02 - Nagash the Unbroken (25 page)

The roaring in his ears was receding. Within seconds he could see clearly
again, and the pain had begun to fade. Arkhan’s muscles felt loose and weak, and
a chill settled into his bones. Neferata still drank from him, her eyes clamped
tightly shut.

And then, without warning, her body began to convulse. Arkhan felt the
muscles in her neck writhe like serpents. She tore herself from his grasp, her
mouth agape and her chin stained dark with fluids. The queen thrashed upon the
bed, arms and legs flailing. A cloud of steam boiled up from her throat,
followed by a long, terrible howl.

Arkhan watched in horror as the queen’s body began to change. Her flesh
shrivelled, stretching the skin across her bones, and her lustrous, black hair
grew faded and brittle. Neferata’s eyes sank into their sockets, and her cheeks
turned gaunt, transforming her face into a ghoulish, bestial mask.

Shrieking in agony, Neferata reached for him with one flailing hand. It
clawed at the sheets, just inches away, but Arkhan could not bring himself to
touch her.

Neferata’s screams turned to a choking rattle. She collapsed back upon the
bed. Her head turned towards Arkhan, and the immortal saw that her eyes were
wide and staring. They were still vivid green, but the pupils were slitted, like
those of a cat.

She stared at him for barely a moment, her expression filled with pain, and
then all the air went out of her lungs and her body went limp. Arkhan heard
Aiyah let out a long, heart-wrenching moan.

Neferata, Daughter of the Moon and Queen of Lahmia, was dead.

Cripple Peak, in the 76th year of Khsar the Faceless

(-1598 Imperial Reckoning)

The slaughter of the barbarian priests had been more than just an act of
vengeance on Nagash’s part; it had served a pragmatic purpose as well. The
mountain would become the seat of his power, just as the Black Pyramid had been
in Khemri. From here he would raise the armies that would cast down the kings of
Nehekhara. He envisioned sprawling mines, foundries, armouries and great
laboratories from which he would continue to master the arts of necromancy. The
construction alone would last centuries, and occupy his undead army both day and
night. Eliminating the priests was necessary to keep them from interfering in
his designs, and to swell the ranks of his workforce.

Construction began the night after the battle at the fortress temple. The
undead rose from their beds across the barrow plain and converged on the south
face of the mountain. Guided by Nagash’s will, they began constructing the first
stage of fortifications around what would be the first of many mine complexes.
Within the first month the southern barrows had been dismantled, and the
foundation stones hauled up to the mountain to help form the first buildings.
Earth and stone excavated from the mountain were used as well, but Nagash knew
he would need much more before he could say the great work was well and truly
begun. The fortress would take many centuries before it was complete, and much
of it would be underground, sheltered from the burning light of the sun.

At the same time, Nagash kept a close watch on the temple fortress. He knew
that he hadn’t managed to kill every member of the order. At any given time
close to a hundred junior priests and acolytes were travelling between the
barbarian villages, tending to each of the totem statues and performing the
ceremonial duties of the order. Sure enough, almost two months later, a few
score of the holy men returned to the fortress and began making it fit for
habitation again. That night, he sent a large force to slay them and add their
numbers to his own. Nagash especially savoured the irony of using the undead
members of the order to slay their younger brethren and deliver them into his
hands. After that, no one else attempted to take residence in the great
fortress.

Nagash suspected that the superstitious barbarians thought it to be haunted
and, in a very real sense, they were right.

Surprisingly, the burials on the barrow plain continued. The families of the
deceased would cross the Sour Sea in boats, making landfall just after sunset
and bearing their dead kin to a spot on the northern end of the plain. They
would bring tools with them, and under the moonlight they would dig a deep hole
in the ground and lay the body inside. Then, to Nagash’s amusement, they would
turn their attention to the mountain and utter some kind of absurd prayer before
filling up the hole again. Once the family had gone, Nagash would summon up the
corpse and find a place for it on one of his work parties.

A year passed. Work on the mountain continued, and then the rainy season
returned. Not long after, burials on the plain increased sharply. Scores of
bodies were brought across the sea and laid to rest, usually in large groups.
Nagash noted that the corpses were men of fighting age, and all of them had been
slain by sword, spear or arrow. The barbarian tribes were at war again, though
against whom Nagash did not know. One night, Nagash saw an orange glow on the
horizon to the north-west, and realised that one of the larger hilltop villages
was on fire.

Another wave of burials occurred, twice as large as the ones before. The war
continued unabated, Nagash reckoned—and the barbarians were losing badly.
Their loss was his gain, he reasoned. And then something unexpected happened.

One night, in the midst of another spate of burials, a small group of men
made their way across the barrow plain in the direction of the mountain. They
were dragging a large sledge behind them, bearing a large, cylindrical object
wrapped in ragged sheets of muslin.

The men hauled the sledge over the muddy ground, until they reached the
eastern edge of the plain. There, virtually in the shadow of the mountain, they
took up tools from the sledge and went to work digging a deep hole. When one of
the men judged the hole deep enough, he gestured for his companions to proceed,
then he knelt before the hole and bowed his head, spreading his arms as though
in supplication, or in prayer.

The rest of the men returned to the sledge and pulled away the muslin sheets.
Then they took their places to either side of the cylinder and lifted it from
its cradle. Struggling under the weight of the object, they inched towards the
hole. Finally, after long minutes of effort, they let the end of the cylinder
drop into the cavity and pushed the object upright. The kneeling man rose to his
feet, his hands turning upwards in a gesture of triumph, as the men shovelled
loose earth into the hole and stabilised the object. Once they were satisfied
that the object was secure, the men gathered their tools and began the long trek
back to the shore.

Nagash had observed this through the eyes of several of his servants, who
stood watch over the plain to mark the arrivals of the burial parties. The
object left at the foot of the mountain intrigued him. When the men had
disappeared to the west, he sent one of the undead sentinels to inspect it.

What the sentinel found was a totem-statue, similar to those found in the
barbarian villages. But where the other statues were four-sided and depicted two
pairs of men and women, this statue was carved to represent one figure only.

The workmanship was crude. Nagash, looking through his servants’ eyes, stared
at the statue for some time, until he saw the suggestion of a cloak about the
figure’s shoulders and realised that the skeletal monster carved into the wood
was meant to be him!

Nagash didn’t know what to make of the statue. Was it some pathetic attempt
at an abjuration, meant to forbid him from trespassing upon the plain, or was it
simply a crude attempt at defiance on the part of the barbarians? At length, he
decided to wait and see if the men visited the statue again.

And visit they did, just a few nights later, when the next wave of burials
landed upon the shore. Nagash watched the men approach the statue, and this time
he noted that the men were young and clad in robes—and, most importantly, bore
none of the physical deformities that marked the rest of the villagers. They
were members of the old order that Nagash had thought extinct!

To his amazement, the men surrounded the statue and laid plates heaped with
offerings at its feet. They knelt in supplication and offered up prayers, then
anointed the statue with oils. The whole ritual took almost an hour, and then
the men hurriedly withdrew.

Nagash continued to study the statue throughout the night, trying to puzzle
out the meaning of the ritual offerings and prayers. Were they actually offering
up adulation and worship, or were the offerings more of a bribe to keep him from
interfering in their business? The fact that the ritual coincided with another
round of mass burials wasn’t lost on him, but the timing didn’t argue one way or
the other.

He continued to watch and wait, though now he made sure that a small group of
warriors were always kept close by the statue each night. The men returned each
night that a burial took place, laying out more offerings and taking care of the
great statue. On the fifth visitation, Nagash’s patience was rewarded.

As the men gathered about the statue and laid out their offerings, another
group of men and women approached from the north, where the latest round of
burials were taking place. They accosted the supplicants, brandishing cudgels
and shouting threats. The leader of the supplicants—a young man whose
mannerisms seemed strangely familiar to Nagash—seemed to try reasoning with
the second group, but his arguments fell on deaf ears. There were more shouted
threats, and finally the supplicants chose to depart. The second group pursued
them for a while, waving their clubs in the air, then, satisfied, they returned
to the sombre ceremonies to the north.

The confrontation suggested a great many things to Nagash. The supplicants
considered Nagash a god, and sought to worship him, but their newfound devotion
wasn’t popular with the rest of their kind. What was it they hoped to
accomplish? Had the confrontation convinced them to abandon their heresy? The
questions only served to pique his interest further.

Another week passed before the next spate of burials occurred. Again, the
supplicants journeyed across the plain to kneel before the statue. This time,
Nagash was ready for them.

The supplicants had no sooner begun their rite when a much larger group of
villagers came charging out of the darkness, brandishing cudgels and knives and
shouting threats at the kneeling men. The young leader of the supplicants rose
to his feet and approached the villagers, but it was clear to Nagash that the
mob wouldn’t be interested in talking this time. They were out for blood.

Nagash issued a series of commands to the warriors that lay in wait just a
short distance from the totem statue. They rose silently from their places of
concealment and crept towards the unsuspecting barbarians.

The leader of the supplicants started to speak, but a burly villager stepped
from the crowd and lashed out with his cudgel, striking the young man in the
head and knocking him to the ground. The attack galvanised the rest of the mob;
they rushed forward, shouting furiously, and fell upon the other worshippers.
The holy men fell to the ground, covering their heads with their arms to ward
off the avalanche of blows.

No one saw the undead warriors until it was too late. Half a dozen skeletons
appeared out of the darkness, stabbing at the villagers with spears or slashing
with tarnished bronze blades. Shouts of anger turned to screams of fear and pain
as the mob was cut apart by the remorseless skeletons. The survivors reeled away
from the attackers and fled into the darkness, abandoning their wounded
compatriots to their fate.

The leader of the mob lingered a moment too long, pausing to deliver a final,
vicious kick to the leader of the supplicants before trying to make good his
escape. As he turned and prepared to run, he found himself face-to-face with a
leering skeleton; the flat of the undead warrior’s blade crashed into the side
of his head, knocking him senseless.

The fight was over in seconds. Nagash’s warriors surveyed the scene of
carnage for a moment, and then a pair of the skeletons seized the leader of the
mob by the shoulders and dragged him away. Two more of the warriors went to the
leader of the supplicants, who was trying to force his battered body to stand
upright. They seized him by the arms and dragged him away as well.

The remaining two skeletons hefted their weapons and slew the wounded
villagers one by one. As the supplicants watched in horrified wonder, their
oppressors died screaming—then, with the last of their lifeblood still flowing
from their wounds, the corpses rose to their feet and followed their killers
into the night.

A single tower reared up from the ugly sprawl of buildings, mine works
and fortifications that now girdled the mountain’s southern flank. Five storeys
tall, square and built from stone, it would have been thought crude and artless
in the civilized cities of Nehekhara, but it dominated the surrounding
countryside and provided good fields of view over the southern barrow fields and
the mountains to the south-east. It was no palace, but it allowed Nagash to
oversee the labours on the mountainside and continue his necromantic studies in
solitude until such time as a proper sanctum could be built.

The top storey of the tower was a single, window-less chamber, lit only by
the pulsing green glow of a huge chunk of burning stone that rested on a crude
metal tripod at the left of Nagash’s new throne. The high-backed chair had been
wrought of wood and bronze, shaped to resemble the Throne of Settra that had
once rested in Khemri. The necromancer sat back in the tall chair, his hands
steepled thoughtfully, as his warriors dragged the two barbarians into his
presence.