The Rise of Nagash

by Mike Lee

  Blinking slowly, the king found himself lying on his stomach at the edge of one of the great sacred pools. He couldn’t remember how he’d got there. The last thing he knew, he’d watched the sky-ship’s air bladder come apart, and felt the deck drop away beneath him as the great craft plunged earthwards.

  Wincing, Rakh-amn-hotep got his hands underneath him and tried to push himself upright. A stabbing pain lanced through the right side of his chest. More than likely, he’d cracked a rib at some point during the crash. No doubt he’d been thrown clear when the wooden hull crashed to the ground. By the gods’ own grace he’d just managed to clear the deep pool at his feet. Had he landed three feet shorter he would have surely drowned in Asaph’s sacred water.

  No, not sacred any more, the king corrected himself. With a hiss of revulsion he jerked his feet from the corpse-choked water and wiped at the oily residue of human rot clinging to his skin. This close to the water the stench of corruption was tangible, coating the back of Rakh-amn-hotep’s dry throat.

  Coughing raggedly, the king rolled over and tried to take stock of his surroundings. The wreckage of the sky-boat lay just ten yards or so away, its shattered timbers partially covered by a tattered shroud of canvas and a carpet of seething, chewing insects. To his horror the king saw struggling figures buried beneath the mass of locusts. One lifted a hand skywards, as though beseeching the gods for help. Three of the man’s fingers had been gnawed down to the bone.

  Few of the other Lybaran sky-boats had fared any better. Rakh-amn-hotep could see broken hulls scattered across the eastern curve of the great basin, and dozens of dazed and injured men were trying to escape the wreckage.

  To the west, waves of sound reverberated across the basin from the massed warriors of the Usurper’s host. From what the Rasetran king could tell, the retreating companies had fetched up against Nagash’s hidden reserves, and the Usurper’s immortal champions were angrily re-forming their ranks. The great mass of disordered troops was the only thing standing between the allied survivors and Nagash’s eager companies. That would change in a matter of minutes.

  Rakh-amn-hotep staggered over to a group of Lybarans crawling away from the ruins of his sky-boat.

  “Where is your king?” he asked hoarsely. “Where is Hekhmenukep?” When the stunned crewmen stared wordlessly at him, the Rasetran applied his sandal to their backsides. “On your damned feet!” he ordered. “We have to get out of here, but no one leaves until Hekhmenukep is found!”

  The king’s commanding voice sent the crewmen scrambling back the way they’d come, hurriedly searching around the wreckage of the sky-boat.

  “Get the wounded moving!” Rakh-amn-hotep called after them. “Any men who can’t move must be carried!”

  As the crewmen searched, the king turned his attention to the survivors of the other sky-boats. Many flocked to the sound of his voice, and he put them to work as well. Large swathes of torn canvas were gathered off the ground to provide crude litters for the most seriously wounded, and the king began sending small groups eastwards as soon as they were organised.

  “Over here!” one of the Lybarans called, waving frantically. “He’s here! The king is here!”

  Hekhmenukep was lying only a few yards from the smashed prow of the sky-boat. Miraculously, he had escaped the ravages of the locust swarm, while two men who had come to earth a few feet closer to the crash had been reduced to glistening skeletons. When Rakh-amn-hotep reached the king, two of Hekhmenukep’s subjects were trying to help him to his feet. The Lybaran ruler was pale and hunched with pain, and flecks of bright red foam ringed the corners of his mouth. Rakh-amn-hotep muttered a curse.

  “A rib has pierced one of his lungs,” the veteran warrior said. “Set him on a piece of canvas and get him back to the army as quickly as you can. Don’t worry too much about his comfort. Right now, speed is what matters.”

  As the crewmen hastened to obey, the air shook with the bellow of war-horns and the mingled voices of thousands of eager warriors. Across the basin, the Usurper’s army was on the move once more.

  The Rasetran king growled like an old, scarred hound. They had run out of time.

  “Get moving,” he said to the remaining men. “Help the wounded as much as you’re able. Now, go!”

  The Lybarans needed no further urging, fleeing for their lives in the face of the advancing army. In moments, the king stood alone, in the face of the Usurper’s distant horde. Beaten but unbowed, he turned his back on his foes and headed off after his men.

  Behind him, the Usurper’s warriors let out a wordless roar of bloodlust and surged forwards, breaking ranks in their eagerness to catch up to the Lybarans. The enemy warriors were more than half a mile away, and were forced to follow the twisting trails that surrounded the poisoned fountains, but the same could be said for Rakh-amn-hotep and his men, many of whom could barely move. With every passing moment, the bestial sounds of pursuit grew louder in the king’s ears.

  Then, up ahead, Rakh-amn-hotep spotted horsemen wending their way carefully among the pools. They were Lybaran light horsemen, the leading edge of the pursuit force that had followed the retreating enemy companies into the basin. As he watched, the horsemen helped their fellows onto the backs of their horses and began to head back the way they’d come. The litter bearers had no choice but to struggle onwards with their burdens, but now they marched under the protective gaze of the light horsemen.

  One of the cavalrymen spotted Rakh-amn-hotep and spurred his horse forwards with a shout. He reined in alongside the king and slid from the saddle without hesitation.

  “Your champion waits with the Rasetran chariots yonder,” he said breathlessly, nodding his head in the direction of the mists to the east. “Take my horse, great one. The enemy is nearly upon us.”

  Rakh-amn-hotep glanced back the way he’d come and was shocked to see enemy spearmen less than a hundred yards away. “Get back in the saddle,” he ordered. “Two can ride as well as one. Besides, I’m like to fall off if I try to ride this beast by myself.”

  The cavalryman leapt gratefully back onto his horse’s back and with an effort helped the king up behind him. An arrow hissed through the air off to their right, and then another. The horseman hauled on the reins and spurred his mount away from the advancing host. He wove his mount through the press of retreating figures with great skill, occasionally splashing through shallow pools to circumvent larger knots of men.

  Many minutes later they reached the far end of the basin and its tendrils of swirling mist. A hundred Rasetran chariots waited there in a kind of rearguard, their narrow wheels and considerable weight preventing them from penetrating further into the basin’s rough terrain. Ekhreb waited nearby, ordering litter bearers to load their charges aboard the chariots as they arrived. The champion’s expression relaxed considerably when he saw his king approaching.

  Rakh-amn-hotep dropped gracelessly from the saddle and clasped the cavalryman’s wrist in thanks before walking over to Ekhreb.

  “The damned Usurper was a few steps ahead of us all along,” he snarled. “The battle on the plain was just meant to exhaust us and use up the last of our water. Now he’s poisoned the only water source for fifty miles. If we stay here his reserves will break us by nightfall, and then there will be a slaughter.” Ekhreb listened to the dire assessment calmly.

  “What would you have us do?” he asked. Rakh-amn-hotep gritted his teeth.

  “We retreat again, damn it. Back to Quatar, though the gods alone know how we’re going to make it. Nagash will pursue us. He’d be a fool not to. We’ll draw him against the walls of the city and try to break him there.”

  “What if the Usurper is still thinking a few steps ahead of us?” the champion asked. Rakh-amn-hotep scowled at the champion.

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, we’ll all probably be dead of thirst long before that becomes a problem,” he said. Ekhreb chuckled in spite of himself.

  “Now look who’s the optimist,” he said, and lea
d the king to his waiting chariot.

  The tent flaps of heavy canvas swept aside, allowing only the weak grey light of the misty basin into the gloom of Nagash’s tent. Raamket hurried inside, grateful to escape even the faint glimmer of Ptra’s searing rays. Most of his body was shielded by leather wrappings and armour, leaving only his head and hands exposed. His cloak of human skin fluttered like vulture’s wings in his wake as he approached the Undying King and sank to one knee.

  “The enemy host is withdrawing, master,” the immortal said. “What is your command?”

  Nagash sat upon the ancient throne of Khemri, displaced from Settra’s palace for the first time in centuries. The king’s brooding figure was wreathed in the sepulchral tendrils of his ghostly retinue, their faint cries weaving a fearful threnody in the oppressive shadows. The necromancer’s vassal kings waited upon Nagash’s pleasure: Amn-nasir, the once-proud King of Zandri, sat in a low-backed chair at Nagash’s left and drank wine laced with the black lotus, his expression haunted. The twin Kings of Numas sat next to one another on the necromancer’s right, whispering apprehensively to one another. At the rear of the tent the Undying King’s marble sarcophagus sat beside his queen’s. Neferem’s sarcophagus was shut. Ghazid, the necromancer’s servant, knelt beside the stone coffin and stroked its polished surface with a trembling, wrinkled hand, whispering in a thin, reedy voice.

  The Undying King rose to his feet amid a swirl of tormented spirits and strode to the opening of the tent. With a gesture, the mantle of spirits glided forwards and pulled the tent flap aside.

  Nagash stared from the shadows into the failing light of day and smiled.

  “We march to Quatar,” he declared, “where we will grind these rebel kings beneath our heel.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Elixir of Life

  Khemri, the Living City, in the 46th year of Ualatp the Patient

  (-1950 Imperial Reckoning)

  The Priest King of Khemri folded his arms and scowled at the large parchment map spread before him.

  “Where are they now?” Nagash asked of his vizier.

  Arkhan the Black moved quickly around the corner of the long table and stood beside the king. The nobleman referred quickly to a note scrawled on ragged parchment, and then traced his finger along the length of the Great Trade Road, west of Khemri.

  “According to the latest reports from our scouts, the Zandri army is here,” he said, pointing to a spot approximately a week’s march from the Living City.

  The other half a dozen noblemen attending upon the king, including the thuggish Raamket and a weary-looking Shepsu-hur, leaned over the table to better hear Arkhan over the sound of voices and the shuffling of pages in the King’s Library. Traditionally a silent, solitary haunt for the king and the royal family, the library occupied almost an entire wing of the palace. In his youth, Nagash spent many years poring over ancient tomes in the library and prowling through the dim, dusty archives in the wing’s sub-levels. Now that he was king, the large sandstone chamber had become his chamber of office, where he conducted much of the business of the kingdom.

  Though it was already well into the evening, the room was crowded with scribes, messengers and harried-looking slaves, all going about their business under the disapproving glare of the library’s senior clerk. It had been much the same for days, ever since the Bhagarite trader had arrived at the palace with valuable news to sell: King Nekumet of Zandri had mustered his warriors and was preparing to liberate the Living City from the clutches of Nagash the Usurper. For the first time in eighteen years, Khemri was at war.

  News of the impending attack had not come as a great surprise. Indeed, Nagash had been expecting such a move for quite some time and had been making the necessary preparations. The news of Thutep’s fall had spread across Nehekhara like a storm wind, prompting cries of outrage and dismay in the palaces of the other great cities.

  It was not so much the act of removing Thutep that was so abhorrent, for the young king had been widely viewed as foolish and naive, but the fact that Nagash had violated the covenant of the gods by claiming the crown. As firstborn, his life belonged to the gods, and thus he had set a dangerous precedent that the other kings could not abide. To make matters even worse, he had forbidden Thutep’s wife, Neferem, to join her husband in the afterlife, as custom demanded, jeopardising the covenant and offering a grave offence to the gods.

  Nagash had lost count of the number of angry delegations sent from the holy city of Mahrak to demand his immediate abdication in favour of Thutep’s son.

  Meanwhile, he suspected, the Hieratic Council had been sending envoys to the other cities in the hope of raising an army to remove him from the throne by force. Until now, however, the Kings of Nehekhara had preferred to bide their time and hope that the gods, or more likely, Khemri’s angry populace, would step in and save them the expense of a costly military campaign.

  For nine years, the gods had been strangely silent, and the people of Khemri had accepted Nagash’s rule with a kind of stunned passivity. His rise to power marked the end of years of plague, and had ushered in an era of calm and stability. The king replenished the ranks of the nobility by elevating prominent members of the merchant class, and suppressed crime through quiet arrangements with the city’s criminal elements. Dissenters were quickly identified and dealt with quietly by Raamket’s agents, allowing the king free rein to pursue his immediate goals.

  Nagash had known from the first that it would only be a matter of time before King Nekumet felt strong enough to march on Khemri. Now the labour of the past few years would be put to the test.

  “What have we learned about the composition of the army?” the king inquired. Arkhan consulted his notes again.

  “Our scouts report eight thousand foot soldiers, a mix of regular spear companies and barbarian auxiliaries, as well as two thousand archers and fifteen hundred chariots.”

  Sidelong stares and uneasy murmurs passed among the noblemen. The Zandri army was nearly twice as large as Khemri’s. Nagash nodded thoughtfully.

  “King Nekumet has assembled an ideal force to combat ours,” he said. “Clearly his spies have kept him well-informed.” He glanced up at Raamket. “What of our own troops?”

  “The last of our spear companies and archers left the city by mid-afternoon, as you commanded,” the nobleman said. “The light horsemen and chariots are finishing their final preparations even as we speak.” Nagash acknowledged the report with a curt nod, and then turned to Shepsu-hur.

  “And what of your forces?” he asked. The handsome nobleman gave the king a rakish smile.

  “All stands in readiness,” he said easily. “We can leave at any time, great one.”

  Nagash studied the map for a few moments more, and then nodded in satisfaction.

  “There is nothing more to discuss, then,” he said. “The cavalry will depart in two hours, as planned. Shepsu-hur, you will leave Khemri an hour after midnight. Be at the rendezvous here,” the king continued, indicating a point along the banks of the River Vitae, “by dawn.”

  Shepsu-hur bowed to the king, and the rest of the noblemen took this as their cue to depart. Arkhan quickly rolled up the map of Nehekhara and departed with a hasty bow. Two hours left precious little time to make ready, and there was still much to be done. Nagash dismissed them from his mind at once, returning his attention to the books and parchments that had been covered by the vizier’s map.

  Books and scrolls on architecture lay atop a broad sheet depicting a monumental pyramid, larger by far than even the Great Pyramid. The pyramid contained more than a dozen levels of carefully arranged chambers, more than half of which penetrated well below ground level, and the margins of the architectural plan were filled with precise measurements and lists of materials that would go into the pyramid’s construction. Tonne upon tonne of black marble, plus hundreds of pounds of silver and jars of crushed gemstone.

  The cost of the building materials alone would beggar the great cities of
Nehekhara twice over. Yet every bit was absolutely vital, in Nagash’s estimation. Based on everything he had learned from the druchii, plus the observations of his experiments over the last decade and a half, it would take nothing less to draw the winds of dark magic to Nehekhara and store their power for his use.

  The cost of such an undertaking did not concern him, but was a relatively trivial problem, as far as Nagash was concerned. What confounded him, time and again, were the calculations of labour that would be required to build such a massive edifice. The king traced a fingertip along a series of figures in the lower margin of the plan, arriving once again at the inevitable conclusion: two hundred to two hundred and fifty years.

  Nagash placed his palms on the tabletop and revisited his calculations once again, trying to find a way to complete his grand design in less than a single lifetime. So keen was his concentration that it was several long minutes before the king realised that the library chamber was completely silent.

  Frowning, the king glanced up from his work to find Neferem and her retinue of maidens standing in the centre of the room. The Daughter of the Sun was dressed in her royal finery, complete with the ceremonial headdress and heavy golden sunburst worn by Khemri’s queen. Her green eyes were limned with kohl, and her lips had been dusted lightly with crushed pearl, but such adornments seemed cheap compared to Neferem’s natural beauty. Not even the cold glare of contempt she focused on the king detracted from her tremendous presence.

  Everyone in the chamber: slaves, scholars, even the querulous senior librarians, had fallen to their knees and bent their heads to the floor in her presence.

  “Leave us,” Nagash commanded, and the attendants hastened from the room.

  The king studied Neferem appraisingly. After almost twenty years she had fully blossomed into the legendary beauty the gods had meant for her to be, and despite himself Nagash felt the hunger of desire all the more keenly.

  “I see you’ve finally put off those damned mourning robes,” he observed. “You look like a queen once more. Does this mean you’ve changed your mind?”