02 - Nagash the Unbroken (12 page)

It was a necropolis of sorts, similar in some ways to the great cities of the
dead in far-off Nehekhara. As he worked his way among the great barrows his mind
reeled with the possibilities. Here, sealed in earth and stone, was the
beginnings of an army. All that he lacked was the power and the knowledge to
bring them forth.

Upon leaving the road, the procession had spread out among the barrow mounds.
Each family followed a pair of lantern-bearing priests to the mound that had
been built for their kin. Nagash ignored them, making for a collection of
glowing orbs farther across the plain that lay almost at the feet of the
mountain itself. That was where the high priest and his retinue were to be
found.

There were almost a dozen families gathered around the priests; no doubt they
represented the kinfolk of the hetman and his warband. The bodies they’d carried
for so long had been laid side-by-side before the dark entrance to the mound.
Each corpse was naked. Their hair had been shorn close to the scalp, and their
physical deformities had been covered in dark ash, so that they practically
vanished in the gloom. All of the men bore ghastly wounds; Nagash had seen such
things often enough to know the marks of spear and axe, expertly delivered. The
hetman and his chosen warriors had gone to do battle with a far superior foe,
and been dealt a bitter defeat.

Nagash kept his distance, sticking to the shadow of an older mound as he
watched the high priest rise from his chair and spread his arms over the dead
men. In a guttural yet powerful voice, the old man began to speak. Nagash didn’t
understand the words, but the cadences and the inflection were all too familiar.
A rite of some sort was being performed. After a few moments, the senior priests
joined in, and he could feel the currents of invisible power growing between
them.

The chanting went on for many long minutes. The ritual was a simple one. It
made no use of magical symbols or carefully-inscribed circles, just torrents of
raw power drawn from the high priest’s circlet and, cleverly, the deposits
glowing from the skin of the fish held in the priests’ lanterns. Slowly,
steadily, the rite built to a crescendo—and then he saw one of the corpses
start to twitch.

A wail went up from the crowd. As if in response, another corpse began to
twitch. Then another. Soon, all of them were trembling with invisible energies.

There was a crackle of dead joints as, one by one, the dead men sat upright.
They moved like statues, stiff and awkward, driven by unseen hands. A number of
the mourners cried out again. Some tried to crawl across the wet ground,
reaching for their kin, and had to be dragged back.

The corpses paid them no heed. First the hetman clambered slowly to his feet,
followed by his retainers. Then, without a backwards glance, they walked slowly
through the doorway of the waiting barrow.

To Nagash’s surprise, the chanting of the priests continued—and then he
realised that the wailing of the barbarians was being echoed from all across the
plain. The high priest wasn’t just animating the bodies of the hetman and his
retainers—he was interring all the dead at once. Nagash’s mind raced. How many
bodies had there been? A hundred? More? Enough to constitute a small army, he
was certain.

The high priest and his followers weren’t holy men. They were necromancers as
well, drawing upon the power of the burning stone to command the bodies of the
dead. And for the moment, they were far more powerful than he.

Lahmia, The City of the Dawn, in the 76th year of Djaf the
Terrible

(-1599 Imperial Reckoning)

Arkhan the Black dreamt of riding beneath an endless desert sky, with nothing
but the stars and the gleaming moon to watch over him. The Bhagarite stallion
seemed to float across the rolling dunes, its hooves thudding softly like the
beat of a living heart. Silver bells were woven into the stallion’s mane,
jangling a fine counterpoint to the horse’s stride, and a dry wind caressed his
skin, smelling of dust and faded spice.

There was no end to the sands, no end to the emptiness of the desert night.
It was a benediction, a gift that he knew he did not deserve. And yet, when
rough hands seized Arkhan and shook him awake, the pain of the longing he felt
was worse than any wound he’d ever known.

He found himself lying on his side, cheek pressed against the grimy floor of
the king’s hidden sanctum. His eyelids felt stiff and brittle, like old paper.
The immortal opened them with effort and peered up at the robed figure kneeling
beside him.

W’soran’s bald, bony head and long neck reminded Arkhan of nothing so much as
a vulture. His wrinkled face, with its deep-set eyes, hooked nose and receding
chin, would not have looked out of place on a statue of the Scavenger God
himself. Once upon a time, he might have even been a priest of Ualatp. Arkhan
knew that the man had come to Lahmia from the ruined city of Mahrak, more than a
hundred years before, and had ultimately thrown himself on the generosity of
Lamashizzar’s court when none of the city temples would have anything to do with
him. Without doubt he possessed a wealth of arcane knowledge and sorcerous
ability that none of Lamashizzar’s other allies could equal, which explained how
he’d found his way so quickly into the king’s secret cabal.

Cold, black eyes studied Arkhan with dispassionate interest. “It’s taking
more effort to wake him with each passing night,” W’soran observed. He gripped
Arkhan’s shoulders and upper arms, testing the rigidity of the immortal’s
muscles and joints. “No obvious signs of morbidity, but his vigour is clearly
waning,” he said with a sour expression.

Arkhan heard sounds of movement at the far end of the room. An oil lamp
flared, filling the space with orange light and the faint reek of melting
tallow. “Perhaps we’re giving him too much lotus these days,” he heard
Lamashizzar say.

W’soran grunted, bending closer and peering into Arkhan’s eyes as though
searching for signs of deception. “He’s being given the same amount as always,”
he stated flatly. “So, therefore, his ability to recover from its effects has
diminished. He’s weakening.” His small, dark eyes narrowed. “Or…”

Arkhan heard footsteps draw nearer. A wine bowl clunked down onto a nearby
table, followed by the dry rustle of papers. “What?” the king said irritably.

W’soran stared into the immortal’s eyes for several long moments, as though
he could reach inside Arkhan’s mind and read its contents like a dusty scroll.
Arkhan gave the man a flat, predatory stare. His expression was unequivocal.
Given half a chance, I’d tear your head off your scrawny neck.

It was nothing that W’soran hadn’t seen every night for decades. What he
didn’t know was that, for the first time in a century and a half, Arkhan was
strong enough to actually do it.

W’soran straightened, his knees popping noisily. He’d been well advanced in
years when he’d first come to Lahmia, and Lamashizzar’s elixir could not
completely halt the implacable march of time. He shrugged his knobby shoulders.

“Perhaps the elixir is less effective as the physical body ages,” W’soran
muttered, turning his back on the immortal. “His flesh and organs are four
hundred years old. It’s possible that we are approaching the limits of your
arcane prowess.”

There was no mistaking the accusatory tone in W’soran’s voice. Lamashizzar
did not reply at first, but Arkhan could feel the sudden tension in the air
between the two men.

“Come here, Arkhan,” the king said coldly.

The immortal’s eyes narrowed in concentration as he drew his legs up
underneath him and pushed himself to his feet. His limbs were stiff and clumsy—not due to the effects of the lotus root, but rather the months of
hixa
stings he’d been receiving from Neferata. The wasp’s venom collected in his
muscles rather than passing away as it would in a living body, making even the
simplest movements difficult. He tried to turn its debilitating effects to his
advantage, letting it slow his movements to something approximating the
lassitude that the king and his cohorts had come to expect. If Lamashizzar had
even the slightest suspicion that he no longer had complete control over his
prisoner, Neferata’s scheme would come to naught, and he would never be free
again.

The king was standing before a long, wooden table set just a few feet to one
side of the room’s ritual circle, his expression preoccupied as he tried to
bring some kind of order to the pile of papers and scrolls spread before him.
More figures moved about in the shadows at the far end of the room, murmuring in
low voices and passing jars of wine between one another. Lamashizzar was
accompanied by nearly his entire cabal: beside W’soran, the immortal recognised
the tall, muscular outline of Abhorash, the king’s champion, as well as the
reclining forms of Ankhat and Ushoran, his oldest and most powerful allies at
court. The king’s grand vizier, Ubaid, stood apart from the other men, politely
refusing offers of drink and waiting to do the king’s bidding. Opposite the
doorway, young Zuhras poked at the banked coals of a brazier with the point of
his dagger, stirring them back to life. Grinning slyly, he speared one of the
small coals on the point of his knife and used it to light the small, clay pipe
dangling from his lips. The acrid scent of Eastern pipe smoke began to spread
throughout the chamber.

That left only the two libertines, Adio and Khenti. Arkhan suspected they
were chasing whores or losing their money in the gambling dens of the Red Silk
District. Likely they would stumble in later, reeking of sour wine and cackling
like hyenas to claim their share of Lamashizzar’s elixir. Why the king hadn’t
lost patience with them and had their throats cut remained a mystery to Arkhan.
He knew all too well that Lamashizzar would turn on anyone that he considered a
threat.

Iron chain links rattled dully as Arkhan shuffled across the floor to stand
before the king. Arkhan studied the man warily. Outwardly, Lamashizzar had aged
somewhat, with grey hair streaking his temples and a fleshiness to his face that
bespoke years of self-indulgence, but he still held himself with the easy
assurance of a younger, fitter man. The effects of the elixir had left its mark
on the king in more ways than one, Arkhan knew. He could see it in Lamashizzar’s
stiff shoulders and the swift, almost furtive movements of his eyes. The
immortal had seen that look many times, in the court of the Undying King. The
hunger for immortality turned the strongest men into beasts, making them savage,
suspicious and unpredictable. If what the queen had told him was true,
Lamashizzar cared little for the fortunes of his kingdom anymore. Mastering
Nagash’s terrible incantations was his one and only obsession, which made him
very dangerous indeed.

Arkhan clasped his hands together and bowed his head. The iron rim of the
collar dug into his scarred neck. “How may I serve, great one?” he asked his
captor. The words burned like molten lead on his tongue.

“Is it true?” the king asked. He never took his eyes from the occult diagrams
laid out on the table. “Does the elixir no longer sustain you as it once did?”

The immortal considered his answer carefully. He knew that the moment he was
no longer useful to Lamashizzar, the king would have him killed. “I do not deny
that it is harder to shake off the effects of the lotus,” Arkhan replied. “It is
possible that the learned W’soran is right. Certainly there is much more to be
learned from Nagash’s tomes. You have scarcely scratched the surface of the
Undying King’s power.”

From the moment that he had awakened in the cellars of the royal palace,
Arkhan knew that his only hope of survival was to give up Nagash’s secrets
grudgingly, giving Lamashizzar just enough power to whet the king’s appetite
while he waited for an opportunity to escape. But Lamashizzar was no fool, he
saw to it that Arkhan had no personal access to Nagash’s books, and the only
sustenance allowed to him was the same thin gruel that the king and his cohorts
drank. It left him with barely enough strength to move, much less break free
from the iron collar that the king had riveted about his neck. Even the black
lotus had given him little relief; he was so weak that the potion brought no
dreams, only cold oblivion.

W’soran seized on Arkhan’s reply. “Listen to him, great one,” he said. “We
must go back to the source and start again.” He stepped forward and laid a hand
on one of Nagash’s books. “Follow the Usurper’s instructions to the letter. We
know
that the rituals work—Arkhan here is proof of that!”

“And they also led to the Usurper’s downfall!” Lamashizzar snapped. “Everyone
knows the horrors that took place in Khemri before the war. How long do you
think we could prey upon palace servants and criminals before people began to
take notice?”

“You can buy slaves from the East!” W’soran exclaimed. “No one would care
what you did with them! Or round up the hundreds of beggars clogging the streets
in the lower districts! You’re the
king,
or have you forgotten?”

The words had scarcely passed W’soran’s lips when there was a rasp of metal
and suddenly Abhorash was standing beside the king, his iron sword held loosely
at his side. There was no expression on the champion’s broad, heavy-boned face:
he had the look of a man about to kill a snake that had slipped inside his
house.

Lamashizzar said nothing to either of the two men. He simply met the older
man’s stare until W’soran finally looked away.

“I apologise, great one,” W’soran growled. “My words were intemperate and
ill-considered. I meant no disrespect.”

“Of course,” the king replied, but there was an edge to his smile that belied
the graciousness of the answer. He gave a sidelong glance to Abhorash, and the
warrior obediently—although not without some reluctance—slid his sword back
into its scabbard. It was only then that Arkhan realised how tense he had
become. His hands had curled into fists, and his jagged teeth were on edge. Just
like Nagash’s court, so long ago, he thought. How we circled each other then,
like hungry jackals, ready to sink our teeth into the weak the minute their back
was exposed.