‘One cannot live in the bowels of death for so long without developing a taste for it,’ Neferata said with a shrug.
‘Is it inevitable, then?’ Morath spat. ‘Will the Strigoi become cowering apes, hiding in the dark and gnawing bones?’ He glared at the vampires. ‘Is that what awaits us–’ Morath stopped as the tunnel blossomed into an uneven chamber. Strange lights seemed to move through the rock and, his rage forgotten, he dug his fingers into the soft, ashy rock, revealing something that wept a toxic green smoke. His hand trembled as he examined the stuff that rested on his palm. ‘This is…’ he hissed. ‘I didn’t believe… not really.’
‘What is that foulness?’ Layla whispered, her nose wrinkling.
‘The stuff which nightmares are made of,’ Morath said, letting it hiss through his fingers to the floor. ‘It’s called abn-i-khat. Nagash devoured it; it sustained and consumed him.’ He looked at the ghouls. ‘And likely these poor creatures as well,’ he said.
‘Much like magics in general,’ Neferata murmured, her flesh crawling as she took in the shimmering veins of the weirdly glowing ore. Morath looked at her.
‘Maybe, but it is a price some of us willingly pay,’ he said.
‘Yes, yes, so much the martyr,’ Neferata said, peering into one of the dark tunnels. She sniffed the air as she spoke. ‘You have sacrificed much for your people. And you think I have not?’
‘You consumed your people,’ Morath said quietly. ‘And now you would consume mine.’
Neferata spun with a snarl, her lips writhing back from her razor-teeth. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me, leech,’ Morath said, his pale features growing even paler. The ghouls began to whine and moan as Neferata stalked towards the necromancer. ‘You and Ushoran and W’soran and even Abhorash, you are leeches, battening on the blood of the Strigoi. You are twisting us, the way W’soran twists flesh and bone, making us over in your damnable images!’ He swept out an arm to indicate the ghouls. ‘And you won’t succeed. That is the saddest thing. You will simply make us into beasts like these!’
Trembling with anger, covered in dried blood, Neferata reached for Morath’s head. Her talons scraped almost gently against his cheeks. ‘You are lucky I need you, Morath. You are lucky that I do not see fit to tell W’soran of your part in my investigations into his schemes.’
‘You think he doesn’t know? Do you think my mind is proof against his sorceries?’ Morath said, and in his eyes, Neferata saw the truth of his words. She could see W’soran’s dark sorceries squatting in his student’s mind and soul like some ugly spider. She had expected it, but to see it so plainly was startling. The old monster lacked subtlety.
She dropped her hands. ‘What else does he know?’
Morath chuckled hoarsely. ‘What makes you think he talks to me? If you are unique from your fellow monsters in any fashion, Neferata, it is in that you speak openly to your servants.’
‘Servants hear everything anyway,’ Neferata said, turning away. There was a sound in the darkness, of quiet steps on the shifting strata of the mountain. The ghouls were agitated. Morath barked something and they began to lope into the darkness, leading their ‘guests’ on. He looked at Neferata.
‘We are wasting time. There are other scavengers in the dark than just ghouls and they are stirring. We should go. These tunnels are too dangerous to linger in for long.’
‘The ghouls seem safe enough,’ Rasha said.
‘What makes you think that?’ Morath said bitterly. ‘They are hunted for sport here, even as in Mourkain.’ He glared at the vampires, as if blaming them for that fact. Which, Neferata supposed, he did.
They left the stinking warren and its eerie glow behind. The ghouls led them up through the winding tunnels, and often Neferata’s keen ears caught the quiet scuttling of something that was moving near them, perhaps just on the other side of the walls. After what could only have been a number of miles, the crude tunnels gave way to what, she judged, had once been mine-works.
Vast wooden bracers held up the mine-tunnels, lending them a sense of stability that the more cramped ghoul warrens lacked. There were more piles of bones here, these mostly not gnawed or otherwise disturbed and surprisingly anatomically complete. ‘Nagash’s miners,’ Morath murmured. There were hundreds of them, lying where they had dropped when Nagash had been destroyed.
‘There are more dead here than in the entirety of the world,’ Layla whispered.
The quality of the air had changed as well. There was a verminous smell to things now, a sort of musk that clung to the ancient support timbers and the bones that littered the sides of the tunnel. There were strange marks that glowed faintly on the walls. Neferata touched one and felt a tingle in her fingers. She grunted as she realised that some of the green stone had been used like chalk here, but as to the nature of the mark she couldn’t say. It was unlike any writing she had ever seen.
The ghouls had drawn together in a huddle, their yellow eyes darting around. They grimaced and whimpered. Morath looked at them pityingly. He flicked his fingers and the beasts suddenly loped away, back the way they had come, running as if their lives depended on it.
‘That was foolish, necromancer,’ Neferata said. ‘We need guides.’
‘And blood,’ Layla said.
‘You would not want to drink the blood of anything which lurks in this place,’ Morath said. ‘And we need no guides, not now. Like calls to like, in the sour places.’ Morath dropped to his haunches and dug through the closest pile of bones, extracting a nearly mummified hand. A thin shroud of flesh clung to the age-browned bones and Morath hissed in satisfaction.
He held up the hand and blew a soft breath across it. The fingers stiffened and straightened with an ugly clicking sound. Morath held his hand flat over the fingertips and a burst of puffball light emerged from his palm like poison being drawn from a wound. He winced as the light split and settled on the fingertips, as if the bones were candles. He held it up by its wrist stump and the light slid greasily across the rocks of the tunnel walls.
‘What is that?’ Neferata said.
‘A light to guide us in the darkness,’ Morath said. ‘Normally, we use them to find hidden barrows and tombs. The hand is drawn towards the largest concentration of the dark energies which we weave together to raise the dead and in this place, it will find Nagash’s throne room much quicker than the shoddy ancestral memories of our ghoulish hosts.’ He raised the corpse-light, his face pinched with strain. Neferata and the others followed. The faint skittering sounds followed them, though at a distance. It was as if their mysterious pursuers were travelling in a roundabout fashion.
The mines of Nagashizzar proved to be as vast as Morath had warned. Though the necromancer swore that they were travelling in the correct direction, Neferata found herself wondering whether they were going up or down. Time seemed to have little meaning in the ageless, suffocating confines of the mines and days blended into weeks. For Neferata and the other vampires, this was no hardship. They could go months without nourishment, though they preferred to feed as often as possible. Morath, however, was another story.
The necromancer had the lean form of a man on the edge of starvation, and he only grew thinner during their time in the dark. Part of that, Neferata knew, was due to the spell. Keeping his grisly candelabrum lit for so long seemed to take most of his strength, and they were forced to help him keep up more than once. He had brought supplies, but those were exhausted soon enough. Soon, the three vampires were forced to catch the fat black rats that scurried through the dark tunnels for Morath to feast on. A number of the vermin had mutations – extra limbs, scales or bone spurs – but the necromancer devoured them regardless, chewing the foul meat as if it were the greatest delicacy.
Every rock and tunnel seemed to pull at Neferata’s very core as they travelled, sucking her down into a maelstrom of darkness that only intensified the longer
they walked. It was like a trap, and she was the rat who had walked blindly into it. To distract herself, she wondered what was occurring in her absence in Mourkain. Everything now balanced on the sharp end. An action taken in haste might tip the whole affair one way or another and unravel every strand of her carefully crafted web. She should not have left. But the crown, and what it implied, was too great an opportunity to pass up.
She needed it. It had called her to Mourkain to claim it. She was a queen, was she not? And queens had more need of crowns than grovelling schemers like Ushoran. She saw it so clearly now, down in these dark tunnels. It had used Kadon to draw Ushoran, and it had used Ushoran to draw her and now, now was the time for it to be claimed by its true mistress. After all, was she not Nagash’s rightful heir? Was she not a daughter of his blood, at least in the ways that mattered? Was she not a queen of the Great Land?
Yes, yes, you are all of this and more, it murmured, caressing her thoughts. You will be a queen again and you will rule over silent, perfect cities. You will rule over a world of unchanging tides and unfailing devotion. All will love you. All will serve you.
Even him, it hissed, even Alcadizzar.
She shuddered slightly, thinking again of Alcadizzar’s face. He would be a ghost-king for a vampire-queen; what could be more appropriate? He would love her in death as he had not in life. Everything would be–
The blade stabbed down from out of the darkness above as the roof of the tunnel seemed to unfold like the membranous wing of a bat. Morath, caught unawares, could only stare upwards in stupefaction. Neferata’s palms slammed together on the oily blade, trapping it inches from Morath’s head. With a roar, she jerked the blade’s wielder from its hiding place and dashed it to the ground. The cloak the small figure wore was the colour of the rock, and its hairy limbs were bound in leather and rags. It jerked its blade free of Neferata’s grip and flipped up, lashing out at her as it chattered curses. It wielded two blades and they hummed as they cut the air. She had little room to manoeuvre in the cramped tunnel, but the creature seemed to have no such difficulty. It sprang into the air and bounced from wall to floor to ceiling, always stabbing and cutting at her.
Losing her temper, she shot a hand out, wincing as the blades chopped into her arm. She swung her arm, pulling the weapons out of her attacker’s hands, and grabbed a hairy throat with her unwounded hand. The hood fell back, revealing the frothing, snarling snout of a great rat. With a cry of disgust, Neferata bashed the creature’s brains out on the side of the tunnel, leaving a dark trail across the rock.
‘What in the name of Settra was that thing?’ Layla yelped, looking around. The scuttling sounds they had been hearing since they entered the mines were louder now, as if whatever was making them was no longer concerned with stealth.
Rasha spat a word in Arabyan. Neferata nodded as she pulled the blades from her arm. ‘Ratkin, even as Morath warned us,’ she said. ‘Foul little beasts. Where there’s one, there’s a thousand. We should hurry,’ she added.
‘It might be too late,’ Rasha said, pointing back the way they had come. Strange lights flickered in the darkness. Weapons rattled and a wave of chittering voices rolled down the tunnel.
‘The throne room is near, it must be,’ Morath said, rubbing his throat and looking down at the body of his would-be assassin. He sounded more hopeful than confident. ‘If we hurry–’
‘Hold them for as long as you can,’ Neferata said to her handmaidens. Rasha grimaced and nodded. Layla hissed eagerly.
‘I’ve killed rats before. It should be easy.’
Neferata didn’t reply. She grabbed Morath and slung him over her shoulder. He squawked at the treatment, but fell silent as she broke into a sprint. She ran easily, despite the encumbrance. ‘You said it was nearby,’ she growled to Morath.
‘I can feel it, like a weight on my heart,’ he gasped. The skeletal hand flexed and the light that clung to the fingertips began to glow more brightly. She took that as a good sign. Behind her she heard the clash of weapons and smelled the musk-stink of the ratkin’s blood as it was spilled. She sped up, moving like quicksilver. Anyone watching would have seen little more than a pale blur. The rough mine tunnels gave way to shaped corridors as she ran. The corpse-light was burning as brightly as a torch as she raced onwards.
She passed through vast, dark, deserted halls and echoing vaults. She loped through great, now-empty storehouses and silent, shuttered rooms that had once been the sites of Nagash’s blasphemous rites. Morath gasped as she ran through the immense mountain crypt, barely able to breathe so swiftly did she move.
Neferata felt a strange sense of recognition and realised that Nagashizzar and Mourkain shared more than a legacy of death; Kadon, whether he had known it or not, had recreated Nagash’s citadel in his own crude fashion. Thus, when they reached the antechamber to Nagash’s throne room she knew it at once for what it was.
She barrelled through a thick curtain of spider-webs and dust, sliding across a rough stone floor on her feet and hand, her claws leaving thin canyons in the stone. She tossed Morath down. ‘On your feet, necromancer, we’re here.’
Morath climbed to his feet and held up the glowing hand. The corpse-light illuminated a great swathe of the massive chamber. It was a crude parody of the antechamber to the throne room of the great palace of Khemri. Even Nagash, it seemed, had not been immune to nostalgia.
The doors to the throne room were little more than unfinished slabs of bronze now gone green from verdigris and their hinges were braided sinew, long since fossilised into immobility. Morath hesitated, staring up at them. Strange char marks covered them, and he said, ‘There was a battle here.’
Neferata looked at him. ‘Can you open them?’ she said flatly.
‘W’soran taught me,’ Morath said. ‘It will take me a few minutes, however. I am weak,’ he added, at her look. ‘These past weeks have been difficult. I am merely mortal, woman, unlike you.’
‘Why did you volunteer to come with me, Morath? W’soran wanted to send Melkhior, and in truth that might have been more convenient,’ Neferata said, annoyed.
‘W’soran is frightened,’ Morath said, looking at the door. ‘He fears the crown and its hold on Ushoran. Aye, and on him as well, and you,’ he added. ‘He is planning something. To flee, I think. And when he goes, only some of his students will go with him. The others will be disposed of.’
‘You want protection,’ Neferata said.
‘Wouldn’t you?’ Morath looked at her. ‘Isn’t that why you came to Mourkain?’
‘No,’ Neferata said.
Morath grunted. ‘No, I suppose not, eh? Well, you’ll soon get what you want, won’t you?’
‘And you’ll get what you want,’ Neferata said. ‘I’ll need an advisor, Morath. A man who knows his people as well as you seem to would be invaluable.’
Morath looked at her. ‘Do not offer what you cannot promise.’
Neferata sniffed. ‘Can I not? When the crown is mine–’
‘You will not be you any longer. Or so W’soran says,’ Morath said darkly. ‘Even Ushoran is not Ushoran. Not any more. He grows less and less like the man I once served, and more like the thing he is – bestial and rapacious and too hungry for this world.’
‘But you could keep me from becoming that way, Morath of Mourkain,’ Neferata said, clutching his arm. ‘Unlike Ushoran, I know how to listen to those who serve me!’
‘Really? Because you ignored the fears of your handmaidens to undertake this journey,’ Morath said. He jerked his arm free of her grip. ‘I must concentrate.’ He stretched out a pale, thin hand and stroked the air. A pall of dust rose, puffing from the edges of the doors. Then, with a groan as deep as the mountain itself, the long-immobile doors began to move. They rumbled inwards, shaking the ground beneath Neferata’s feet.
Flagstones of black marble paved the path inwards, and the path itself was lined with e
laborate and grotesque columns which stretched up into the darkness to support the arched ceiling. Morath’s wheezing breath echoed strangely in the space. Neferata strode ahead of him, her eyes adjusting easily to the darkness.
The room itself had seen much activity, despite the sealed doors. There were great gaping holes in the stone walls and immense char marks scored the spots where there were no holes. The black marble on the floor had been seared to slag in places and more than one of the columns had tumbled into pieces. Intuition told her that the rat-men had likely burrowed through Nagash’s throne room after the Great Necromancer’s death, and they had left evidence of their presence, including piles of old droppings and huddled, miserable piles of gnawed bones.
The centre of the room was marked by the presence of more than a dozen ancient corpses, scattered haphazardly in a rough circle. Morath grabbed her arm as she started forwards. ‘Abn-i-khat,’ he whispered, pointing with the skeletal hand. A glowing stain marked the floor.
She kicked a body aside and it crumbled into dust. ‘What was this?’
‘A rite of some kind was conducted here. But it was interrupted,’ Morath said, his eyes narrowed speculatively. ‘Perhaps W’soran…?’
‘It would not surprise me,’ Neferata said. W’soran had been chased from Nagashizzar with his tail between his legs, and he was naturally reluctant to discuss it. Her eyes scanned the chamber and were drawn to an ominous presence occupying the far end.
She hissed, and Morath looked to see what had startled her. He swallowed thickly as he saw it and said fearfully, ‘Nagash’s throne…’
The throne of the Undying King occupied the far wall. It was, like the throne of Mourkain, a paean to barbaric splendour. But unlike Mourkain, its majesty was no pallid mockery. Here was the truth of which Mourkain was only a weak echo. The throne was crafted from great blocks of stone and petrified wood and lined with the bones of beasts and men. Ropes of now-brittle human hair had been woven into a cushion and glimmering strands of abn-i-khat ran through its form, casting a faint illumination over the floor all around it. In the first moment that Neferata glimpsed it, a massive shadowy shape seemed to occupy it, only to waver and vanish as Morath’s spell-light passed over it.
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