The Rise of Nagash

by Mike Lee

“We’ll speak of Raamket and his allies again once the battle is done,” he said.

  The catapults fired again, hurling their screaming projectiles at the city. With a clatter of bone, wood and metal the first spear companies began to move, rolling in a silent, inexorable tide towards the city walls. Arkhan felt the earth tremble at the tread of eighty thousand pairs of feet.

  “How long, do you reckon?” he asked the champion. Shepsu-hur looked towards the City of Hope.

  “An hour. Perhaps less. Once the gate is breached, the city is doomed.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they will surrender before it comes to that.”

  “Is Nagash interested in surrender?”

  The immortal looked down at Arkhan and gave him a fanged smile.

  “The Undying King has said that every man who brings him a living priest will be paid his weight in gold. The rest are to be slain out of hand.” The vizier was surprised at the news.

  “Slain? Not enslaved?” he asked. Shepsu-hur shook his head in reply.

  “Today, the age of the old gods comes to an end,” he said. “The temples will burn and the faithful will be put to the sword.”

  “The men of Numas and Zandri will be outraged,” Arkhan declared, thinking back to the reaction of the kings in the palace at Quatar. “They may well revolt.”

  Shepsu-hur wheeled his horse around. The immortal glanced back over his shoulder.

  “The men of Numas and Zandri may well be next,” he said, and went to rejoin his troops.

  Arkhan watched the cavalry set off behind the implacable spearmen and looked beyond, to the silent walls of the City of the Gods. Invisible energies crackled through the air, swirling above the marching army like a building storm. A breeze plucked at the vizier’s robes, kicking up tendrils of dust and grit. Arkhan couldn’t say if it was Nagash’s doing, or whether some other force was stirring as the army began to march.

  Atop the nearby dune, Nagash the Undying King watched his army press forwards and contemplated Mahrak’s doom.

  Bale-fires were burning across the plain where bundles of screaming skulls had fallen short of the city walls. As the necromancer watched, the catapults launched another salvo, and this time many of the projectiles found the range. They burst against the walls in sickly green showers of bone and broken sandstone, or struck the battlements in blazing sprays of fire.

  The spear companies were moving at a slow, measured pace, advancing in a broad line towards Mahrak’s western wall. They had nearly reached the demarcation line where the necromancer’s shroud met the city’s defensive wards.

  Nagash turned to his queen.

  “Cast them down,” he told Neferem, pointing towards the starlit field. The Undying King was already gathering his power, drawing upon the energies of the Black Pyramid, hundreds of leagues distant. When the wards fell, his sorcerous shroud would rush in, and darkness would fall upon the City of Hope.

  The first ranks of spearmen reached the city’s wards. Neferem raised her withered arms and let out a long, despairing cry.

  Down on the plain below, the breeze began to strengthen, pulling ribbons of sand into the air towards the waiting city. The spear companies continued forwards under the fire of the catapults, followed by thirty squadrons of light cavalry led by a third of his immortals. In their wake came thousands of skeletal archers, their tall bows held at the ready. They would do the majority of the fighting once the companies reached the walls, shooting at the city defenders as they fired down at the milling spearmen.

  The march of the spearmen had sent a steady, rolling drumbeat across the sandy ground, but that tempo was punctuated by slow, heavy footfalls. Thump… thump… thump…

  They crested the line of dunes just as the catapults fired another salvo at the city. Eight towering figures, each sixteen feet tall and crafted of fused bones and cable-like sinews, the bone giants wielded enormous clubs, fashioned from ships’ masts cut down and banded together with thick strips of bronze. Fashioned after the complicated metal giants of Lybaras, they would assault the city’s gate and hammer it down, paving the way for the cavalry to begin the slaughter.

  The wind was continuing to strengthen, drawing more and more dust into the air above the plain. The necromancer’s mantle of shadow was starting to unravel, drawn inexorably into the building vortex.

  Thousands of skeletons marched forwards, their battered helmets and spear tips gleaming dully under the fading starlight. The city’s wards had not fallen.

  For a fleeting instant, the Undying King was stunned. He sharpened the force of his command, quickening the pace of his troops. The bone giants increased their stride, gaining swiftly on the advancing companies.

  Overhead, the clouds of dust were boiling, their insides lit from within by a furnace-like glow. The wind had risen in power to an angry, lion-like roar. Then came a deafening crack, like a boulder splitting in the sun, and fire began to rain down upon the living dead.

  Tumbling pieces of rock the size of wagon wheels arced from the clouds on trails of blazing crimson, landing among the tightly ranked spearmen and hurling their pieces skywards in plumes of dirt and flame. Each impact reverberated across the plain like a hammer blow, one falling atop another so quickly that they merged into a titanic, thunderous roar.

  Huge holes were gouged in the spear companies, but the skeletal warriors did not feel hesitation or fear. Driven by the invisible lash of their king’s will, the spearmen closed ranks and continued to press forwards. Bodies struggled onwards, their wrappings burning away as they walked. The catapults continued to fire, but as the skulls streaked through the clouds the bundles were burst apart and hurled earthwards, landing upon the skeletons below.

  Furious, Nagash whirled upon his queen. He seized Neferem by her hair and wrenched her head around, cracking the desiccated skin of her neck.

  “Break their power!” he commanded. “Break it!”

  Neferem raised her arms feebly, her face warped by pain and terror. She wailed like a lost soul, crying her torment to the heavens, but to no avail.

  The immortals had penetrated into the wards, and as the fiery stones fell around them they quickened their pace, weaving their way past the struggling spearmen and racing for the gate. The giants followed suit, in some cases ploughing ruthlessly through any spearmen caught in their path. One giant was struck squarely in the forehead by a plunging stone, shattering its misshapen skull. The headless construct staggered for a moment, and then righted itself and continued on.

  When the charging horsemen were less than a hundred yards from the city walls the sandy ground before them heaved and burst, throwing a curtain of dust high into the sky. The cavalry, going too fast to stop, plunged into the billowing wall and disappeared from view.

  For a moment, Nagash could see nothing, and then a small shape came spinning out of the cloud like a flung potshard. By luck, it hit a bone giant in the chest and shattered in a spray of fragments. Belatedly, the necromancer realised that the shape had been one half of an undead horse.

  The dust was starting to thin out, and large, dark shapes could be seen stirring within its depths. More bits and pieces were flung from the cloud, like fragments scattered by the sweep of heavy blows.

  The giants had nearly reached the curtain of dust. They raised their clubs and swung them in broad, ponderous sweeps, cutting roiling wakes through the shroud and revealing massive, leonine shapes whose flanks were the colour of the desert sands. One of them rounded on the giants and leapt forwards, paws outstretched.

  It struck the giant in the chest, talons shattering the fused ribcage and digging furrows in the construct’s pelvis.

  The monster was easily as large as the giant, with a lionlike body and a powerful, lashing tail, but the head of the beast was not a lion. It had a russet mane and slitted yellow eyes, but the face was that of a man.

  The sphinx bared massive fangs and lunged at the giant’s neck, snapping the knobbly vertebrae in a single, powerful bite. The construct toppled beneath the monster’s w
eight and the sphinx tore it apart with sweeps of its sabre-like claws.

  More sphinxes leapt from the settling dust cloud, their pelts covered in crushed pieces of bone and pale shreds of tissue. They dashed among the remaining giants, too fast for their clumsy weapons to touch, and tore at their legs with tooth and claw. One by one, the constructs crashed to the ground and were ripped to pieces.

  Clouds of arrows arced across the plain and landed among the sphinxes as the surviving archers drew into range. The monsters raised their heads and snapped at the arrows as though they were no more than stinging flies, and then returned to their grisly work.

  The spearmen were still pushing forwards under the hail of fire, but now they advanced singly, or in scattered knots of five or ten warriors. Their companies had been shattered, and the archers were suffering beneath the heavenly assault. The plain was carpeted in smouldering bones and broken bits of weapons and armour.

  Baring his teeth in a silent snarl, Nagash raised his face to the heavens and roared in anger. Down on the field the surviving skeletons staggered at the sound, turned about and began to withdraw.

  The sphinxes paced the broken ground at the foot of Mahrak’s walls like hungry cats, staring balefully at the rest of the necromancer’s forces. The remains of the cavalrymen and their immortal captains crunched beneath their paws. Not one of the riders had survived.

  The huge beasts tossed their heads and roared defiantly at the retreating skeletons, their human-like faces both wrathful and triumphant as they stood among the broken bones of the horde.

  Beyond the City of Hope, the first rays of dawn were breaking.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Lord of the Dead Lands

  Mahrak, the City of Hope, in the 63rd year of Djaf the Terrible

  (-1740 Imperial reckoning)

  The slaves began their work at dusk, edging warily across the shadow line as soon as the sun disappeared behind the sorcerous clouds to the west. They worked in groups of fifty or sixty, with a third of their number dragging hand carts while the rest scooped up armfuls of broken bones or torn leather harness and loaded up the conveyances as quickly as they could. Companies of skeletal archers watched over the bone gatherers from just behind the demarcation line, ready to shoot any slave who lost his nerve and tried to return before their cart had been filled. The closer the scavengers got to Mahrak’s walls the more fearful they became.

  Arkhan the Black stood atop the same low dune where Nagash had unleashed his first attack on the city of priests, and watched the progress of one particular band of bone gatherers who were a few hundred yards farther ahead than the rest. A scribe sat on the sands nearby with a portable writing desk balanced on his knees, ready to record the vizier’s observations. Behind them the vast tent city of the besiegers was stirring, rising from the long day’s slumber and making ready for another tedious night watching the shadow line and waiting for the city to fall.

  Four years after the catastrophic opening of the siege, the western plain of Mahrak was carpeted in splintered bone, torn armour and broken weapons. Uncounted thousands of warriors had been hurled at the city, only to be smashed by fiery stones or shattered beneath the paws of the city’s elemental guardians.

  Company after company had been fed into the waiting maw of the city defences, using every conceivable tactic that Nagash and his captains could devise. They launched elaborate feints and flanking moves, hoping to overwhelm the defending wards. They supported the assaults with fierce bombardments and scores of lumbering bone giants. They even crafted burrowing constructs to try to tunnel across the killing field, all to no avail. The defences of Mahrak were as tireless and fierce as Nagash’s undead attackers, and as the months turned into years the plain outside the city became a vast field of bones.

  The carnage had grown so severe that the besiegers had to start using slaves to clear lanes through the debris to permit the movement of troops. Cart-loads of bones were dumped in huge liche-fields to the rear of the army, where the king’s acolytes would pore through the wreckage for suitable parts to reassemble useful warriors or larger siege constructs. Further west, scavenging parties combed the necropoli of Khemri, Numas and Zandri, breaking into peasant crypts and raising new conscripts to restore Nagash’s battered army.

  The cost of maintaining the siege had grown so severe that the stored energies of the Black Pyramid had been dangerously depleted. Raamket had been sent back to Khemri after the first year of the siege to gather fresh souls for sacrifice. Rumour had it that barges of northern slaves were shipped downriver from Zandri every month to die in the depths of the pyramid.

  The Undying King had made it clear to his vassals: if it took ten years, or ten thousand years, the siege of Mahrak would continue until the City of the Gods was no more.

  Arkhan peered into the deepening gloom beyond the shadow line and gauged the progress of the scavenging party.

  “Two hundred yards,” he said, and the scribe’s brush whispered across the papyrus. “Nothing yet.”

  The party was well ahead of the other scavengers, wading through drifts of splintered bone that rose almost to their knees. The sky above the slaves remained clear, as expected. For the last year the besiegers had begun probing the city’s wards in various ways, gathering information on how they operated in the hope of finding a way to unravel them. They had learned that groups of a hundred men or less could cross the shadow line without triggering the rain of fire and could move safely up to a quarter of a mile from the city. Once past that, however, they fell prey to the sphinxes.

  There was some debate as to how many of those desert spirits protected Mahrak. Various observers claimed no more than half a dozen, while others insisted there was at least a score. The trouble was that the spirits came and went at will within the quarter-mile zone just outside the city walls. They could disappear into the sandy soil and emerge from a dust cloud hundreds of yards away, striking with terrible speed, before vanishing once again. Despite their best efforts, Nagash’s troops had yet to injure a single sphinx, much less slay one.

  The siege wasn’t entirely one-sided, however. If Nagash’s warriors couldn’t enter Mahrak, they could at least make certain that nothing got out. Numasi patrols had intercepted numerous foraging parties over the last two years, and after sufficient torture, the prisoners had confessed to the desperate conditions inside the city. Mahrak’s food stores had been exhausted long ago. The horses were gone, as were all the rats. Fighting had broken out around the temple of Basth when mobs of starving citizens went after the temple’s sacred cats. Mahrak’s fearsome Ushabti, the most terrible holy warriors in all of Nehekhara, found themselves turning their powers upon the city’s faithful in a desperate effort to maintain order.

  Initially, Nagash had been pleased by the news. It seemed as though the city might fall at any time, but the king’s anticipation soon turned sour. Mahrak continued to endure, night after awful night, while to the south the Kings of Rasetra and Lybaras were no doubt rebuilding their broken armies to offer battle once more.

  The sound of hooves on the far side of the dune caught Arkhan’s attention. He stole a glance over his shoulder and saw a messenger wearing a hooded desert cape slide clumsily from the saddle of a sickly looking mare. Frowning, Arkhan turned his attention back to the slaves creeping towards the distant city. Whatever the rider had to say, he’d hear it soon enough. It was unlikely to be of much significance.

  The messenger took his time climbing the rounded dune, his breath rattling noisily in his throat. Arkhan heard the man’s laboured footfalls draw near, until he could smell the oily stink of sickness seeping from the wretch’s pores. The vizier’s pale lips curled in distaste. When the man spoke, his voice was a wheezing rattle.

  “First we offer bones. Now we sacrifice flesh and blood to the lions of the desert,” he said. Arkhan felt a cold flash of irritation. Once upon a time he would have made the man suffer dearly for such impertinence.

  “Have you a message for me?” he
growled. “Or have you chosen to risk your life by wasting my valuable time?” The messenger surprised him with a phlegmatic chuckle.

  “The sands of time are running swiftly through our fingers, Arkhan the Black,” he said quietly. Irritation gave way to outrage. Arkhan rounded upon the messenger, his pale hands clenching into fists, and found himself staring into the sallow, haunted face of Amn-nasir, the Priest King of Zandri.

  The immortal fought to keep the shock from his face. He stole a wary look at the nearby scribe, who was watching the exchange with dreadful fascination.

  “Leave us,” Arkhan told the man. “I’ll relay my observations personally to the king.”

  The scribe started to object, but thought better of it when he saw the look of menace in Arkhan’s eyes. Without a word, he snatched up his materials and hastily withdrew down the far side of the dune. When the scribe was out of earshot, Arkhan turned back to the king.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he hissed.

  Amn-nasir’s sunken eyes widened fractionally at the vizier’s tone, although perhaps it was simply Arkhan’s words making their way through the fog of wine and lotus root gripping the king’s mind. Amn-nasir managed a fleeting smile, revealing a mouth full of stained, rotting teeth.

  “I wished to see for myself how far the king’s proud vizier has fallen,” he said softly. Some of Arkhan’s former anger returned. He spread his arms wide.

  “Then look,” he sneered. “Drink deep, great one.”

  The priest king’s smile returned. A bright thread of drool slipped from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped at it absently with a trembling hand.

  “Not even the mightiest among us are safe from Nagash’s wrath,” he observed.

  Arkhan bit back a sharp reply. What point was there in denying it? Amn-nasir had watched him writhe like a worm in the palace at Quatar. He thought back to Shepsu-hur’s last words, before he’d ridden to his doom beneath the walls of Mahrak.

  The men of Numas and Zandri may well be next.