The Rise of Nagash

by Mike Lee

  Moans of despair rose from Nagash’s minions, but the necromancer felt only a rising tide of icy rage.

  “You would have a reckoning then, brother?” he said. “So be it.”

  The necromancer flung out his hand and spat a string of arcane syllables, unleashing a torrent of sizzling, glowing darts that streaked over the heads of his men and chewed Hapshur apart. The high priestess let out a single, lingering shriek as her body was shredded by sorcerous teeth. Thutep and his bodyguards were all caught in the fine spray of blood and minced flesh.

  “Destroy them!” Nagash commanded.

  Faced with such a display of power, his men did not hesitate to obey. The noblemen drew knives and swords and rushed at the king’s bodyguards from all sides, but despite heavily outnumbering the dozen glowing bodyguards, Nagash’s men were completely outmatched. Blessed by Ptra with superhuman speed and strength, not to mention a lifetime devoted to mastering the arts of combat, the young devoted met the noblemen with a fierce shout of joy and began a terrible slaughter.

  As young and relatively inexperienced as the Ushabti were, their skill and ferocity were appalling. Noblemen fell like ripe wheat, most cut down before they could even lay a single blow. Unless something was done, the battle would be over in moments.

  Nagash hissed the Incantation of Reaping and drank in the life energy of the slain noblemen. With their raw souls bubbling in his veins, he threw out his hands once more and unleashed spell after spell, hurling bolts of pure darkness into the tight circle of bodyguards. Each bolt found a mark, sinking effortlessly through the armour of the devoted and rending flesh and muscle beneath. The Ushabti staggered beneath the blows, but fought on, sustained by their vows to Ptra.

  The necromancer’s minions grew more cautious, focusing their efforts on the most wounded bodyguards. An Ushabti reeled as one of Nagash’s bolts peeled back the right side of his face. Sensing an opportunity, one of the noblemen lunged forwards, hacking his blade into the bodyguard’s throat. Even as the devoted fell, his sword licked out in a backhanded swipe that cut his attacker in half, and the two men died at nearly the same moment.

  Nagash reaped the dying nobleman’s soul and continued to punish the devoted with a barrage of lethal magic. When the Ushabti surged forwards, trying to use Nagash’s men to shield them from his spells, he opened pits of shadow at their feet. When the survivors reeled back to safer ground, he speared them with bolts of sizzling black flame. It wasn’t just Nagash that the Ushabti had to worry about, for Arkhan and a few of the more magically adept nobles joined in too. They flung darts point-blank into the beleaguered Ushabti, striking them from unexpected directions and creating more opportunities for their fellow nobles.

  Thutep stood his ground through it all, shouting encouragement to his men. More than once he tried to join the fight, only to be pushed back by his men. Their courage and devotion were a wonder to behold, but one by one the devoted were overwhelmed. Within minutes after the fight began, the last Ushabti succumbed, his sword buried in the chest of another of Nagash’s men.

  The surviving noblemen clambered over the bodies of their dead compatriots and closed like jackals around the king. Thutep glared defiantly at the necromancer’s henchmen, his sword held ready. On impulse, he glanced down at the girl, still cowering at his feet, and murmured a quick command. Fleet as a deer, she leapt thankfully to her feet and raced into the shadows behind Thutep, fleeing to the surface and safety.

  It was the last free act that Thutep ever made. At that moment, Nagash cast a powerful spell that gripped his brother’s mind in a vice. He stiffened, his face growing slack with horror as Nagash exerted his will over the king.

  The necromancer’s henchmen saw the king’s transformation and stayed their hands. Most reeled back in exhaustion, grateful beyond words that the battle was done. A circle of torn and bleeding corpses surrounded the king and his fallen bodyguards. Slightly more than half of Nagash’s men were dead, and the rest counted themselves lucky not to be among them.

  Nagash descended from the dais, still pinning his brother in place by sorcery and the weight of his prodigious will. He approached his brother, his cold features lit with triumph. The necromancer stood before Thutep, his eyes blazing. Slowly, deliberately, he reached up and lifted away the king’s royal headdress.

  Thutep’s body trembled with outrage, but he could not make his muscles obey. The necromancer smiled.

  “Go on,” he said. “Strike me down. You still hold your sword. All you need is the will to use it.” Nagash took his time arranging Settra’s headdress upon his brow, and then reached down and took Thutep’s sword hand by the wrist. “Here. Let me help you.”

  He raised Thutep’s sword arm and placed the curved edge of the khopesh against his throat. “There. All you need is a simple flick of the wrist and you’ll slice open the artery. What could be simpler than that? Go on. I won’t stop you.”

  Thutep’s entire body trembled. His eyes were wide and unblinking, his face flushed with effort. A single tear coursed down his cheek. The khopesh did not move.

  Nagash sneered in disdain.

  “How pathetic,” he said, and turned away. “Seize him, and follow me.”

  All at once, the force gripping the king vanished. Thutep, still straining at his bonds, all but fell into the arms of Nagash’s minions. His sword was plucked from his hands and his arms twisted behind his back. The king hung limply in their grip as the noblemen followed Nagash from the hall.

  They took the king through the north passage, down into the depths of the pyramid where their father Khetep was laid to rest. The dead king’s crypt was one among many, set aside for not only his wife, his bodyguards and his servants, but for his children as well. The Great Pyramid was meant to house not just one king, but an entire dynasty.

  Nagash led the way into the crypts, lighting the path with a pale grave-light that seemed to emanate from his skin. Thutep quickly realised what was happening, and began to struggle with his captors.

  “You can’t do this, brother,” he said. “The people won’t permit it! You’re a priest, consecrated to the gods. You can’t sit upon the throne!”

  “I am consecrated to no god, brother,” Nagash spat. “I served the will of Settra, king of kings, but that time is past. Tonight, a new era has been born. It’s a pity you won’t see its glories unfold.”

  Thutep only struggled harder, until two men had to take hold of each of his arms and drag him along the dank stones.

  “You’re mad!” he cried. “The other kings will rise against you! Can’t you see that?”

  “I understand the political realities far better than you, little brother,” Nagash snapped. “Let them come. I will be ready for them.”

  Nagash paused. They had come to the end of a long passageway, lined with smooth, blank walls. The architects had left them unadorned on purpose, so that after Thutep died a host of artisans could come and create elaborate mosaics that would depict the glories of his reign. At the end of the passageway stood a narrow doorway, flanked by two stone horex. A huge slab of stone rested against the wall to the right of the opening.

  The necromancer’s light penetrated some way into the burial chamber, revealing a small room with more bare walls and a pedestal intended to hold the king’s sarcophagus. Nagash gestured, and his men shoved Thutep inside. He landed hard against the stone pedestal and whirled, his expression still defiant.

  “Do you have the nerve to kill me with your own hand, brother?” he snarled. “Or will you stand there in the corridor and send in your jackals to finish the job? The gods do not countenance the murder of a king. It has been that way since the dawn of civilisation. By striking me down, you will damn yourself.”

  Nagash only laughed while his men went to work around him.

  “I have no intention of killing you, brother,” he said. “Nor will any of my men raise a hand against you. I wouldn’t dare, but not for the reason you might think. You see, there’s another law I have to be wary
of, even older than the one you described: the one that says that a man’s murderer is forbidden to marry his widow.”

  The look of shock and anguish on Thutep’s face was priceless. Nagash savoured every moment of it, right up to the point that Arkhan and his men pushed the stone slab into the doorway and buried the king alive.

  NINETEEN

  Blood and Water

  The Fountains of Eternal Life, in the 63rd year of Ptra the Glorious

  (-1744 Imperial Reckoning)

  The priests were kept busy throughout the night as the army prepared for battle. Neru’s acolytes paced the sprawling perimeter of the allied camp, raising their eyes to the face of the goddess and filling the cold air with song to keep the spirits of the wastes at bay. Around the campfires, hammers clattered against bronze as warriors made last-minute repairs to chariots or mended their battle-harnesses. Men prayed as they worked. Some called upon Ptra to drive their enemies before them, while others beseeched mighty Geheb to lend them the strength to overcome their foes. Still others made worship to ashen-faced Djaf, God of Death, praying that their blows struck clean and true. The rattle and murmur of the enormous host mingled with the cries of oxen, goats and lambs as the priests led their charges from the sacrificial pens and dragged them before red-stained altars in the centre of the camp. The clamour of the army ebbed and flowed across the sands like the restless breath of a vast, elemental beast.

  The army of the Usurper waited little more than three miles away, across rolling dunes and a broad, rocky plain. Small campfires flickered among the hundreds of dark tents, and from time to time the nervous whicker of a horse would reach the ears of the allied sentries, but otherwise the enemy camp was eerily still.

  At the centre of the vast encampment, ringed by scores of watchful Ushabti, Rakh-amn-hotep listened to his scouts’ reports and contemplated the field of battle for the coming day. Long after he’d dismissed his captains to their tents, the king perched on a camp stool and brooded over the large map arrayed before him, studying the positions of his and his enemy’s troops. From time to time his champion, Ekhreb, would rise from his chair near the entrance to the large tent and fill the king’s empty cup with a mix of herbs and watered wine. At the far side of the tent’s central chamber the King of Lybaras reclined upon a dust-stained divan. The papyrus sheets resting in his lap fluttered slightly as Hekhmenukep snored, his chin resting upon his narrow chest.

  Two hours before dawn the army’s slaves rose from the cold ground and began preparing the morning meal. Bowls of grain porridge were passed out to the thousands of grim-faced warriors, along with a palm-sized piece of unleavened bread and a single cup of water. Among the tents of the noblemen, those who could bring themselves to eat breakfasted on bread and olives, goat’s cheese and river fowl. Their wine was thick and resinous, for no water could be spared to thin it.

  Half an hour before sunrise, as the sky was paling to the east, the army began to muster. Horses thundered down the camp’s narrow lanes as the kings despatched the first orders of the day to their companies. File leaders bellowed orders to their troops, drawing them from their tents and forming them into lines. The rumble of man-made thunder and a furious shriek of steam sounded in the north-eastern quarter of the camp, setting the Rasetran cavalry rearing and stamping in fright as the Lybaran war machines stirred to life. Six huge figures reared slowly into the brightening sky, their heavy armour plates grating and groaning as they shifted against one another.

  The earth shook as the giants climbed ponderously to their feet. Their faces, carved from wood and sheathed in burnished copper, bore visages meant to win the favour of the gods: a snarling hound’s face, in honour of Geheb; the cunning, enigmatic jackal favoured by Djaf; or Phakth’s haughty, cruel falcon. The warriors of Rasetra and Lybaras stared in awe as the great engines hefted massive stone maces and took their first steps towards the battlefield. Few noticed that the army’s war scorpions were nowhere to be seen. Like their patron, Sokth, the stealthy machines had slipped away in the night, leaving only piles of churned sand to show where they had been.

  The stirring of the war machines brought answering bellows from the south-eastern quarter of the camp, as the living war machines of the Rasetran army raised their armoured snouts and challenged the distant giants. The thunder-lizards were massive, humpbacked creatures, with squat legs the size of tree trunks and powerful, lashing tails that were knobbed at the end like maces. The beasts were sluggish in the early morning chill, despite sleeping on sands heated by the warmth of a score of blazing fires. Their handlers, lean, agile lizardmen from the southern jungles, prodded the creatures to their feet with long, spearlike sticks and clambered up their sides into howdahs of wood and canvas fitted to their armoured backs. Packs of lizardman auxiliaries crowded the field around their massive cousins, whispering to one another in their hissing, clacking tongue. Some showed off the bloodstained skulls they had taken in battle the day before, inviting their fellows to taste the trophies with flicks of their dark, forked tongues.

  Just as the first rays of sunlight broke over the far horizon, a chorus of trumpets pealed from the centre of the camp and the infantry began to move. The forward edge of the battleline, twenty thousand men, formed into ten companies stretching nearly five miles from north to south, advanced under the watchful stares of their noble commanders and the leathery curses of their file leaders. The cavalry rode in their wake: eight thousand light horsemen, five thousand heavy horse and two thousand chariots, plus another twenty thousand reserves and auxiliaries. Behind them, striding through swirling clouds of dust, came the titanic war machines of Lybaras and the bellowing thunder lizards of Rasetra. Last of all came the multicoloured processions of the army’s priests: servants of Ptra and Geheb, Phakth and Neru, and even priests of Tahoth the Scholar in their gleaming vestments of copper and glass.

  The armies of the East marched to battle with the rising sun at their backs and the shadows of night retreating before them.

  The bow of the sky-boat pitched and rolled as the sun churned the air above the rolling dunes, making Rakh-amn-hotep glad that he had resisted the urge to eat a hearty breakfast before heading for the battleline. Beside him, Hekhmenukep swayed like a palm tree in a storm, relaying instructions to his signallers as easily as if he were reclining in his tent back at camp. The King of Rasetra gripped the bow rail in one white-knuckled hand and resolved not to embarrass himself in front of the scholar-king.

  Scores of Lybarans crowded the decks of the sky-ship as it floated along behind the advancing army. Four teams of signallers lined the ship’s rails, clutching their dish-shaped bronze reflectors and periodically gauging the angle of the blazing sun. Behind them, a company of archers sat cross-legged down the centre of the deck, their long bows resting within easy reach as they chatted or played at games of dice. At the stern, surrounding the sky-boat’s complicated set of rudders, two dozen young priests chanted invocations to the air spirits that kept the vessel aloft. Farther off to the east, trailing well behind the advancing army, came the remainder of the Lybaran sky-boats, the seven stately craft casting long shadows across the rolling terrain beneath their keels.

  Two hundred feet below, the allied army advanced steadily across the broken plain towards their waiting foe. At such a distance, none of the rumble and clatter of an army on the march reached Rakh-amn-hotep’s ears, which only served to deepen his unease.

  “I feel like a spectator up here,” he said, half to himself. He glanced at Hekhmenukep. “Are you certain this will work? What if the army can’t read our signals?” The King of Lybaras gave Rakh-amn-hotep a condescending smile.

  “There are Lybaran signallers with every company,” he said, as though reassuring an anxious child. “We have spent centuries refining this system in elaborate games of war. It cannot fail.” Rakh-amn-hotep stared thoughtfully at the Lybraran king.

  “How many times have you used it in a real battle?” he asked. Hekhmenukep’s confident smile faltered a bit.<
br />
  “Well…” he began.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” the Rasetran king growled. For a fleeting moment he considered asking Hekhmenukep to be set down with the rest of the army, but having orders issued from the ground and the air would only increase the risk of confusion. Scowling, he turned his attention to the battlefield below and tried to work out the enemy’s dispositions.

  From Rakh-amn-hotep’s vantage point, the army of the Usurper was laid out before him like tokens on a battle-map. Companies of blue-clad Zandri archers formed a skirmish line some fifty yards in front of a veritable wall of enemy spearmen, anchored on the trade road to the north and stretching for more than four miles in a shallow crescent to the south. The enemy companies were less numerous, but individually larger than the allied formations, five ranks to the allies’ three. The king spied still more companies held in reserve behind the front rank, reinforcing the enemy centre and right. As near as he could reckon, the combined forces of the Usurper outnumbered the allied infantry by more than twenty thousand men. Large squadrons of Numasi light horsemen prowled along the flanks of the enemy army, alert for any attempts to sweep around the battleline, and a large block of heavy horsemen waited behind a set of dunes along the enemy’s left flank. Two more formations waited at the rear of the Usurper’s force, but they were cloaked in the mists rising from the Fountains: chariots, or perhaps even catapults, the king surmised.

  “Seventy, perhaps eighty thousand troops,” Rakh-amn-hotep mused. “It appears that Ka-Sabar’s diversion to the south wasn’t as successful as we hoped. That must be all the fighting men of Khemri, Numas and Zandri combined.” He leaned against the rail, studying the formations more carefully. “Still no tents, as reported at Zedri. Where are the Usurper and his pale-skinned monsters?” Hekhmenukep considered this.