Hardly, Nagash thought. He had underestimated the Forsaken. They were far more powerful than he’d expected. They’d won because the enemy had been overconfident and unprepared. Next time, things would be different.
And there would have to be a next time. The fighting would continue until the Forsaken had been conquered. There was no choice now. The campaign could take years, or even decades, but it would only end when one side or the other was broken. And Nagash intended to make them subjects of his growing empire. They would prove far more useful than the Yaghur.
Aighul approached the necromancer slowly, his expression a mix of fear and wonder. He stopped a few yards from Nagash and sank to his knees.
“All hail the god of the mountain,” he said in a hollow voice. The hetman bent at the waist, pressing his forehead to the blood-soaked ground. One by one, the other hetmen followed suit.
Nagash rose to his feet. Their obeisance meant nothing to him. He recalled how the barbarians had very nearly ruined the attack at the outset, and felt nothing but contempt for them.
Hathurk approached the necromancer, an ecstatic look on his crude features. He came right up to Nagash and bowed deeply. “The hetmen are ready to receive their reward, master,” he said proudly.
Nagash suppressed an angry sneer. When he’d promised to give them the secret of the northmen’s strength, he’d meant skills like metalworking and simple tactics. But such things were lost on these animals. No doubt they expected some kind of magical gift—or worse, a damned miracle!
A cruel idea came to him then. He looked at Hathurk and smiled, as a man might smile at an obedient dog.
“They want to make the strength of the Forsaken their own? Very well. Tell them this: the power of a man lies in his flesh and his bones. His heart is the fount of his strength. The liver is the seat of his courage. If you would become like them, you must consume them, down to the very bones.”
Hathurk’s eyes widened in shock. “You… you mean—”
“Tell them!” Nagash commanded. “I command it! Tell them that they must feast upon the dead. It is the only way.”
The supplicant stared at Nagash. A look of dread crept across his face. After a moment, the necromancer thought that Hathurk would refuse, but then the fool bowed to him once again and turned to give the hetmen the first commandment of their new god.
FIFTEEN
The Shadow of the Hawk
Lahmia, the City of the Dawn, in the 76th year of Phakth the Just
(-1597 Imperial Reckoning)
The news of King Lamashizzar’s death took flight within hours of the announcement by the palace. Swift messengers raced across the Golden Plain, carrying word to Lybaras and Rasetra, and then past ruined Mahrak to the Valley of the Kings and the cities of the west. Within months, royal processions from each of the seven cities were underway, heading east to pay their respects to the dead king and to gauge the new state of affairs in the City of the Dawn. It was rare for a queen to assume the throne in the great cities of Nehekhara, and unheard of in Lahmia itself. Speculation was rampant on how this would affect the complex web-work of trade deals that the city had woven during Lamashizzar’s reign. The priest kings hastened to Lahmia as quickly as they could manage, suspecting that those who reached the queen first would stand the best chance of profiting under the new regime.
Queen Amunet of distant Numas was first to arrive, having journeyed by barge up the River Vitae and deep into the mountains, where the great trade stations had been built around the shores of the wide Vitae Tarn. From there the Numasi had off-loaded two score of their fine steeds and rode swiftly through the twisting mountain passages until they reached the northern edge of the Golden Plain.
King Teremun of Zandri followed the same path and arrived less than a month later, leading a procession of northern slaves laden with gifts for the new queen. The delegation from Zandri had been bedevilled by bandit raiders as they crossed the plain, losing several of their number along the way before finding refuge within the city.
Next to arrive was dour, white-haired King Naeem of Quatar, accompanied by a solemn retinue of ash-daubed priests. Beset on all sides by the dispossessed hierophants of Mahrak, the Quatari ruler had spent his entire life trying to restore both his city and theirs, with minimal success. Had it not been for a quick-witted captain at the city gates, the delegation might have been taken for beggars and turned away.
Two weeks after the Quatari delegation came a much larger procession, led by King Ahmun-hotep of Ka-Sabar and a score of nobles clad in the old armour of the once-mighty Legion of Bronze. Though the city still lay mostly in ruin following the dreadful siege a half-century before, Ahmun-hotep intended to show his peers that he and his city remained a force to be reckoned with. His servants bore rich gifts for the queen that likely had been stripped from the royal palace itself, and the blood staining the tips of his warriors’ spears told of the bandits who’d come to grief trying to wrest those treasures from Ahmun-hotep’s grasp.
Curiously, the cities closest to Lahmia were the last to send delegations to honour the queen. First came King Shepret of Rasetra, hard-faced and armed for war, at the head of a procession of royal guardsmen armoured in glossy lizard-scale. Unlike the other delegations, who bore treasures of gold and precious stones, the Rasetrans brought with them the riches of the deep jungle: raw amber, polished thunder lizard horn and jars of exotic herbs found nowhere else in all of the land.
As lavish as the gifts were, they were also a message for the queen: Rasetra had regained much of its strength since the dark days after the war, driving back the lizard tribes and reclaiming much of their lost territory. In short, the Rasetrans meant to show the queen that Lahmia would be far better off treating them as friends and allies rather than rivals.
Last of all, more than three months after the arrival of the Numasi delegation, came the Priest King of Lybaras and his fierce warrior-queen. They arrived with even less pomp than the dour Rasetrans, attended by a retinue of nobles and spearmen clad in glossy plates of dark iron.
The sight was a shock to the Lahmian nobility. For years there had been rumours that the Lybarans had been hard at work searching for local sources of iron in the Brittle Peaks. Not only had they evidently succeeded, they had also divined the art of working the dense metal, something that even the Lahmian royal artisans hadn’t been able to achieve. It was also clear that the rumours of cooperation with Rasetra was borne out in the martial skill of the warriors under the Lybaran king’s command. Unlike Lahmia, the City of Scholars had dealt aggressively with the roving bands of raiders that had plagued the trade road within their sphere of control, and it was said that on more than one occasion the Lybaran queen herself had led expeditions to run down the largest and most stubborn raiders. She rode in full armour alongside the marching warriors, her hair bound back in tight braids and her expression as unsparing and fierce as her namesake.
Rather than keep the royal delegations at a lavish remove by housing them in tent cities, as Lamashizzar had once done, Neferata instead welcomed each procession into the royal palace. They were assigned luxurious quarters, as befitted their stations, and treated with generous, if sombre, hospitality. The opportunity provided by the queen wasn’t lost on her guests, each of whom made use of the proximity to the throne to press for their individual agendas.
For weeks, Neferata met each ruler in private, discussing matters of state deep into the night—all but the kings of Rasetra and Lybaras, who treated the queen’s representatives with careful courtesy but chose to keep their own counsels nonetheless.
By the time all the kings and queens were assembled, Lamashizzar had been more than six months in the tomb. Rather than take part in a funeral procession the visiting rulers took part in a solemn ritual of remembrance in the great necropolis to the north of the city, then spent another six days attending lengthy afternoon councils and sumptuous feasts held in the great palace garden.
The guests used the council meetings to tes
t the success of their private dealings with the queen and determine where they stood in relation to their peers. Each and every one soon discovered that, no matter how ruthlessly they’d pursued their agendas, not one of them had emerged in a better position than their peers. If anything, their strengths and weaknesses had been carefully exploited to neutralise their counterparts, creating a status quo that left each city prosperous and stable only so long as they fulfilled their obligations to Lahmia.
The net of trade and debt, first envisioned by Lamasheptra, then laid down by Lamashizzar his son, had finally been drawn tight by Neferata, trapping the great cities at last. And not one of Nehekhara’s rulers could say just exactly how it had happened. They had understood the danger when they’d begun the journey to Lahmia, had plotted and schemed diverse ways to counter it, and yet their cunning had all come to naught when matched against the wiles of Lahmia’s canny and seductive queen.
By the end of the sixth day it was clear to the visiting rulers that they had journeyed to Lahmia not just to bear witness to the passing of a king, but to also formalise the city’s ascension as the centre of wealth and power in all Nehekhara.
In private councils, sometimes well into their cups, the royal guests confessed their dismay to one another in rueful whispers. They wondered how all their plans could have gone so wrong, pitted against a cloistered and untried queen. The rulers of Rasetra and Lybaras listened closely, but kept their suspicions to themselves.
The Hall of Kings glittered like a treasure vault in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. The gifts of five great kings and queens had been heaped upon the gleaming marble floor, at the feet of towering basalt statues that flanked the long processional leading to the Lahmian throne. No less than eight of Nehekhara’s lost gods looked down upon the supplicants of the court. The first two, closest to the chamber’s great double doors, were grim, jackal-headed Djaf, the death-bringer, and faceless, hooded Usirian, who judges the worth of the souls of the dead. Sixty paces onward stood lion-headed Geheb, god of the earth and giver of strength, standing opposite Phakth, the hawk-faced bringer of justice. Yet another sixty paces further, at the feet of the wide steps leading to the great throne, rose sensuous, cat-faced Basth, giver of love and beauty; her feline eyes seemed to stare mischievously across the great hall at slender Tahoth, giver of knowledge and keeper of lore. Finally, towering to either side of the throne, stood Lahmia’s patron goddess Asaph, giver of magic and architect of the sacred covenant, and mighty Ptra, god of the sun and father of all Creation.
The guardians of the throne faced westward, towards the sea. Sunlight streamed through high, rectangular openings set above the chamber’s entrance, bathing the statues in golden light. Only the great throne room in Khemri had rivalled the chamber in splendour and regal glory; now it was without equal in all the land.
So, too, the great throne of Lahmia had been wrought from the same fine-grained, dark wood as the one that had once sat in the palace of Khemri. There was nothing like it in all of Nehekhara, and legends said it had been brought out of the deep parts of the southern jungles during the Great Migration of mankind. The throne was high-backed and deep, shaped in sinuous curves that suggested it had been grown rather than carved by the hand of man; its thick, rolled arms were glossy and smooth, polished by generations of royal hands. They felt warm beneath Neferata’s touch as she leaned back in the ancient chair and studied the approaching figures of the Imperial delegation. Even at a hundred paces she could read their discomfort in the curt swish-swish of their slippered feet and the thin whistle of breath through their tightly-pressed lips.
The queen was clad in her richest robes of state: layers of rich saffron embroidered with gold and thousands of tiny pearls. A girdle of gold thread and lapis circled her narrow waist, and a thick necklace of gold plate circled her alabaster throat. Her lustrous hair had been bound up with golden pins and more strands of pearl, and thick bracelets of gold circled her slender wrists. Nestled in the crook of her left arm was the sceptre of Asaph, a heavy rod of solid gold wrought in the shape of a pair of twining asps and inset with tiny scales of onyx. Upon her face rested the cold, lifeless contours of her golden mask. It was the first time she had worn it since rising from her deathbed. She had resolved that the scheming barbarians of the far east deserved nothing more.
Sunlight shone from the mask’s polished surface, almost too bright to look upon. Neferata felt its rays upon her bare hands and felt little more than a faint discomfort, like the fading ache of a hixa sting. Even Nagash and his immortals had grown to shun Ptra’s searing rays, but the queen found that she could move about in the morning and afternoon with little trouble. She was nothing like the necromancer or his minions; somehow she had been reborn in a crucible of poison, sorcery and death. The interactions of the sphinx’s venom with the powers of the elixir and the workings of Arkhan’s rituals had transformed her into a being of flesh that existed beyond the reach of death.
She was no mere immortal. Neferata had become like unto Asaph herself, and the secrets of the world were laid bare at her feet. She could sense the passage of the sun through the sky and feel the rhythm of the tides through the stones beneath her feet. She sensed the presence of each and every living thing in the echoing audience chamber, from the members of her privy council who stood at the feet of her throne to the Celestial Prince and his retainers and even the stolid-faced royal guards who stood just outside the chamber door. She could hear their every movement, smell the scents upon their skin and taste the rich, sweet blood hissing through their veins.
It was blood, always blood, that was uppermost in her mind. If there was one weakness to her new existence, it was the endless thirst for human blood. It was the wellspring of her power, a thousand times purer and more potent than Nagash’s petty brew, but almost as soon as she had drunk her fill of it, she found herself craving more. Neferata found that she had to drink each and every night to sustain her strength. Fortunately, with a city of souls at her beck and call she knew that she would never go without.
The queen smiled languidly behind the implacable curves of her mask and studied Prince Xian’s young, handsome face with the cold intensity of a hungry lioness. His expression was set in a mask of calculated disdain as he and his retinue approached to within a dozen paces of the queen’s privy council and came to an abrupt halt, as though noticing the Lahmian nobles for the first time. As before, the Scion of Heaven was accompanied by a fawning translator, a handful of imperious-looking bureaucrats and a silent, demure young woman whose face and hands were painted as white as Neferata’s own. The queen could not be certain if she was the prince’s wife or merely a favoured concubine. Her hands were clasped at her waist, and her eyes were focussed on a point just behind Xian’s heels.
Xian gestured almost imperceptibly with one long, golden fingernail, and his translator immediately took one small step towards the throne. “The Scion of Heaven offers his condolences on the death of your husband, the king,” he said stiffly. “He cannot help but observe your sorrow, so deep that even the simplest ceremonies are too terrible a burden to bear.”
Neferata’s smile sharpened. “The Scion of Heaven is mistaken,” she said simply, careful to keep her tone neutral and unaffected. “I am conscious of my obligations as ruler and host. Has he not been treated with all due courtesy and respect?”
The translator paused, pressing his lips together tightly as he struggled for a proper response. “It is to my eternal shame that I must inform you that your guards have refused to admit the Scion of Heaven’s servants to prepare the hall for his arrival.” He spread his hands. “Where is my lord and master to take his ease, while he indulges you with fine tea and civilized conversation?”
“There is but one chair in the Hall of Kings,” Neferata replied coldly, and watched with satisfaction as the translator shivered in response. “And it is a place for conducting affairs of state, not indulging in idle chatter.” The queen waved her hand dismissively. “Though the S
cion of Heaven can be forgiven his misapprehension, since this is the first time he has been invited to attend upon the throne.”
One of the prince’s bureaucrats let out a strangled gasp; the rest kept their composure, but Neferata could hear their hearts beating angrily in their chests. She couldn’t have insulted the prince any worse if she’d walked up to him and slapped him across the face.
The translator was completely taken aback. Uncertain how to proceed, he turned and stared at Xian, whose own expression might have been carved from stone. Once more, the Son of Heaven gestured to the functionary with a tiny flick of one curved nail. The man bowed deeply to the prince, then drew a deep breath and turned back to the queen.
“The Scion of Heaven has the honour of bearing tidings from his divine father, the Emperor of Heaven and Earth,” the translator said with as much affronted dignity as he could muster. “He wishes you to know of the great fortune bestowed upon the Empire in the form of the gold mines of Guanjian province. So great is their bounty that the value of gold is not as it was when your father incurred his debt to the Empire.” A tiny glint of satisfaction shone in the functionary’s eyes as he bowed before the throne. “A single payment remains to settle the matter between Lahmia and the Celestial Household, but it must be no less than triple the agreed upon amount in order to satisfy the terms of the debt.”
Silence fell across the great hall. The prince and his retainers watched and waited, expecting cries of outrage and growing ever so slightly concerned when none was forthcoming. Finally, after a long moment, the queen shook her head.
“No.”
Now the cries of outrage began in earnest, but it was the prince’s retainers who shouted their anger at the insult to the Scion of Heaven’s honour. One of the functionaries even went so far as to take a step forward and raise his fist to the queen. Before he could take a second step Abhorash was blocking the man’s path. The tip of the champion’s iron sword rested in the hollow of the bureaucrat’s throat.
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