The air was cold and dank. Now and again her fingertips brushed across a slimy patch of mould. Once, something large and many-legged darted out from underneath her fingers, and it was all she could do not to let out a startled shout. For all she knew, the king or his companions could be nearby. If they caught her now, Neferata didn’t care to speculate what they might decide to do with her.
After about twenty feet, her hand encountered a wooden doorframe. She continued on, counting each doorway as she went. It had been more than a century since she’d last stood inside Lamashizzar’s improvised sanctum, but she knew it was in the centre of the wing, far from any windows that would reveal the telltale glow of oil lamps burning far into the night. When Neferata reached the tenth doorway she stopped and tried the latch. It moved with a faint screech of tarnished metal, the sound deafeningly loud in the oppressive darkness. She paused, hardly daring to breathe, but several seconds passed without any sounds of movement other than the scampering of rats.
The door opened with only the tiniest sound of wood scraping through the grit that had accumulated on the sandstone floor. Enough predawn light filtered through windows on the eastern face of the palace wing to provide some definition to the interior of the building. She saw that she was in a narrow corridor facing eastwards that connected to a wide central passageway that ran the entire length of the wing.
Moving as silently as she could, Neferata crept to the end of the servants’ corridor. The walls of the central passageway had been stripped of their hangings, and every piece of art and furniture had been removed many years ago; they had all been surreptitiously sold in the city marketplace during lean years to help pay off the debt to the Silk Lords.
The thick dust that had settled in the central passageway had been churned by the regular passage of sandalled feet. Peering through the gloom, Neferata followed the muddled tracks down the wide hall until they stopped outside an otherwise unobtrusive door to her right.
Heart pounding, she laid her hand on the latch. This was the point of no return; once she crossed the threshold, there would be no turning back.
This is not for me, she reminded herself. This is for Lahmia.
The latch gave an oiled click as she pressed it. She pushed the door open with her fingertips, smelling the faint scent of incense and the tang of spilled blood.
There was still a faint red glow emanating from a banked brazier on the far side of the room. Neferata paused in the doorway, taking in everything she could see. There were more tables than she remembered, most of them covered in stacks of paper, collections of papyrus scrolls and jumbled piles of leather-bound books. Wooden chairs and tattered divans were scattered about the room, with wine goblets and trays of half-eaten food set nearby. The queen’s lips curled in distaste. It resembled nothing so much as the cluttered library of a wealthy young dilettante.
Convinced that Lamashizzar and his cronies were nowhere about, Neferata stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She navigated carefully around the room until she reached the brazier, and within a few minutes she’d stoked it carefully back to life.
The glow of the burning coals reached into the far corners of the large room, revealing still more shelves and wide, utilitarian tables set with dusty ceramic jars and glass bottles filled with exotic liquids and powders. They were set to either side of a cleared patch of floor that had been scrupulously swept clean of dust and grime and inlaid with a complicated magical symbol the likes of which she had never seen before.
It took a moment before Neferata spied the figure sprawled in one corner on the other side of the sorcerous circle. The queen searched the tables around her for an oil lamp. Finding one, she lit the wick using a coal from the brazier, and, summoning up her courage, she crept closer to the king’s prisoner.
Arkhan the Black hadn’t changed one bit in the last hundred and fifty years. He was clad in filthy rags, and his bluish skin was covered in grime, but his face looked exactly as it had when she’d first set eyes on him all those years ago. A thick, iron collar enclosed the immortal’s neck, connected to a heavy chain that had been bolted deep into the wall. At his side, an upended wine goblet spilled a thick trickle of dark fluid onto the floor.
The immortal’s lips were stained black by lotus root. Though his chest did not rise and fall as a living mortal’s would, Neferata knew that Arkhan was deep in a drugged slumber. From the very beginning, Lamashizzar kept his prisoner under control by feeding him a mixture of his weak elixir and enough lotus root to kill a half-dozen men. When he wasn’t needed to translate Nagash’s esoteric writings, Arkhan was kept in a stupor so he couldn’t escape.
Staring at the immortal’s slack features, Neferata wondered how much of his sanity still remained. She consoled herself with the thought that if Arkhan was of no further use to Lamashizzar, he would have been disposed of without a moment’s hesitation.
The queen took a deep breath and drew the gold box from her girdle. Opening the filigreed lid, she withdrew the hixa and pressed it to Arkhan’s neck. It took several attempts before the insect’s abdomen arched and drove its sting into the immortal’s flesh.
For a moment, nothing happened. Neferata expected Arkhan to groan as the wasp’s venom burned away the effects of the lotus, but the immortal didn’t so much as tremble. His eyes simply opened, as though he’d only been lightly dozing, and he fixed her with a dull, listless stare.
Neferata expected Arkhan to wonder at her presence, but the immortal said nothing. The unnerving silence stretched for several long minutes, until finally the queen could take it no more. Without thinking, she reached out and gripped his arm, and to her surprise, Arkhan the Black flinched from her touch.
The Queen of Lahmia struggled to give the ghastly creature a friendly smile. “Greetings, Arkhan of Khemri,” she said. “Do you remember me? I am Neferata, Queen of Lahmia, and I have a proposition for you.”
FOUR
The Barrow-Lands
Cripple Peak, in the 76th year of Asaph the Beautiful
(-1600 Imperial Reckoning)
Nagash understood now why the barbarians favoured their long, oiled cloaks. It was the rain: the steady, invasive, unrelenting rain.
North of the great sea, the coastline was a mix of flat, marshy plains and rolling hills girdled with stunted, grey-green thorn trees. The larger of the barbarian villages squatted atop these bald hills, their squalid mud-and-grass huts crouching like clusters of toadstools beneath the never-ending sheets of rain. Smaller villages or clan-like communities hunched amid the yellow weeds of the marsh plains, connected by winding, waterlogged foot paths worn by generations of hunters and raiding parties. The barbarians avoided travelling along those paths at night, Nagash found, for the humans were not the only hunters who favoured the paths when the moon was high in the sky. More than once, the necromancer heard the caterwauling of great cats out in the darkness, and the bellowing of a fierce creature that sounded bestial but had the timbre of a human voice. Sometimes he would hear stealthy footsteps creeping through the tall weeds as he walked the paths at night, but none came close enough to threaten him.
It had taken weeks to make his way up from the southern marshes to the sea’s north coast. Since then, Nagash had moved more cautiously among the barbarian settlements, gathering information about them where he could and then moving on. They were a primitive, suspicious people, hostile to outsiders and capable of the kinds of treachery and cowardly viciousness common to the poor and the weak-willed.
The barbarians were little better than animals, subsisting on what little food they could scrape from the land or catch in the dark, bitter waters of the sea. They clad themselves in rough leather and worked with crude tools of wood and stone for the most part, although occasionally Nagash would peer from the shadows into the open doorway of a village hut and spy a tarnished bronze sword or spearhead hung from pegs close to the crude stone hearth. The style of the metal weapons was crude by Nehekharan standards but entirely functional, and obvio
usly kept as treasures by the barbarians. He suspected they were battle-trophies, since the villagers had nothing of substance to trade with. That meant there was another, more prosperous and advanced barbarian culture somewhere nearby.
Virtually all of the barbarians he observed bore the mark of the burning stone in one fashion or another. The waters of the Sour Sea—or so Nagash called it, because it was dark and bitter with mineral salts from the abn-i-khat—permeated everything in the region and warped it in uncontrolled ways. Physical deformities were commonplace: most were minor, and a few even seemed beneficial. One night, as he’d crept up to peer into the doorway of a village hetman’s dwelling, he was surprised to find himself staring at a young boy of eight whose eyes shone like a cat’s in the reflected glow of the hearth-light. The child saw through the darkness with ease, raising such a hue and cry at Nagash’s appearance that the entire village rose up in arms to try and capture him. The pursuit had lasted most of the night, and they’d come close to catching him a number of times.
At first, his interest in the barbarians had been more a matter of survival and a certain degree of scholarly curiosity, but the more Nagash learned, the more he saw the potential that lay before him. Here was a vast source of magical power, one that might even rival that of the Black Pyramid in Khemri, and a primitive people who could provide him with soldiers and slaves.
He would not necessarily have to return to Nehekhara to continue his quest for domination. His empire could begin again here, along the shores of the Sour Sea.
The barbarians were a fractious and tribal lot, not dissimilar to the desert tribes he had known in the past. They were led by whoever was strong enough and brutal enough to cow the rest into submission, supported by a strong cadre of kinsmen and allies who served as the hetman’s warband. They posed little threat to Nagash; even the larger, hilltop tribes were still isolated from their neighbours, and could be brought down one at a time. No, what concerned him most were the totem-shrines of polished wood that every village boasted, and the treatment of the itinerant priests that tended them.
The totems were columns of carved wood more than fifteen feet high—no small feat in a land where the trees grew like gnarled fists and were no more than eight or nine feet tall—and were shaped to resemble tall, powerfully-built men and women. There were four to eight figures carved into each totem, always in pairs, facing outward from the trunk in poses that Nagash supposed were meant to convey strength, wisdom and prosperity.
The craftsmanship was crude by Nehekharan standards, and there was no common iconography from one totem to the next that might suggest anything like a pantheon. The only common factor he could discern was that none of the figures bore the deformities common to those who worshipped them.
Villagers made offerings of food and simple, carved tokens to the shrines, and Nagash suspected that, given the location of the totems at the centre of each village, they were the focal point of the barbarians’ important ceremonies.
The priests who tended the shrines travelled from village to village, never staying in one place for more than a few days at a time. Like the priests Nagash had known in Khemri, these holy men got the best of everything. Their leather kilts were well made and often decorated with pieces of metal or polished stones, and carried polished wooden staves that they wielded both as weapons and badges of office. They were uniformly tall, well-fed and physically fit, and not one of them bore the slightest trace of disfigurement. The holy men travelled in groups of six or eight, usually with an older priest attended by a pair of functionaries and two or three young acolytes. When they stayed at a village they slept in the hetman’s hut, even if it meant the hetman and his family slept outside that night.
From what Nagash could tell, the priests’ duties involved anointing the totem shrines with oils and performing prayers over them, collecting tribute in the form of food, beer, clothing and tools (which the acolytes carried on their backs when the priests left) and occasionally meddling in the affairs of the villagers themselves. They decided who could marry whom, settled certain disputes involving inheritance, and in one case ordered the death of a young man whose ravings suggested that exposure to the burning stone had rendered him mad.
The priesthood’s influence and authority could be problematic, Nagash realised. More importantly, their lack of deformities hinted that they’d learned to control the worst effects of the abn-i-khat, just as he had done. Potentially that made them very dangerous indeed.
The barbarian villages grew larger and more elaborate as Nagash drew closer to the great mountain. The broad hillsides had been crudely terraced, and ranks of round-roofed huts sprawled down and across the sodden fields, where crops of rice and tubers were nurtured in paddies of bitter water. The tracks were wider and better travelled, and the woodland more sparse. Only the constant rain worked in his favour, giving him reason to conceal his face beneath the dripping hood of his cloak and discouraging conversation with the barbarians he encountered on the muddy tracks. There were times, on moonless nights, when he would attach himself to larger groups of travellers and follow along with them in silence for many miles, little more than another vague, cloaked shape in the darkness.
Now he stood beneath the dripping branches of a small copse of trees, close to the point where the northern coast began to curve south and east towards the mountain, and watched a strange procession make its way down the switchback trail of one of the largest barbarian villages Nagash had seen yet.
Normally the crude customs of the barbarians were of no interest to him whatsoever; what caught his attention this time were the dozens of glowing green lights that accompanied the procession down the dark trail.
The necromancer clutched his sodden cloak tightly around his ever-thinning frame and edged back into the shadows of the wood as far as he could manage. As far as he could tell, the procession would make its way down the muddy trail directly past where he stood, which also meant that they were heading towards the mountain.
The procession was a long one. He reckoned that he was almost two miles from the village. The tail end of the line was still working its way down the hillside when he began to hear the low, mournful chanting of voices emanating from around a curve in the track to his left. Minutes later, a familiar glow began to seep around the muddy track, followed by a pair of young priests wearing fine robes and carrying gnarled wooden poles in their hands. The acolytes’ heads were bared to the bitter rain as they led the procession down the track, their faces turned downward and their shoulders heaving as they led the rest in the funereal chant. The green light emanated from globular sacks of hide hung from the ends of the wooden poles. Each hide sack had been scraped until they were translucent and then filled with water. Glowing green shapes stirred within, occasionally darting and swimming from one end of their prison to the next.
Behind the priests and their heavy lamps came a large group of chanting, bare-headed holy men, all clad in rough vestments of cloth and hide that were decorated in glittering bits of metal and precious stones. Their faces had been painted with glowing oil that highlighted their handsome, unmarred features.
After the phalanx of chanting holy men came a column of groaning acolytes bearing a rough, wooden palanquin. Upon the palanquin rode an arrogant old man that Nagash knew had to be the barbarian high priest. He sat upon a straight-backed throne, wreathed in layers of heavy robes festooned with chains of actual gold and a kind of polished, ruddy copper. A circlet of gold rested upon his brow, inset with a glowing oval stone. The piece of abn-i-khat looked to be the size of a bird’s egg; Nagash could feel its crackling power from a dozen yards away. His hands clenched hungrily at the sight of it. Had he more power at his command, he might have been tempted to lay waste to the holy men and take the stone for himself.
The high priest went by, heedless of the necromancer’s feverish gaze. Behind him came another set of lantern-bearing priests, followed by a funereal procession uncomfortably similar to those Nagash had once presided
over in Khemri.
There had been a battle, Nagash realised at once. The barbarians followed the priests in family groups, arranged by order of prominence within their village. Their fine clothes had been covered in grey ash, and many of the women had cut away their hair in a gesture of grief. They carried the dead upon their naked shoulders, resting in a woven litter made from swamp reeds. The corpses were naked, and Nagash was surprised to see that none of the litters contained trophies or grave gifts to aid their spirits in the afterlife. The tribe needed absolutely everything they could get just to survive. The dead, however honoured in life, clearly had to fend for themselves afterwards.
A pair of lantern-bearing priests marched at roughly even intervals along the length of the great procession, filling the air with their droning chant. Nagash watched the line snake its way southeastward, apparently heading for the broken plain at the foot of the great mountain. Intrigued, Nagash waited for the end of the procession to go by, then fell into step behind him. The darkness and the steady, drizzling rain hid him effectively from view.
They passed through rocky, flat terrain, devoid of any signs of life. To Nagash’s surprise, the path widened after a time and became paved with irregular, flat stones. Totem shrines appeared at intervals along the crudely-built road. Their faces had been painted some time earlier with the same glowing oil that adorned the priests, lending the carved faces an eerie semblance of life.
Hours passed. The barbarians walked for miles in the dark and the rain, growing steadily closer to the mountain. Eventually, Nagash saw a glowing, greenish nimbus in the air some distance ahead. After about half a mile he could see a line of tall, formidable-looking structures that stretched across the path ahead. More glowing orbs hung at intervals along their length, or shone from the slits of windows set into their flanks. Before long Nagash realised that he was looking at a strange kind of fort. From what he could tell, it was a series of long, high-walled buildings made of mud, brick and wood, connected end to end and stretching from a rocky spur to the north-east all the way to the shore of the Sour Sea, perhaps two miles to the south-west. A single, wide gateway provided the only access between the barbarian villages and the sea’s western coast. It was also the first real attempt at fortification Nagash had seen in the entire region.
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