(-1598 Imperial Reckoning)
The slaughter of the barbarian priests had been more than just an act of vengeance on Nagash’s part; it had served a pragmatic purpose as well. The mountain would become the seat of his power, just as the Black Pyramid had been in Khemri. From here he would raise the armies that would cast down the kings of Nehekhara. He envisioned sprawling mines, foundries, armouries and great laboratories from which he would continue to master the arts of necromancy. The construction alone would last centuries, and occupy his undead army both day and night. Eliminating the priests was necessary to keep them from interfering in his designs, and to swell the ranks of his workforce.
Construction began the night after the battle at the fortress temple. The undead rose from their beds across the barrow plain and converged on the south face of the mountain. Guided by Nagash’s will, they began constructing the first stage of fortifications around what would be the first of many mine complexes. Within the first month the southern barrows had been dismantled, and the foundation stones hauled up to the mountain to help form the first buildings. Earth and stone excavated from the mountain were used as well, but Nagash knew he would need much more before he could say the great work was well and truly begun. The fortress would take many centuries before it was complete, and much of it would be underground, sheltered from the burning light of the sun.
At the same time, Nagash kept a close watch on the temple fortress. He knew that he hadn’t managed to kill every member of the order. At any given time close to a hundred junior priests and acolytes were travelling between the barbarian villages, tending to each of the totem statues and performing the ceremonial duties of the order. Sure enough, almost two months later, a few score of the holy men returned to the fortress and began making it fit for habitation again. That night, he sent a large force to slay them and add their numbers to his own. Nagash especially savoured the irony of using the undead members of the order to slay their younger brethren and deliver them into his hands. After that, no one else attempted to take residence in the great fortress.
Nagash suspected that the superstitious barbarians thought it to be haunted and, in a very real sense, they were right.
Surprisingly, the burials on the barrow plain continued. The families of the deceased would cross the Sour Sea in boats, making landfall just after sunset and bearing their dead kin to a spot on the northern end of the plain. They would bring tools with them, and under the moonlight they would dig a deep hole in the ground and lay the body inside. Then, to Nagash’s amusement, they would turn their attention to the mountain and utter some kind of absurd prayer before filling up the hole again. Once the family had gone, Nagash would summon up the corpse and find a place for it on one of his work parties.
A year passed. Work on the mountain continued, and then the rainy season returned. Not long after, burials on the plain increased sharply. Scores of bodies were brought across the sea and laid to rest, usually in large groups. Nagash noted that the corpses were men of fighting age, and all of them had been slain by sword, spear or arrow. The barbarian tribes were at war again, though against whom Nagash did not know. One night, Nagash saw an orange glow on the horizon to the north-west, and realised that one of the larger hilltop villages was on fire.
Another wave of burials occurred, twice as large as the ones before. The war continued unabated, Nagash reckoned—and the barbarians were losing badly. Their loss was his gain, he reasoned. And then something unexpected happened.
One night, in the midst of another spate of burials, a small group of men made their way across the barrow plain in the direction of the mountain. They were dragging a large sledge behind them, bearing a large, cylindrical object wrapped in ragged sheets of muslin.
The men hauled the sledge over the muddy ground, until they reached the eastern edge of the plain. There, virtually in the shadow of the mountain, they took up tools from the sledge and went to work digging a deep hole. When one of the men judged the hole deep enough, he gestured for his companions to proceed, then he knelt before the hole and bowed his head, spreading his arms as though in supplication, or in prayer.
The rest of the men returned to the sledge and pulled away the muslin sheets. Then they took their places to either side of the cylinder and lifted it from its cradle. Struggling under the weight of the object, they inched towards the hole. Finally, after long minutes of effort, they let the end of the cylinder drop into the cavity and pushed the object upright. The kneeling man rose to his feet, his hands turning upwards in a gesture of triumph, as the men shovelled loose earth into the hole and stabilised the object. Once they were satisfied that the object was secure, the men gathered their tools and began the long trek back to the shore.
Nagash had observed this through the eyes of several of his servants, who stood watch over the plain to mark the arrivals of the burial parties. The object left at the foot of the mountain intrigued him. When the men had disappeared to the west, he sent one of the undead sentinels to inspect it.
What the sentinel found was a totem-statue, similar to those found in the barbarian villages. But where the other statues were four-sided and depicted two pairs of men and women, this statue was carved to represent one figure only.
The workmanship was crude. Nagash, looking through his servants’ eyes, stared at the statue for some time, until he saw the suggestion of a cloak about the figure’s shoulders and realised that the skeletal monster carved into the wood was meant to be him!
Nagash didn’t know what to make of the statue. Was it some pathetic attempt at an abjuration, meant to forbid him from trespassing upon the plain, or was it simply a crude attempt at defiance on the part of the barbarians? At length, he decided to wait and see if the men visited the statue again.
And visit they did, just a few nights later, when the next wave of burials landed upon the shore. Nagash watched the men approach the statue, and this time he noted that the men were young and clad in robes—and, most importantly, bore none of the physical deformities that marked the rest of the villagers. They were members of the old order that Nagash had thought extinct!
To his amazement, the men surrounded the statue and laid plates heaped with offerings at its feet. They knelt in supplication and offered up prayers, then anointed the statue with oils. The whole ritual took almost an hour, and then the men hurriedly withdrew.
Nagash continued to study the statue throughout the night, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the ritual offerings and prayers. Were they actually offering up adulation and worship, or were the offerings more of a bribe to keep him from interfering in their business? The fact that the ritual coincided with another round of mass burials wasn’t lost on him, but the timing didn’t argue one way or the other.
He continued to watch and wait, though now he made sure that a small group of warriors were always kept close by the statue each night. The men returned each night that a burial took place, laying out more offerings and taking care of the great statue. On the fifth visitation, Nagash’s patience was rewarded.
As the men gathered about the statue and laid out their offerings, another group of men and women approached from the north, where the latest round of burials were taking place. They accosted the supplicants, brandishing cudgels and shouting threats. The leader of the supplicants—a young man whose mannerisms seemed strangely familiar to Nagash—seemed to try reasoning with the second group, but his arguments fell on deaf ears. There were more shouted threats, and finally the supplicants chose to depart. The second group pursued them for a while, waving their clubs in the air, then, satisfied, they returned to the sombre ceremonies to the north.
The confrontation suggested a great many things to Nagash. The supplicants considered Nagash a god, and sought to worship him, but their newfound devotion wasn’t popular with the rest of their kind. What was it they hoped to accomplish? Had the confrontation convinced them to abandon their heresy? The questions only served to pique his interest further.
Anoth
er week passed before the next spate of burials occurred. Again, the supplicants journeyed across the plain to kneel before the statue. This time, Nagash was ready for them.
The supplicants had no sooner begun their rite when a much larger group of villagers came charging out of the darkness, brandishing cudgels and knives and shouting threats at the kneeling men. The young leader of the supplicants rose to his feet and approached the villagers, but it was clear to Nagash that the mob wouldn’t be interested in talking this time. They were out for blood.
Nagash issued a series of commands to the warriors that lay in wait just a short distance from the totem statue. They rose silently from their places of concealment and crept towards the unsuspecting barbarians.
The leader of the supplicants started to speak, but a burly villager stepped from the crowd and lashed out with his cudgel, striking the young man in the head and knocking him to the ground. The attack galvanised the rest of the mob; they rushed forward, shouting furiously, and fell upon the other worshippers. The holy men fell to the ground, covering their heads with their arms to ward off the avalanche of blows.
No one saw the undead warriors until it was too late. Half a dozen skeletons appeared out of the darkness, stabbing at the villagers with spears or slashing with tarnished bronze blades. Shouts of anger turned to screams of fear and pain as the mob was cut apart by the remorseless skeletons. The survivors reeled away from the attackers and fled into the darkness, abandoning their wounded compatriots to their fate.
The leader of the mob lingered a moment too long, pausing to deliver a final, vicious kick to the leader of the supplicants before trying to make good his escape. As he turned and prepared to run, he found himself face-to-face with a leering skeleton; the flat of the undead warrior’s blade crashed into the side of his head, knocking him senseless.
The fight was over in seconds. Nagash’s warriors surveyed the scene of carnage for a moment, and then a pair of the skeletons seized the leader of the mob by the shoulders and dragged him away. Two more of the warriors went to the leader of the supplicants, who was trying to force his battered body to stand upright. They seized him by the arms and dragged him away as well.
The remaining two skeletons hefted their weapons and slew the wounded villagers one by one. As the supplicants watched in horrified wonder, their oppressors died screaming—then, with the last of their lifeblood still flowing from their wounds, the corpses rose to their feet and followed their killers into the night.
A single tower reared up from the ugly sprawl of buildings, mine works and fortifications that now girdled the mountain’s southern flank. Five storeys tall, square and built from stone, it would have been thought crude and artless in the civilized cities of Nehekhara, but it dominated the surrounding countryside and provided good fields of view over the southern barrow fields and the mountains to the south-east. It was no palace, but it allowed Nagash to oversee the labours on the mountainside and continue his necromantic studies in solitude until such time as a proper sanctum could be built.
The top storey of the tower was a single, window-less chamber, lit only by the pulsing green glow of a huge chunk of burning stone that rested on a crude metal tripod at the left of Nagash’s new throne. The high-backed chair had been wrought of wood and bronze, shaped to resemble the Throne of Settra that had once rested in Khemri. The necromancer sat back in the tall chair, his hands steepled thoughtfully, as his warriors dragged the two barbarians into his presence.
The former leader of the village mob struggled in the skeletons’ grip, spitting curses and roaring oaths in his bestial tongue. Blood flowed freely from a cut at his temple, but otherwise he appeared none the worse for his experience. The young supplicant, on the other hand, had been beaten within an inch of his life. He hung almost limply from the bony arms of the warriors. It took all of his strength to hold his head upright and look about in dull wonder at the shadowy interior of the tower.
With a mental command Nagash directed his warriors to drag the mob leader into the centre of a ritual circle he’d prepared some time before. They forced the man to his knees. When he tried to rise, one of the skeletons dashed him to the floor with another blow to the head.
The supplicant was deposited on the floor a short distance from the circle, at the very edge of the light shed by the chunk of burning stone. His wide-eyed stare fell upon Nagash, and immediately the young man bent forward, prostrating himself before the throne. The gesture triggered a memory: this was the young acolyte he’d seen outside the barrow during the ambush. Nagash smiled thinly. His instincts had been correct. This one could prove useful.
Nagash rose slowly from the throne. He was clad in robes that had been looted from the temple fortress, which concealed much of the changes that time and the abn-i-khat had wrought upon his body. It was only his hands and his face that hinted at the horrors concealed beneath the rough-spun cloth. His flesh, once paper-thin, had begun to liquefy under the heat emanating from his bones, giving it a sickly, gelid appearance. Muscles and tendons glistened in the open air where the flesh and skin had been worn away, and only the barest shreds of flesh remained at cheek and brow to lend the hint of life to Nagash’s skeletal face.
He approached the leader of the villagers, whose eyes widened in pure terror. The barbarian screamed curses at the necromancer, his voice rising in pitch as his sanity neared breaking point. When Nagash entered the ritual circle, the barbarian surged to his feet, but before he could take a single step, the necromancer seized him by the throat.
Wide-eyed, gasping, the barbarian began to thrash and kick. Nagash spoke a single word, and the villager’s muscles contracted savagely, putting so much stress on his limbs that the long bones of his arms and legs broke like dry twigs. His curses became shrieks of agony, growing ever more shrill and frenzied as the necromancer reached up with his left hand and began methodically pulling away handfuls of the barbarian’s black hair. When the man’s scalp was bald and bleeding, Nagash pulled a knife from his belt and began carving runes into the barbarian’s skin.
The preparations took almost half an hour. When it was complete, Nagash dropped the villager in a heap at the centre of the circle and then withdrew. Once outside the circle, the necromancer raised his arms and began to chant. At once, the sigils etched into the circle flared into life, and the spell began to unravel the barbarian’s mind and soul.
It was a variation on the ritual of reaping that he’d perfected in Khemri, and then reconstructed from memory in the years he’d spent wandering the wasteland. The difference between this version and the original was the way it separated the constituent elements of a victim’s spirit. As he tore the villager’s soul from his body, Nagash picked the elements he wished and discarded the rest, like a lord picking at a resplendent feast.
The barbarian’s memories meant nothing to him; he cast those aside with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. Nagash learned that the man was an apprentice woodworker by tasting the flavour of his skill with chisel and saw. Those, too, he cast aside.
There! Nagash tasted the rough flavour of language in the stew of the man’s thoughts. He drew that out and consumed it. Crude, guttural words came and went in his mind, etched one by one into his memory.
Finally, the necromancer consumed the barbarian’s life essence. He tasted its potency and compared it to the power of the burning stone. Nagash’s lip curled in distaste.
“Disappointing,” he sneered, as the shrivelled corpse collapsed onto the floor. With a wave of his hand, he sent a flow of power back into the sack of bones and sent it shambling off to the mines.
Nagash turned to the supplicant, who had watched the entire ritual in terrified silence. The necromancer searched his memory for the right words.
“Who are you?”
The supplicant pressed his forehead to the floor. “Ha… Hathurk, mighty one,” he stammered.
“Hathurk,” Nagash echoed. “Who are you to worship me? You served the temple once.”
The n
ecromancer expected the former acolyte to equivocate, but instead, Hathurk nodded matter-of-factly. “I served the Keepers of the Mountain,” he admitted readily. “In time, I would have become a Keeper myself. But their time is finished. The words of the Ancients have been fulfilled.”
“How so?”
Hathurk dared to glance up from the floor. “The Ancients told us that one day the mountain would wake,” he explained. “The god would come forth. And now you are here.”
Interesting, Nagash thought. “Where are the words of the Ancients…” he paused, realising that the barbarians had no words for the act of writing. “How were the words of the Ancients preserved?”
“They were passed down, generation to generation, from Keeper to acolyte.”
Nagash nodded thoughtfully. “And do the village hetmen know these tales?”
Hathurk shook his head. “They were not worthy, mighty one. They are ignorant, superstitious folk.”
“Indeed,” Nagash said.
Sarcasm was lost on the likes of Hathurk. The supplicant nodded quickly. “They know of you, though,” he continued. “We have travelled between the villages, spreading the word of your coming. We told the hetmen that it was you who came for the Keepers, because the High Keeper refused to accept that the words of the Ancients had been fulfilled.”
“Do they believe?” Nagash asked.
The supplicant shook his head. “Not yet, mighty one. They are stubborn and set in their ways. But,” he added quickly, “the war season has begun, and the tribes of the Forsaken have come down from the northlands with fire and sword. Without the Keepers to aid them, the village warbands have suffered many defeats. Already, two villages have been destroyed, their women and children slaughtered in their homes. The other hetmen are talking openly of an alliance against the Forsaken, but even that will not be enough. They will need the power of the mountain if they are to prevail.”
Nagash considered this. More vassals were needed to labour in the mines and seek out sources of stone and timber for constructing the fortress. Empires grew on a steady diet of conquest.
02 - Nagash the Unbroken Page 19