[Nagash 02] - Nagash the Unbroken

by Mike Lee - (ebook by Undead)

  Time had no meaning in the trackless expanse of the wasteland. Nagash no longer marked the passage of days, focusing all his attentions on unlocking the powers of the stone and shaping rituals to harness its power. The first rite he experimented on was creating a resonance between a fleck of stone and the source it had stemmed from.

  The results were initially very disappointing. Over time, as he began to grasp the mineral’s properties more closely, the experiments became merely baffling. It wasn’t that the resonance failed to draw him in a distinct direction—it pointed him in a multitude of directions at the same time, including straight up and straight down. Following the many paths the ritual revealed to him caused Nagash to cross and re-cross the length and breadth of the wasteland. From time to time he would find pieces of stone, sometimes buried deep beneath the ground, but none led him towards the dark mountain. After a time, he began to think that the fickle energies of the stone were somehow purposely leading him astray.

  Then one night, he saw a streak of green light arc across the starlit sky, and another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  Whatever the abn-i-khat was, it truly was not of this earth—or at least not part of the earth that Nagash knew and understood. He marked the plunging arc of green light as a soldier might trace the fall of an arrow shot, and then began a long and arduous trek to find where the stone had fallen. Eventually he came upon a shallow crater dug into the earth. Pieces of the green stone were nowhere to be found, but large, rat-like footprints were in abundance. The beasts had made it to the site mere hours before he did. Nagash tried to track them further, but soon lost their spoor across the hard, rocky terrain. After that, he resolved to kill the rat-beasts wherever he found them, for clearly they coveted the stone at least as much as he did.

  Nagash mulled over everything he’d learned, and concluded firstly that if he’d been able to detect the power radiating from the mountain at such a distance, it must contain a much larger collection of abn-i-khat than he’d ever seen before, and its chaotic energies made magical divination difficult, if not impossible. So he abandoned his ritual and let his instincts guide him, heading ever eastward over the ridges and foothills and leaving his senses open for concentrations of magical power.

  It was the hazy glow to the north-east that drew him first—a faint, greenish luminescence that limned the crooked lines of the mountain peaks, almost too faint to see against the paling of the early morning sky. He was well beyond the foothills now, crossing the first of the Brittle Peaks, and the sensations of power seemed to shift directions like the fey mountain wind.

  Like everything else about the wasteland, the glow seemed just a few miles distant, but it took him nearly a fortnight to reach the last of the intervening peaks. From there, Nagash found himself staring down upon a broad, dark sea. The night was early, and the glow he’d seen on previous nights wasn’t in evidence yet, allowing him to see a long way in the clear mountain air. Marshlands glittered frostily beneath the moonlight along the sea’s south-eastern shore, while a broad crescent of watch fires flickered along the coastline to the north and north-west.

  None of that mattered to Nagash. To the east, hard by the shores of the gloomy sea, rose the dark slopes of the mountain that had called to him for more than a hundred years. It was larger and far more imposing than the broken peaks that surrounded it; tendrils of steam leaked from fissures along its flanks, glowing faintly green in the darkness. It dominated the horizon for miles, crouching at the edge of the sea like a brooding dragon from some barbarian myth.

  Looking upon the mountain, Nagash realised he had never actually seen it with his own eyes before that moment. The shadow of the power buried at its heart had somehow etched itself upon his mind’s eye. Now he understood why it had always seemed to hide, just out of his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to reach it. All this time he’d been chasing a phantasm, a ghost of the true mountain. The notion both intrigued and troubled him.

  Nagash reckoned that there could be dozens, perhaps even scores of stone deposits hidden within the mountain. How could they have been gathered all in one place? His gaze strayed to the constellation of watch fires lining the northern coast. Perhaps it was the rat-things. They were gathering up the stones faster than he. It all had to be going somewhere.

  He would have to learn more before proceeding. The secrets of the mountain would be his, no matter what; he would need every bit of power he could muster to re-conquer Nehekhara and punish those who had defied him. If the rat-things stood in his way, then he would deal with them as well.

  It took most of the night for Nagash to descend the far slope of the mountain and make his way to the outskirts of the marshland. In the early hours before dawn, when the night was coldest, a thick blanket of glowing mist rose from the marshlands and along the shores of the distant sea. The vapours curled and shifted across the surface of the water, though there was no wind to stir them; the unearthly light created the illusion of half-formed shapes capering and whirling madly within the mist.

  The marsh terrain was more dense and treacherous than Nagash realised. He sloshed through foul-smelling, scummy water that rose up to mid-thigh in places. It was unnervingly warm, and where it touched his skin he felt the faintest brush of sorcerous energy. The necromancer considered the tendrils of steam writhing like serpents across the flank of the distant mountain. If there were enough burning stone buried within the mountain to taint the neighbouring sea, his vengeance upon the living world would be great indeed.

  He wound between hummocks of thick, yellow marsh grass and stunted trees, listening to slithering, splashing creatures hunting through the mist. Strange howls and high-pitched cries echoed from the moss-covered branches of the trees, and once he saw a pair of faintly glowing yellow eyes regarding him intently from the shadows to the left of his path. But the creatures of the marsh shunned him, as all living beasts did. More than once he heard something huge rise up in the mist ahead of him and go thrashing off into the water at his approach. When the sun finally broke over the horizon, hours later, he crawled into a muddy hollow formed by the thick roots of a half-dead tree and waited for nightfall.

  Voices and the sounds of thrashing water roused him from his meditations, many hours later. Darkness had fallen, though the moon was still low in the sky, and as he crept to the edge of the tree’s sheltering roots he could see a yellow haze of lantern light playing upon the surface of the water.

  The voices sounded human, guttural and strained with effort. There were at least two speakers, perhaps three, calling out to one another in a barbarian tongue unlike anything Nagash had heard before. It was difficult to tell how far away the voices were, the sounds echoing flatly from the surface of the water and the surrounding trees.

  Nagash eased carefully from his hiding place, head low, and searched for the source of the noise. The thrashing continued unabated, punctuated by grants and muffled blows. It was coming from beyond a screen of moss-covered trees just a few dozen yards away. The glow of lanterns seeped between the gnarled trunks, flickering crazily as straggling figures moved past the source of the light.

  The necromancer still carried two of the large bronze daggers he’d looted from the corpses of the rat-things so many years ago. He drew one of the blades from his leather belt and crept from tree to tree until finally he caught sight of the source of the noise.

  Peering through a screen of hanging moss, Nagash saw a wider patch of water just past the hummock where he stood. Perhaps ten yards away a low, flat-bottomed boat had poled up close to another small, tree-covered hummock, and within the globe of light cast by the lantern set at its bow, four men were wrestling with the thrashing body of what appeared to be a huge, whiskered fish. Two of the men stood up to their waists in the murky water, their arms thrown around the fish’s scaly flanks as they tried to heave it up into the boat. A third stood in the boat and tried to grip the creature’s flat, toothy head, while the fourth tried to kill it with blows from a short, thick club.
From where Nagash stood, it was difficult to tell which side was winning the fight.

  The men were barbarians; that much he saw at once, but they had little in common with the tall, fair-haired northerners sold on the slave block at Zandri. Their bodies were short and squat, thick with muscle but deformed in different ways. He saw hunchbacks and misshapen skulls, long, ape-like arms and bulging, knobby spines. Their heads were hairless, and their skin was a sickly, pale green. The men in the boat wore simple, belted kilts of rough leather that hung below their knees, and their chests were decorated in swirling scar patterns similar to Nehekharan tattoos.

  So it wasn’t the rat-creatures who inhabited the north shore after all, Nagash realised. Clearly these barbarians had lived close to the tainted waters for much, if not all their short, squalid lives. The mutations wrought by the burning stone appeared pervasive. The necromancer’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. With a little patient study, these men could teach him a great deal.

  Sticking to the deep shadows, Nagash crept around the edges of the wide pool while the barbarians straggled to finish off their prey. The noise of their struggles masked his movements, until finally he reached the far side of the hummock next to their boat.

  The sounds of thrashing abruptly ceased. Nagash heard the barbarians whooping and laughing, and then the sounds of feet tramping through foliage just a few yards away. Carefully, he eased through the undergrowth towards the sounds.

  Within moments, lantern light was seeping between the mossy trees. Nagash heard the scrape of wood on soil, and then a meaty thud on the ground nearby. Peering around the bole of a gnarled old tree, he saw that the barbarians had grounded their little boat and dragged their monster catch up onto dry land to clean it and cut away the meat. The fish was huge—easily six feet long—and almost as thick as a human torso. The scales along its back were a dark grey, grimed with muck from the bottom of the pool, and its wide mouth was full of small, black, triangular teeth.

  The two men who had wrestled the thing from its hiding place beneath the water had pulled on heavy, oiled leather cloaks and stood tiredly over their catch, their mud-streaked chests heaving, filthy water streaming down their legs. One of their companions was digging a leather-wrapped bundle out of the bottom of the boat, while the fourth man was busy tying the craft to the branch of a nearby tree.

  Sensing his opportunity, Nagash slipped silently from the shadows beneath the tree and crept across the small clearing where the men had set down their catch. Being careful not to startle the barbarians, he walked quietly up behind one of the cloaked men. At the last moment, just as Nagash came within arm’s reach, the man must have sensed his presence. The barbarian whirled about, his powerful hands poised to seize whatever was creeping up behind him. The man must have been expecting an animal of some kind, because when he saw Nagash, his beady eyes widened with surprise.

  Before the barbarian could recover, Nagash darted in quickly and slashed his throat with the rat-beast’s dagger. Blood splashed across the clearing and the man collapsed with a choking scream.

  Nagash turned on the second cloaked man just as the barbarian leapt at him with a guttural shout. He managed to get his left hand around the man’s throat as they crashed together, nearly knocking him from his feet. A stubby-fingered hand seized Nagash’s knife wrist and held it in a vice-like grip, while jagged fingernails clawed for his eyes. Nagash tightened his grip on the barbarian’s throat and tried to pull his knife hand free, but the man refused to let go. A knobby fist smashed into the side of the necromancer’s skull; he responded by driving his knee into the barbarian’s groin. The man roared in pain, but doggedly hung on.

  The barbarian who had been tying off the boat snatched up a fallen branch and charged across the open ground towards Nagash, and the fourth man wasn’t far behind. The tide of the battle was rapidly turning against the necromancer, and the very idea infuriated him. With a snarl, he drew upon the power of the burning stone.

  Fiery strength surged through him. His hand closed about the barbarian’s neck, crushing the man’s spine. Nagash hurled the body like a children’s doll straight into the third man’s path. Both man and corpse tumbled across the ground in a tangle of limbs.

  Nagash pounced on the man before he could pull himself free and drove his dagger through the barbarian’s eye.

  The last man stopped dead in his tracks, mouth agape in shock. Without thinking, Nagash flung out his hand and hissed a stream of arcane words—and the power of the stone responded. The man’s body went suddenly rigid, as though gripped in a giant’s invisible fist. The necromancer hissed in satisfaction.

  “Good,” Nagash murmured, feeling the power crackling through his outstretched hand. “Yes. Very good.”

  He rose slowly, careful to maintain his focus on the impromptu spell. It was more difficult than it once was; the magic was more potent, but less controlled, and fought against his will every second.

  Nagash approached the man carefully. The cloth bundle was still clutched in the barbarian’s hands. The necromancer reached up and carefully prised it from the man’s fingers. The objects wrapped up in the greasy cloth clinked metallically.

  He smiled. Kneeling down, he set the bundle on the ground and unrolled it. The tools within gleamed in the lamplight. The necromancer nodded grudgingly. Crude implements, but suitable to the task. Satisfied, Nagash turned his attention back to his prisoner.

  “I have many questions,” he told the terrified barbarian. “This is a strange land, and there is much I do not know about you and your people.”

  He drew a long, curved flensing knife from the pouch and inspected the bronze blade in the lantern light.

  “Fortunately, I expect you will be a font of useful information,” the necromancer said. He rose to his feet and studied his subject carefully. He raised his left hand, and with a slight gesture, the barbarian’s arms rose from his sides.

  Nagash’s smile widened. It had been a very long time since his last vivisection.

  “We shall begin with the muscle groups,” he said to the man, and went to work.

  THREE

  A Silken Betrayal

  Lahmia, The City of the Dawn, in the 76th year of Asaph the Beautiful

  (-1600 Imperial Reckoning)

  The Eastern priests crouched before the queen like great, yellow bullfrogs, backs slightly arched and palms pressed to the marble floor as they filled the Hall of Reverent Contemplation with their buzzing, wordless song. Their eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, perspiration gleaming beneath the brim of their outlandish felt hats as the six elderly men emitted a basso drone that Neferata could feel against her skin. The delegation from the Silk Lands seemed to find it uplifting, judging by the beatific looks on their faces. She found the noise deeply unnerving—and it just seemed to go on and on. For the first time, Neferata was genuinely glad that she was required to wear a mask in public. The longer the Eastern throat music went, the more horrified she became.

  The audience with the Imperial delegation had begun in a civilized enough fashion, with little of the outrageous fanfare that usually accompanied the arrival of a member of the Celestial Household. Normally, the first Imperial attendants would arrive well before dawn to decorate the Hall of Reverent Contemplation with silk hangings, lacquered screens and an unbroken line of royal carpet stretching all the way to the palace gate. Priests would walk from one end of the hall to the other, chanting prayers to chase away evil spirits and promote harmony, then give way to a procession of musicians and artists whose task was to tune the vibrations of the space in a manner that was pleasing to Celestial ears.

  When the delegation itself finally arrived, many hours later, it would be accompanied by a small army of courtiers, bureaucrats and servants that would fill the cramped chamber to capacity. By the time that Neferata met the delegates face-to-face, it was only the relative placement of the throne-like chairs that made it clear who was actually giving an audience to whom.

  By contrast, the curr
ent ambassador had arrived with very little fanfare, appearing at the palace gates promptly at midday and pausing only long enough to have a brilliant blue carpet unrolled at his feet before continuing onward to the hall. He was accompanied by a very modest retinue: five bureaucrats, a handful of courtiers, and a young woman clad in rich robes whose face was painted white as alabaster. The entire delegation could be seated in a comfortable half-circle before the royal dais, lending the proceedings an unusually intimate, almost conspiratorial air.

  Of course, all the usual Imperial proprieties had to be observed. The audience had begun with a lengthy recitation of the queen’s lineage, followed by an even longer recitation of the ambassador’s ancestry. The ambassador, speaking through his senior bureaucrat, then offered a very appreciative and long-winded greeting, bestowing upon Neferata the acknowledgement of the Imperial Court and the hopes of continued harmony with the City of the Dawn.

  Tea was served. The strange Eastern concoction, served in tiny ceramic cups, still tasted like little more than heated bathwater to Neferata, but she’d learned to nod politely and listen with feigned appreciation as the ambassador’s courtiers spoke at length of the refinement of the leaves and the delicacy of its flavour.

  Once the cups had been collected and a prayer offered to the Eastern gods in thanks for the tea’s many blessings, it was time for the customary tokens of esteem. Neferata accepted a fine Eastern bow and a quiver of arrows on behalf of the king, as well as a half-dozen scrolls of poetry, three chests of fine silk robes and a prince’s ransom in exotic spices from the far corners of the Empire. This time the ambassador even brought a gift for the queen’s lovely cousin, whom the king had required to attend the audiences as part of her courtly education. A servant presented Khalida with a magnificent falcon, taken from the Emperor’s personal stock. Evidently, the last ambassador had overheard Neferata’s pet name for her cousin, confirming the queen’s suspicion that the delegates from the Imperial court spoke perfectly good Nehekharan, and insisted on translators for their own inscrutable reasons.