02 - Nagash the Unbroken (2 page)

The great palace was honeycombed with a network of hidden passageways, built
for the use of the household’s many servants, and Ubaid led the queen through a
veritable labyrinth of narrow, dimly-lit corridors and dusty storage rooms as
they made their way to the cellars. Neferata could barely see where she was
going within the confines of her mask. The servant’s lantern bobbed in the
darkness ahead of her like some teasing river spirit, luring her onward to her
doom.

Finally she found herself descending a series of long, narrow ramps, and the
air turned cold and damp. Gooseflesh raced along the skin of her neck and arms,
but she suppressed the urge to shiver. Then a few minutes later she felt the
weight of the narrow passageways fall away to her left and right, and she
realised that they’d entered a large, low-ceilinged space. Neferata glimpsed
stacks of rounded, clay jars sealed with wax, and heard the distant sound of
voices somewhere up ahead.

Ubaid led her through one interconnected cellar after another, past jars of
spices, salt and honey, bolts of cloth and bricks of beeswax. The sense of space
began to shrink again, and the queen reckoned that they were heading into a much
older part of the cellars. The voices grew more distinct, until she could
clearly make out her husband’s hushed, urgent voice.

Suddenly, the grand vizier halted and stepped aside. Neferata rushed ahead
and emerged into a small, dripping chamber stacked with wide-bellied wine jars
bearing the royal seal. A handful of torches guttered from the walls, casting
strange, leaping shadows across the floor.

Lamashizzar, Priest King of Lahmia, City of the Dawn, stood over an opened
wine jar and gulped greedily from a golden drinking bowl. His rich, silken robes
were grimed with the dust of the road, and his tightly curled black hair was
matted and limp with sweat. Half a dozen noblemen stood around the king, all of
them travel-stained and reeling from fatigue. Several drank along with the king,
while the rest stole apprehensive glances at the slaves working feverishly at
the far side of the room. None of them noticed the sudden appearance of the
queen.

Neferata studied the men for a long moment and felt her irritation sharpen
into icy rage. She took another step into the room and drew a deep breath. “This
is an ill-omened thing,” she declared in a cold, clear voice.

Startled cries rang off the stone walls as the noblemen whirled, their dark
faces pale and eyes wide with shock. To Neferata’s profound surprise, many of
them reached for their swords; they caught themselves at the last possible
moment, hands hovering over the hilts of their blades. Yet they did not relax.
None of them did. Instead, their eyes darted between Neferata and the king, as
though uncertain how to proceed.

Now it was the queen’s turn to stare in amazement. Some of the men she knew
to be Lamashizzar’s closest supporters, while others, though Lahmian, were
strangers to her. All of them shared the same tense, hard-edged expression, the
same fevered glint in their eyes.

They look like cornered animals, Neferata thought, thankful that the
all-enclosing mask hid her startled reaction. Is this what war does to civilized
men?

The king himself was no less stunned to see his queen. His handsome face was
sallow and drawn; his eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollowed out from poor
eating and little sleep, but his gaze was sharper and more penetrating than
ever. Lamashizzar lowered the drinking bowl. Red wine trickled thickly down the
sides of his sharp chin.

“What in the name of the dawn are you doing here, sister?” he rasped.

“I?” Neferata snapped, her anger managing to overcome her growing unease.
“More to the point, what are
you
doing here?” She advanced on
Lamashizzar, her hands clenched into fists. “There are sacred rites to be
observed. The king may not return to the city without first performing the
Propitiations of the East. You must thank Asaph for the blessing she gave when
you first set out to war!” Neferata’s voice grew in volume along with her ire,
until her voice rang like a bell within the confines of the mask. “But the army
isn’t expected for days yet. Asaph’s Quay is bare of offerings from the
citizenry. The proper sacrifices have not been made.”

Without warning, the queen lashed out, striking the drinking bowl from the
king’s hand. “What happened?” she hissed. “Did you drink all the wine you
plundered from here to Khemri? Couldn’t you have waited two more days to slake
your thirst?
This is an offence against the gods, brother.”

For a moment, no one moved. Neferata could feel the tension crackling like
caged lightning in the air. The king glanced past Neferata. “That will be all,
Ubaid,” he said to the grand vizier.

Ubaid bowed and hastily withdrew, his robes rustling as he fled from the
cellar as quickly as his dignity would allow.

Lamashizzar stared at the queen, his eyes depth-less and strange. He raised
his hand and laid the tips of his fingers against the mask’s curved, golden
cheek.

“The gods do not care, sister,” he said softly. “They no longer hear our
prayers. Nagash the Usurper saw to that on the plain outside Mahrak. Did you not
read any of my letters?”

“Of course I did,” Neferata replied, suppressing a chill at the mention of
Nagash’s name. She and Lamashizzar had been born during the height of the
Usurper’s reign, when the former Grand Hierophant of Khemri’s mortuary cult had
held all of Nehekhara in his iron grip. It was only when the kings of the east
had risen in revolt against Khemri that they had learned true horror of the
Usurper’s power, and though they eventually triumphed, the cost of victory was
almost too terrible to contemplate.

Angrily, she pushed aside the king’s hand and stalked past him. At the far
end of the chamber, the slaves stopped what they were doing and abased
themselves at her approach.

“It doesn’t matter if the covenant has been broken or not,” Neferata
continued. “In matters of state—and religion—perception is every bit as
important as reality. Lahmia was spared from the worst excesses of Nagash’s
rule, but the war has disrupted trade with the west for more than ten years now.
Fortunes have been lost—to say nothing of the enormous debt we now owe the
Emperor of the Silk Lands. If the people had
any
inkling of the deal we
struck to obtain their dragon-powder there would be rioting in the streets.”

“That was Lamasheptra’s doing, not mine,” Lamashizzar pointed out, bending to
retrieve his drinking bowl.

“It doesn’t
matter!”
Neferata insisted. “Father is dead.
You
are the one on the throne, now. The people look to
you
for reassurance.
They need to believe that the Usurper’s reign of terror is over and that a new
era has begun. They need to know that Lahmia will prosper once more.”

The queen’s tirade had carried her nearly all the way across the chamber. The
slaves were still as statues, their previous labours forgotten as they pressed
their foreheads to the earthen floor. They had been in the process of shifting
scores of dusty wine jars and dismantling wooden shelves to create a cleared
space for—

Neferata came to a sudden halt. Her eyes widened behind the golden mask as
she saw the linen-wrapped bundles resting on the earthen floor.
“What—”
she stammered, suddenly at a loss for words. “Brother, what is all this?”

Behind her, Lamashizzar dipped his bowl in the open jar. He stared into its
ruby depths, and an ironic smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

“The dawn of a new era,” he said, raising the bowl to his lips.

They were not jugs of plundered wine or wrapped brinks of lotus leaf.
Neferata saw that at once. Each bundle had roughly square sides, some reaching
as high as her knees. The linen wrappings were stained brown by countless
leagues of travel, and were bound with braided twine. She went to the closest
one. Slaves scattered from her path like frightened birds as she knelt beside
the parcel and tugged at its bindings with long-nailed fingers. As she did, a
stir went through the assembled nobles. Neferata heard angry growls and choked
protests, until finally one of the men could contain himself no longer.

“Stop her!” the nobleman snapped. Neferata didn’t recognise the voice. “What
is she even doing outside the Women’s Palace? She should be in her proper place,
not—”

“She is the
queen,”
Lamashizzar said, in a voice as cold and hard as
Eastern iron. “She goes where she wills.”

Neferata listened to the tense exchange with only half an ear. Her dark
fingers teased the twine knot apart, and a corner of the linen wrapping fell
away to reveal—

“Books?” the queen said. Her eyebrows knitted together in a frown. They were
thick tomes of expensive Lybaran paper, bound in a strange kind of pale leather
that sent prickles of unease racing down her spine.

“The books of Nagash,” Lamashizzar explained. “Smuggled from his pyramid
outside Khemri. All his secrets: his plans, his studies, his… his experiments.
It’s all there.”

Neferata felt her heart grow cold. She rose and turned to face the king. “I
don’t understand, brother,” she hissed. “You were supposed to forge an alliance
with the Usurper. With the power under your command you could have broken the
siege at Mahrak and handed the east to Nagash! He would have agreed to any
terms—”

“No,” Lamashizzar said flatly. He took another long draught from the bowl,
his face haunted with memory. “You weren’t there, sister. You didn’t see the…
the
creature
that Nagash had become.”

“We knew he was a sorcerer—” Neferata began.

“He was a
monster,”
Lamashizzar said darkly. “None of the rumours we’d
heard came anywhere close to the truth. Nagash was no longer human, and what
he’d done to Neferem—” The king’s words dried up in his throat. Finally, he
shook his head. “Believe me, Nagash would have never honoured the terms of an
alliance, much less shared the secrets of eternal life.” He gestured at the
stacks of linen-wrapped volumes with his drinking bowl, sloshing thick wine onto
the floor. “So. Better this than nothing at all.”

Neferata spread her hands. “Indeed? Are you a sorcerer now?” she shot back.
“I’m certainly not.”

“You were trained by the priestesses of Neru,” Lamashizzar said. “You know
how to perform incantations, how to create elixirs—”

The queen shook her head. “That’s not the same thing,” she protested.

“It’s enough,” Lamashizzar said. He lurched forward, seizing Neferata by the
wrist, and pulled her after him as he wound his way drunkenly through the
collection of plundered tomes. Beyond the linen-wrapped books lay another shape,
stretched out against the dank stone wall. “We also have
this,”
the king
said proudly.

It was a corpse. It had been inexpertly wrapped, and the linen bindings were
devoid of the ritual symbols of the mortuary cult, but the shape of the body was
unmistakeable.

The king gave his sister a conspiratorial smile. “Go on,” he said, squeezing
her wrist with surprising strength. “Take a look.” His eyes glittered like
glass, sharp and fever-bright.

Lamashizzar’s hand squeezed harder. Neferata clenched her jaw and sank slowly
to her knees. She heard the slaves shift nervously behind her as she stretched
out her free hand and began to gingerly pull away the wrappings that covered the
corpse’s head.

The face took shape by degrees: first a man’s beaklike nose, then a prominent
brow and deeply sunken eyes. Next came sharp-edged cheekbones and a long, square
jaw that gaped in a grimace of agony, revealing a mouthful of jagged, blackened
teeth.

The corpse’s skin was pale as a fish’s belly and covered in a patchwork of
fine scars. The veins at his temples and along his neck were black with old,
clotted blood. The very sight of it filled the queen with revulsion. Neferata
recoiled from the ghastly visage. “What in the name of all the gods—”

Lamashizzar pulled her close. “He is the key,” the king hissed, filling her
nostrils with the sour reek of wine. “This is Arkhan the Black. Do you know the
name?”

“Of course,” the queen said with a grimace. “He was the Usurper’s grand
vizier.”

“And one of the first immortals,” the king added. “But he fell from favour
during the war and betrayed Nagash on the eve of the great battle at Mahrak. He
offered me the power over life and death if I would side with the rebel kings
against his former master.” Lamashizzar gave the queen an almost boyish wink.
“After the battle, I hid him in my baggage train during the long march to
Khemri. No one suspected a thing. The others thought he’d fled westward with the
rest of the Usurper’s immortals, so once we’d reached the Living City and the
Usurper’s troops made their last stand in the city’s necropolis, I paid some
soldiers to spread the rumour that Arkhan had been seen fighting to the bitter
end at the foot of his master’s pyramid. No doubt the story’s taken on epic
proportions since then.”

“And Arkhan actually held to his bargain?” she asked.

The king smiled. “As much as I expected he would. He led me to the books,
deep in the heart of the Black Pyramid.”

“Then you killed him.”

Lamashizzar’s smile never faltered. “Is that what you think?”

Neferata’s expression hardened beneath the mask. With a savage jerk, she tore
her wrist from the king’s grasp. “You’re drunk,” she hissed. “And I am not in
the mood for games, brother.”

That was when the smile faded from the king’s face. Slowly, deliberately, he
lowered his hand and set the bowl of wine upon the floor. His eyes bored into
hers. “Then perhaps I should make it plain for you,” he said quietly. He spoke
again, in that voice as hard and cold as iron.
“Bring them.”

There was a commotion behind Neferata, and the slaves began to wail in
terror. She froze at the sound, and watched as Lamashizzar leaned forward and
tore away the linen bindings wrapping Arkhan’s torso. The immortal’s chest was
even more scarred than his face, but what was worse was the blackened,
thumb-sized hole in Arkhan’s breast, just above his heart.