“Tomorrow night may well be too late, great one. If the city is so close, we should press on. We could be in Quatar before noon.” The Rasetran king bristled at the note of command in the priest’s voice.
“The men are exhausted,” he growled. “If we keep them going past dawn, into the full heat of the day, we could lose many of them. Are the lives of a few hundred warriors worth the life of a king?” Nebunefer raised a thin eyebrow.
“I’m surprised you would ask such a question, great one.” Rakh-amn-hotep let out a snort.
“Right now I need spearmen and cavalrymen, not kings,” he said.
“But the king isn’t just one man, as you well know,” Nebunefer countered. “He represents his fighting men as well. If Hekhmenukep dies, there is no guarantee that the Lybaran host won’t take his body home and leave you to fight Nagash alone.”
The old schemer had a point, Rakh-amn-hotep admitted sourly. He turned and stared off to the east for a moment, trying to gauge the remaining distance to Quatar. He knew that another contingent of horsemen was due back from the river sometime near dawn. It might be enough.
“We’ll see how things stand as we get closer to dawn,” the king said at last. “If the men are able, we’ll move on. Otherwise, you may have another day of praying to do.”
For a moment it seemed that Nebunefer would continue the argument, but after catching the hard look in the Rasetran’s eye, he merely bowed to the king and went off to catch up with Hekhmenukep’s wagon.
Rakh-amn-hotep watched him go, and then tapped his driver’s shoulder.
“Turn us around,” he growled. “Let’s get back to the head of the column.”
The driver nodded and popped the reins, chiding the horses back into motion. They turned in a bouncing arc eastwards and rejoined the trade road once more. Rakh-amn-hotep paid little attention to the trudging men as the chariot rumbled down the column, his mind preoccupied with weighing the risk of a forced march against the very real possibility of losing Hekhmenukep and the Lybarans in the process.
He hoped the night didn’t have any other surprises in store.
When Arkhan received the summons he was more than three miles to the east, prowling along the trade road with a squadron of Numasi horsemen and nipping at the heels of the retreating enemy army. The cloud of locusts that swept down upon the immortal out of the darkness had spooked the still-living Numasi and their horses. Arkhan glared contemptuously at his erstwhile allies as the insects hissed and spun round his head.
“Return to my tent, favoured servant,” Arkhan heard in the rustle of chitin and the buzz of papery wings. “The time of retribution is nigh.”
Arkhan turned command of the squadron over to its Numasi captain, ordering them to close and engage the enemy rearguard throughout the night. Then he turned, wheeled his undead horse around and raced off into the darkness.
The army of the Undying King was arrayed in a crescent formation that stretched for more than three miles from tip to tip, its outstretched arms reaching hungrily for the fleeing enemy host. Most of the warriors in the front lines were long dead, their flesh turned leathery by the desert air and their corpses home to burrowing scarabs and black desert scorpions. They advanced slowly and stolidly after their foes. When the king and his immortals halted the army at dawn they stood in ordered ranks, baking in the heat, until the time to march came once again.
By contrast, the remainder of the host, less than a third of Khemri’s city levies and what was left of the allied armies of Numas and Zandri, followed a few miles behind the vanguard along the trade road, their heads bowed with hunger and fear. The living trembled at the sight of the walking dead, furtively making signs to ward off evil when they believed none of Nagash’s immortals were looking. The Undying King drove them without mercy. Wounds were not tended, nor were they fed more than a meagre ration of water and grain each day. Nagash cared little about the condition of their flesh, for when the time came his warriors would fight, one way or the other.
The companies of living warriors averted their eyes and clutched their spears with trembling hands as Arkhan raced past. He came upon his master’s pavilion near the rear of the column, arrayed on a level patch of sand a few hundred yards from the road. Other tents had been pitched nearby, and Arkhan saw many of the army’s engineers labouring at a frantic pace under the stern gaze of several of the king’s immortals. He had heard rumours of Nagash’s new battlefield innovations, and presumed that they were being made in anticipation of the coming fight at Quatar.
More than a score of undead mounts waited outside the master’s tent as Arkhan approached, and he carefully concealed a frown of disapproval. Since rejoining the army a few weeks past, he’d taken pains to avoid his fellow immortals. The years of solitude in his black tower had left him impatient and mistrustful of the company of others, particularly of his own kind. Steeling himself, he slid from the saddle and entered his master’s tent without a passing glance at the slaves cowering outside.
The tent’s main chamber was crowded with kneeling figures, all waiting upon the king. Arkhan spied Raamket, garbed in a fresh cloak of flayed human hide, and the bandaged figure of Shepsu-hur. The immortals studied Arkhan with the flat, hungry stare of a pack of jackals, and he bared his broken teeth in return.
Nagash, the Undying King, sat upon Khemri’s ancient throne at the rear of the chamber, flanked by his uneasy allies. Arkhan could see at once that the campaign had left its mark on the three kings. Amn-nasir, the Priest King of Zandri, was nearly catatonic, his eyes glazed and his expression slack under the effects of the black lotus. Seheb and Nuneb, the twin Kings of Numas, had kept their wits so far, but both of the young men were anxious and uncharacteristically withdrawn. One of them, Arkhan couldn’t tell which, kept biting at his nails when he thought no one was looking. The immortal could smell the blood on the king’s fingertips from across the chamber.
The vizier marched past the kneeling immortals and sank to his knees directly at Nagash’s feet. He could hear the faint moans of the necromancer’s ghostly retinue swirling above his head.
“What is your command, master?” he asked.
Nagash straightened upon the throne.
“We draw close to Quatar,” the Undying King declared, “and the time has come for the craven King of the White City to pay for his surrender at the Gates of the Dawn.” The necromancer stretched out his hand. “I shall send you forth with these immortals to Quatar’s great necropolis, and there you will raise up an army of vengeance to take the city from our foes. When the rebel kings of the east reach Quatar’s walls, you will be there to bar their path and seal their doom.”
Now, Arkhan understood the strategy behind the necromancer’s slow pursuit of the enemy army. He had been herding them onwards to Quatar, where he planned to trap them against the walls of the city and crush them without mercy. The vizier glanced back at the kneeling immortals. With so many together, they could raise a considerable army among the houses of the dead, easily enough to overwhelm Quatar’s meagre garrison, and afterwards, who knew? The White City would be in need of a new king.
The vizier smiled and bowed his head to Nagash. “It shall be as you command, master,” he said. “We are your arrow of vengeance. Release us, and we will fly straight to your enemy’s heart.”
The Undying King gave the vizier a grim smile.
“I count upon it, loyal servant,” he said. Then he beckoned, and slaves appeared from the shadows bearing goblets brimming with crimson liquid. “Drink,” Nagash commanded. “Fill your limbs with vigour for the battle to come.”
Arkhan was on his feet in an instant, feeling the sudden tension in the air as the immortals reacted to the presence of the elixir. A slave stepped before the vizier and offered him the first taste. Arkhan found himself staring into Ghazid’s blue eyes as he took the vessel in both hands and drank deeply, his body shuddering with the taste of power.
The rest of the immortals surged forwards like jackals around
a corpse. Ghazid watched them drink and cackled with glee, his eyes glittering with madness.
The howling swarm sped across the face of the moon in the early hours of the morning, passing undetected over the heads of the enemy army retreating to the east. Faster than the flight of a night hawk, they sped to the great plain at the foot of the Brittle Peaks, where the towers of Quatar rose like white sepulchres beneath the stars. Ribbons of smoke curled into the night sky from the poorer districts of the city, where victims of the plague were still being found and given to the flames.
The swirling, seething swarm passed over the near-deserted city and its furtive sentries, seeking the vast complex of tombs that spread along the foot of the mountains east of Quatar. The huge swarm seemed to hover over the necropolis for a moment, billowing this way and that as though searching among the maze of crypts. Then the living cloud gathered itself and hurtled southwards, crossing the road leading from Quatar to the Gates of the Dawn and settling among the shabby, crumbling tombs of the city’s poorer citizens.
Smoking husks of dead insects showered down among the tombs as the immortals came to rest after their long flight from Nagash’s pavilion. Arkhan paused for a moment to check his bearings and gauge the height of the moon. It was less than three hours until dawn, he reckoned. There was little time to lose.
Hissed commands passed among the immortals. They fanned out quickly among the tombs, spacing out in an arcane pattern that they had been taught centuries past. Arkhan stood in the centre of this sorcerous web, his veins brimming with inhuman power. He reached out with his senses and felt the currents of magic rippling through the air. Even hundreds of leagues distant he could feel the pulse of the Black Pyramid like the thundering heart of a god.
Arkhan raised his hands to the black sky and began the great invocation, and one by one his fellow immortals joined in, until the air shook with their dreadful voices. Dark magic spread like a stain among the tombs, seeping irresistibly past the cracked facades and flowing over the shrouded bodies within. The vizier knew that the poor could not afford the elaborate protective wards that were typically worked into the tombs of the nobility, making his task that much easier.
The ritual continued for more than an hour, growing in complexity and power until Arkhan thought that he could feel the energy humming along his skin. Faint curtains of dust rose above the countless tombs as their contents began to shift and press at the thin stone walls. Portals cracked apart and collapsed in a shower of rubble as the first warriors of Arkhan’s new army shambled out into the darkness.
Hundreds upon hundreds of skeletal figures clawed their way from their tombs, their eye sockets lit with tiny sparks of grave-light. Tattered, filthy wrappings fluttered from their limbs as they shuffled silently westwards in response to Arkhan’s will. In the broken ground outside the necropolis they formed into rough companies, directed by the subordinate efforts of the remaining immortals. Within two hours the army of the dead numbered thirty thousand strong, testing Arkhan’s necromantic powers to the very limit.
The sky was paling to the east. Arkhan knew that at dawn his control would weaken, as he was forced to take shelter from the sun’s rays. Soon the people of Quatar would look pleadingly to the east, begging for deliverance from the ghastly horde that swept over their walls.
Not one would live to see the dawn.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Blood of Princes
Khemri, the Living City, in the 46th year of Ualatp the Patient
(-1950 Imperial Reckoning)
The Priest King of Khemri stood beneath the blazing noonday sun and tried not to think of blood.
He stood upon an overseer’s platform at the edge of the Plain of Kings, watching the labourers at work on the foundations of the Black Pyramid. At Nagash’s command, the great plain at the heart of Khemri’s necropolis had been transformed. His plan for the pyramid made use of every last hectare of available space set aside for future kings, and demanded still more besides. Scores of smaller crypts had been disassembled and relocated to other parts of the necropolis in order to make room for stone-carving yards, staging areas and rubbish piles. A wide avenue had been built running north from the great plain, requiring the demolition of still more crypts so that huge blocks of marble could be brought from the barges tied up along the river. At the moment it was being used to remove hundreds of cart-loads of sandy soil as Nagash’s army of slaves excavated the pyramid’s subterranean chambers. When it was complete, the Black Pyramid would dwarf every other structure in the necropolis. Indeed, it would be the largest single structure anywhere in Nehekhara. The king’s ambitions required nothing less.
Nagash folded his arms tightly around his chest. Despite the heat of the day, his bones felt brittle and cold, and an aching weariness began to sap the strength from his limbs. He would need to feed again soon. Months of experimentation had allowed Nagash to refine the process of leeching vitality from living blood, but its effects were all too fleeting. Depending on the quality of the source, the king could enjoy a few days of youthful vigour, or a week at most.
The benefits were astonishing. Nagash could not remember possessing such strength or clarity of thought in his entire life, but each time the tide of blood receded he was left feeling weaker and more wretched than ever before. No amount of food or rest could take away the awful chill that settled into his bones, or the alarming weakness that left him as helpless as a child. The only answer was to find another source of blood.
Fortunately, the king had those in plentiful supply.
There were half a dozen slave camps situated around the edges of the city’s necropolis, enclosed by perimeters of trenches and spiked wooden barricades and patrolled by horsemen from the king’s army. Since the sack of Zandri, more than thirty thousand labourers had been assembled for Nagash’s grand scheme, including the bulk of King Nekumet’s army and two-thirds of his citizens. Still more were arriving each day, as Nehekhara’s other great cities sent tribute to ensure that they didn’t suffer the same fate as Nekumet and his people.
The battle on the road to Khemri had been swift and decisive, thanks in no small part to Zandri’s large force of mercenary troops. The superstitious northern barbarians had no faith in the gods of the Blessed Land, and as such they enjoyed no protection from the incantations of Neru’s priestesses. That left them vulnerable to Nagash’s sorceries, and over the course of the night he had tormented the warriors with all manner of ghostly visions and portents of doom. By midnight the barbarians were panicked and on the verge of riot, and when Nekumet and his noblemen attempted to restore order, the mercenaries rose up in revolt.
Chaos tore through the enemy camp as the Zandri army turned upon itself in hours of confused, brutal fighting. By dawn, the surviving mercenaries had managed to escape the Zandri camp and blundered southwards, deeper into the desert. Nekumet’s remaining troops were exhausted, hungry and dispirited, and their camp all but destroyed. At dawn, the dazed survivors began to salvage what they could from the wreckage, and then Nagash’s army appeared in full battle order on the road behind them.
Despite everything they had endured the night before, Nekumet’s troops still managed to form up and offer battle, but before long they found themselves under attack from Arkhan’s cavalry as well, and the Zandrian battleline quickly disintegrated under the pressure. By mid-morning King Nekumet offered his terms of surrender to Nagash, but the King of Khemri refused. There would be no terms. Zandri would surrender unconditionally, or they would be slaughtered to a man. Dismayed, Nekumet had no choice but to comply.
By the end of the day, the survivors of Zandri’s army had been disarmed and bound into slave coffles for the long march to Khemri. Nekumet, stripped of his crown and royal robes, was dressed in sackcloth and sent home on the back of a flea-bitten mule. It was only when he’d arrived at Zandri’s broken gate that he learned what Nagash had done to his city.
News of the battle raced across Nehekhara like a storm wind, borne by the shoc
ked ambassadors fleeing the ruin of Zandri. In Khemri, crowds of citizens turned out along the great avenues to cheer the return of their conquering king. The Living City’s pre-eminence had been restored in a single, brutal stroke, and Nagash’s great work could begin in earnest.
The king surveyed the scope of the excavations once more and nodded thoughtfully. A small retinue of scholars and slaves stood next to him, bearing copies of the pyramid’s plans for Nagash’s reference. To the king’s right stood Arkhan the Black, clad in fine robes and wearing gold rings stolen from the defeated Zandrian nobles. He had been rewarded well for his efforts against Nekumet’s army, and was the king’s chief vizier, charged with overseeing the construction of the Black Pyramid. Also, he had been the first of Nagash’s vassals to taste the king’s life-giving elixir and enjoy the vigour of youth once more.
Nagash gauged the progress of the excavations and judged that they were proceeding well.
“Continue as planned,” he told his vizier. “The excavation will proceed night and day until completed.”
“Does that include our citizens, or just the slaves?” the vizier inquired carefully. To speed construction further, Nagash had ordered the city’s criminals put in the slave camps, and every citizen due to perform his annual civil service was sent to the construction site. Until the massive structure was finished, Khemri’s roads and infrastructure would go untended.
Nagash considered the question and waved his hand expansively.
“Save the most difficult and dangerous tasks for the slaves,” he said, “but everyone must still do their part.” Arkhan bowed.
“It shall be as you say,” he replied, “but deaths among the slaves will increase. We have lost a sizeable number already due to hunger and disease.”
“Disease?” the king frowned. “How is that possible?” The vizier shifted uncomfortably on his feet. He, too, was showing the first pangs of hunger; his eyes were sunken and his hands trembled slightly with cold.
[Nagash 01] - Nagash the Sorcerer Page 33