to die with shrieks of agony. Hard carapaces softened and slumped, flesh rotting from the inside out and putrid liquids spurting. The swarm broke apart as hivers crawled atop each other, snapping and fighting to escape the necrotic fog that swiftly obscured the floor of the chamber from the two watchers.
Lorimer slowly turned to look at her. “Are you insane, woman? That would have killed you had you used it on me.”
“Then I wouldn’t have died alone,” she said, shrugging.
“Perhaps…”
The screaming from below began dwindling into isolated bubbling squeals.
He eyed her pockets and pack. “Ah, do you have any more in there?”
She grimaced. “If you knew how much of my power was distilled into that one little vial you would not be asking that. And I have no time to make more.”
“I hope Jerak Hyden is worth it,” Lorimer said. “We could have used that weapon on the accursed Lucents instead. That would have been delightful.”
“This is a child’s toy compared to the wonders Jerak can concoct,” she replied as the last of the hivers below ceased their screaming.
“Horrors, I think you mean.”
She shrugged as they looked back down into the chamber. The fog was finally thinning and on the chamber floor nothing stirred. They stood and peered down. Maeven smiled and–
–Lorimer shoved her back down the tunnel, bouncing and skidding. Rock exploded beneath his feet. The entire entrance of the tunnel crumbled and fell away into the queen’s chamber taking the vampire with it. He plummeted into the depths of the yellow fog, into the distilled death. The metallic tang of strange magic filled the air.
Spindly, rotting legs emerged from the chamber wall below the entrance, heaving the bulk of the hiver queen up into the tunnel. Her mouldering flesh sizzled and oozed but was far from dead. She hissed at Maeven, powerful mandibles clacking in eagerness to crack open her skull.
Maeven sensed power building inside the creature’s ruined body. “Shit, the damn thing is a sorcerer!” Her magic reached for the queen’s heart, but the necrotic power was blocked by the hiver’s own magic before it could do more than dig shallow, blackening pits in its carapace.
The queen heaved her bulk towards Maeven, spindly limbs scrabbling in fury. Gouts of
steaming fluid erupted from her mouth, just missing Maeven. The tunnel walls hissed as acid ate through earth and stone.
The necromancer grimaced and forced her magic through the hiver queen’s protections, sucking life from the bloated creature’s flesh. Fungal growth and rotten carapace sloughed off in sticky sheets. The queen screeched, setting her teeth on edge.
Just as Maeven prepared to deliver the death-stroke, the wall to her right crumbled and another maddened hiver guard crashed through to defend its queen. She fell back and lashed out with her obsidian knife. The moment it drew blood, the hiver died. It collapsed atop her knife-arm and legs, pinning her in place as the wounded queen dragged her bulk closer.
There was no time. Maeven drew breath and gathered power in one last desperate attack. Her magic burrowed through the queen’s organs, blooming into rot and disease. The bloated body loomed above Maeven, mouth opening wide to snip her head off.
Blood gushed from its open mouth. Mandibles jerked and slackened as Maeven’s necromantic sorcery killed the ant-queen from the inside. The diseased creature slumped atop her, flesh bursting and coating her with pus. Maeven gagged and tried to wipe gunk from her mouth, but found her arms trapped beneath the dead queen’s bulk. Her ribs creaked as the weight began to slowly crush her.
The crushing weight vanished. She gasped for air as the hiver corpse was dragged back into the chamber it had come from.
Lorimer stood over her, his skull a melted ruin of flesh and bone. His clothes had rotted away, as had the skin beneath. His feet were molten nubs and his eyes were gone, blackened pits weeping blood. Without lips and much of a throat his grin was horrifying and his voice wheezing and bubbling. “It would not have ended well for you, had you used that weapon on me.”
She wiped slime from her face and laughed. For a moment the two grinned at each other, before old memories and old grudges returned.
She climbed to her feet, wiping down her clothes as best she could while studying his ruined body. “Does it hurt? Will you heal?”
He chuckled and his jaw sprouted shark teeth. “Pain is nothing to me. This body is just flesh and blood and bone. It can be replaced. A decent meal and I will appear as I always do.” He sniffed the air like a hunting beast and edged closer to her, fingers growing into claws as he fought back the urge to tear out her throat.
She swallowed and stepped back, keeping her knife between them as she examined the weapon of volcanic glass. “It is interesting to learn that hivers have souls of a sort.” On death, the queen’s soul had been devoured by her enchanted knife – a little more power that would now be at her disposal.
Maddened hiver shrieks echoed weirdly down their tunnel. The walls began to vibrate with the sound of hundreds of feet. The Queen in Waiting – the Queen now – scuttled towards them. “Come! Come! Before her diseased kin catch and kill you. To Jerak Hyden.” She now had an entourage of older hivers, devoid of the deformities and disease that marked the previous queen’s spawn. They carried barbed spears and seemed eager to use them.
“I hope he’s worth it,” Lorimer wheezed, a single bloodshot eyeball growing back into its socket.
“As do I,” Maeven said. “Otherwise, we are likely fucked.”
“Hah, by Lucent swords at that.”
They were herded through the tunnels as civil war erupted. The new queen’s scent took control of every healthy hiver she came across and set them to evict the spawn of the old, diseased queen.
A chamber ahead was being guarded by more deformed hivers. The guards were skewered by hiver spears and pinned thrashing to the wall until their heads were chewed off. Inside, human and hiver bodies lay in neat piles, dissected and needing to be disposed of. Living but twisted humans lay in cages, covered in maps of surgical stitching, their eyes blank and their minds gone. Amid a mess of glass tubes, bubbling pots and odd brass constructions leaking steam, a short and vicious fight erupted.
A small, wiry man with a straggly grey beard and long brown coat crawled from behind an overturned table. He groaned at the ruins of what appeared to be a human skeleton crafted from metal, then breathed on his crystal spectacles and gave them a wipe on his sleeve. He peered at the group of humans and hivers. “Goodness,” Jerak Hyden said. “It is my old friends. Is this a rescue? I’ve never been rescued before.”
“There is a first time for everything,” Maeven said. “We need you to kill an army.”
His eyebrows rose. “How marvellous! Such a challenge. Far more interesting than producing preservatives and food supplements. How quickly may I begin?”
“As soon as we get out,” Lorimer said.
“Oh!” Jerak Hyden’s eyes lit up as he studied the vampire’s exposed muscle and organs. “Tell me, my good fellow, does that hurt? Describe every sensation in detail.” He stretched a hand towards Lorimer’s chest cavity and it was firmly slapped aside.
“Get us out,” Lorimer demanded of Maeven, “before I am forced to eat this insane fool in order to shut him up.”
CHAPTER 14
“Hive appears a little more, ah, interesting than I recalled,” Jerak said as they exited a tunnel in the huge conical fortress and skidded to a stop before a crossroads.
Maeven stared at men laying broken and screaming in the middle of the intersection, their weapons discarded. Others sat dazed in the dirt, vainly trying to reattach severed limbs. A knot of leather-clad men sprinted across the intersection ahead, swords and axes raised. A few moments later some of them fled in a panic back the other way, splattered with blood.
“Cahal’gilroy!”
Tiarnach’s face was bruised and his tunic torn away. Bare-chested, long red hair flying wild, he chased after them with a mad grin and a blooded sword. He lashed out and cut through an ankle. The man fell; Tiarnach stepped on his back and kept on going.
The huge form of Amogg rumbled unsteadily after him, trampling the fallen man into the dirt. Her axe swung down and came back up dripping bone and brains as she charged after her raging ally. “Face me, youse cowardsh!”
The necromancer turned to Lorimer, finding him crouched over a corpse eating the heart. His vampiric flesh was already regenerating, soft skin spreading over bone and glistening red muscle. Jerak Hyden watched rapt, fingers twitching.
The new hiver queen chirped happily and squirted her sweet pleasure-scent. “Our deal is complete. Safest to leave Hive. Soon the rotten queen’s spawn will be driven out into the streets.” Her guards escorted her back into the warren of tunnels to continue the purge.
“Hurry,” Maeven said, grabbing Jerak by the arm and forcing him to jog after their companions. “These are no mere town guards. I smell the stink of the Bright One upon them. Which can only mean one thing – inquisitors are near. We need to get out of here, and quickly.”
Lorimer dropped to all fours, bone and muscle popping and cracking, reforming into a bestial, hairless wolf-shape. He caught up with her, loping by her side at an easy pace. “We shall not depart without a fight, I hope?” he growled. “These vermin owe me a debt of blood. I would feast on their flesh.”
“You are never full,” she panted, half-dragging a red-faced and flustered Jerak with her.
“True.” Lorimer grinned and his wolf-fangs and claws grew, becoming truly monstrous.
They followed the sound of clashing steel and screams, turning the corner to see a pitched battle outside a grimy tavern. The locals cowered inside, peering through the shuttered windows as hands and heads flew through the air, shed by Amogg’s huge axe.
The orc roared and swung at an armoured Lucent soldier. He tried to block the blow, but such was the force that his blade bent and rammed back into his face, denting his helmet and crushing his cheekbone. Her foot snapped up and thudded into his chest like a battering ram, cracking his sternum and launching him into a wall.
A soldier swung his sword at Tiarnach, a mighty but clumsy cut. He didn’t deign to parry with the sword in his right or the knife in his left and instead slipped aside to let the s
word cut only air. The soldier overbalanced and Tiarnach sighed as he rammed the knife up through the man’s jaw into his brain.
“Where is the challenge in this?” he shouted. He left his knife embedded in the dying soldier’s skull, and as the corpse fell, Tiarnach deftly slipped the man’s knife from his belt to replace his own. He scowled and looked around for another enemy, but his mirth evaporated as a small army marched into the street ahead. “Ah, shite.”
These were no mere scouts or farm boys given weapons they didn’t know how to use, but mailed veterans intent on killing, their shields raised. At their head were three knights in shining plate, wielding long and exquisitely crafted war swords – the air seemed to crackle and glow around two of the knights, and their swords burned with golden fire.
“Inquisitors,” Lorimer growled as he leapt on the last soldier still fighting. His fangs tore out the man’s throat, then he began to gulp the flesh down, consuming the unfortunate bastard to finish off the repairs of his own body.
Amogg grinned and started towards the knights, but looked down at the weight being dragged along with her arm. She seemed puzzled to find Maeven latched on to her, Jerak still gripped in the necromancer’s other hand.
“We have to go. Now,” the necromancer said.
“I not scared of humansh,” Amogg said, swaying. “You break like twigsh.”
Jerak gazed up with interest. “Goodness, you are quite large. Do you happen to know much about the internal organs of orcs? No? Would you like to?”
The big orc fiddled with her tusk-rings. “Mad alchemist is no fighter. Pathetic, even for human.”
“He does not fight,” Maeven said. “He kills. And you will see exactly why we need him once we are well away of here. A horde of diseased hivers are about to tear this entire town apart.”
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