02 - Nagash the Unbroken (3 page)

“He was swift, but the bullet in my dragon stave was swifter still,”
Lamashizzar said. His nobles crowded around him, dragging the terrified slaves
over to Arkhan’s body. “It’s still there, buried in his heart. Here. Let me show
you.”

The king crouched over the body and pressed his fingers deep into the wound.
There was a thick, liquid sound, and Lamashizzar grunted in satisfaction. When
he drew his hand away his fingers were covered in a black fluid as thick as tar.
A fat, round metal ball was gripped between his fingertips. He held up the
bullet and studied it for a moment.

“You see?” he said. “Such a wound would have killed one of father’s mighty
Ushabti, much less a mere mortal like you or I. But to Arkhan it was nothing
more than an
interruption.”

The king bent close to the immortal’s face. His voice dropped to a whisper.
“He’s still in there,” Lamashizzar said, but whether he said it to Neferata or
to the immortal himself, the queen could not be certain. “Locked in a cell of
flesh and bone. So long as his heart cannot beat, Nagash’s elixir cannot
circulate through his limbs, nor fan the flame of his cursed soul.”

The look on the king’s face sent a shudder through Neferata. This was not the
libertine who had led his father’s army to Mahrak. The things he had seen on the
field of battle—and possibly within the pages of the books he’d stolen from
the Usurper’s crypt—had left an impression in the young king’s mind. Blessed
Neru, she thought. What if he’s gone mad?

Lamashizzar chuckled to himself, entirely oblivious to his sister’s mounting
unease. “I have had many discussions with the former vizier on the journey home,
and I believe we have reached an understanding. He will serve us, unlocking his
former master’s secrets and teaching us how to create the elixir for ourselves.
If he serves well, then we will share the draught of life with him. If not…” he
paused, and his expression grew hard. “Then we will send him back into his cell,
and we shall see how long it takes for an immortal’s body to collapse into
dust.”

The king tossed the bullet aside, then nodded curtly to his noblemen. Without
a word they drew knives from their belts and began slitting the slaves’ throats.

Hot blood sprayed through the air. The slaves thrashed and choked, pouring
out their lives onto Arkhan’s still form. As they died, Lamashizzar picked up
the pale leather tome and began turning its pages.

“The world has changed, sister,” Lamashizzar said. “The old gods have left
us, and a new power has risen to take its place—a power that now we alone
possess. We shall usher in a new age for Lahmia and the rest of Nehekhara. One
that we shall preside over until the end of time.”

At their feet, the blood-soaked body of Arkhan the Black drew in a terrible,
shuddering breath. His bruised eyelids fluttered, and Neferata found herself
staring into a pair of dark, soulless eyes.

The Wasteland, in the 63rd year of Khsar the Faceless

(-1739 Imperial Reckoning)

Night came swiftly to the wasteland.

As the last rays of Ptra’s hateful, searing light disappeared behind the
jagged fangs of the Brittle Peaks, stealing away the heat of the day and filling
the narrow gullies with inky shadow, the hunters of the dead spaces began to
stir from their lairs. Deadly vipers slithered from beneath rocky overhangs,
tasting the air with their darting tongues. Scorpions and huge, hairy spiders
crawled from their daytime burrows and began their hunt, seeking sources of heat
against the contrasting coolness of the rocky ground.

In one shadow-haunted gully, half a dozen lean, spotted shapes came nosing
along the broken ground, tracking the scent of death. The jackals had been
following the trail for many nights; it had rambled and looped back upon itself
many times, like the path of a beast lost in madness and on the verge of
collapse. Now the hunters sensed that the prey had been run to ground at last.
Sniffing at the chill air, they edged towards a low overhang carved deep into
the gully wall.

Within the darkness of the overhang, a bundle of rags stirred fitfully at the
jackals’ approach. The scavengers paused, ears forward, watching as a single,
bony hand groped its way painfully from beneath the overhang. The skin was
blackened and leathery, the nails yellowed and splintered by months of
scrabbling over rocks and burrowing in the dry earth. The skin of the knuckles
was split, peeled back like shreds of dry parchment to reveal grey flesh inlaid
with grit.

The jackals watched as the long fingers arched, digging into the earth for
purchase. There was a rustle of fabric and loose dirt. A trio of sleek, black
lizards bolted from beneath the overhang, startled as their refuge began to
shift beneath them.

Slowly, shakily, the figure dragged itself out into the night air. First an
emaciated arm, then a bony shoulder, then a thin torso clad in grimy robes that
had once been the colour of blood.

A bald head, blackened and blistered by the sun god’s merciless touch,
emerged from the shadows: a man’s face, once handsome, now ravaged by the
elements and the horrors of war. Dark eyes, set deep in bony sockets, regarded
the jackals with feverish intensity. The man’s face was gaunt to the point of
being skeletal, his cheeks and nose frayed by brushes with rock and the
mandibles of burrowing insects. A ragged hole, wide as a man’s thumb, had been
punched into his forehead, close to the left temple. At one time the ghastly
wound had grown infected, causing the flesh to swell around the rim of
splintered bone and the veins to distend with corruption.

The jackals lowered their heads and began to whine softly as the figure
continued to drag itself from its refuge. This was not what they expected.
Indeed, their would-be prey exuded a sense of
wrongness
that their animal
brains couldn’t quite comprehend.

Death hung over the man like a shroud. In addition to the awful wound in his
head, his left arm was coiled uselessly against his chest. Another hole had been
blown through the upper limb, shattering the bone and constricting the muscles
into immobile knots. The scent of old bile rose from a puncture in the man’s
belly, and another wound in his chest carried the reek of old infection.

Dead,
the jackals’ minds said. The man ought to be dead long since. And
yet still the leathery muscles worked, creaking like old ropes. The eyes still
burned with an almost feral rage. Thin, cracked lips drew back from blackened
teeth in a snarl of challenge.

Nagash the Usurper, Undying King of fallen Khemri and for a time the master
of Nehekhara, pressed his palm against the stones and grit of the gully floor
and with a bubbling growl pushed himself to his feet. Once upright, he swayed
slightly as he turned his head to the gleaming face of the moon and let out a
long, ululating howl of hate.

The jackals flinched at the awful sound. It proved too much for the leader of
the pack, who let out a nervous bark and sped from the gully with the pack hard
on its heels.

Nagash continued to howl long after they were gone, emptying the last dregs
of air from his lungs in a long, wordless curse against the living world. The
exertion left him shivering and weak, his skin burning with a fever that had no
basis in the sicknesses of living flesh.

Like the jackals, he turned his face skyward, casting about for spoor. The
scent of power hung above the emptiness of the wasteland, emanating from the
slopes of a dark, brooding mountain that always seemed to lie just beyond the
far horizon. It had a flavour unlike anything he’d ever tasted before; not dark
magic, which he knew well, nor the fitful heat of a human soul. It was something
furious and unfettered, primal and alien at the same time. It shone like a
beacon in the emptiness, promising him vengeance against those who had betrayed
him and cast him out into the wastes. He thirsted for it, and yet, like a
mirage, it seemed to recede into the distance with every step he took. Lately,
even the scent of it had grown vague. It was getting harder and harder to sense
it past the pain of his ravaged body and the fever buzzing in his skull.

You’re growing weaker,
a voice said.
Your power is almost spent.
Darkness waits, Usurper. Darkness eternal, and the cold winds of the Abyss.

Nagash whirled, hissing with rage. She stood just a few feet away, her
translucent body silhouetted by moonlight. Neferem, last Queen of Khemri, looked
much as she did the day she died: a withered, ravaged husk of a woman,
transformed into a living mummy by Nagash’s sorceries. Only her eyes, large and
brilliant as cut emeralds, hinted at the beauty that had been taken from her.
Her ghostly figure was clad in ragged samite, and the golden headdress of a
queen rested precariously upon her brow.

The Usurper reached out with his hand and clenched it at her like a claw—but his febrile mind failed him. The words of power that once bound the ghosts
of Nehekhara to his will had been somehow stolen from him. Rage and frustration
boiled inside his brain.

“Witch!”
he hissed. His voice sounded somewhere between a growl and a
groan.
“I am Nagash the Immortal! Death cannot claim me! I have passed beyond
its grasp!”

So have we all,
Neferem replied soundlessly. Her eyes glittered with
hate.
You saw to that at Mahrak. The paths to the Lands of the Dead are no
more, swept away when you used me to undo the sacred covenant with the gods. Now
none of us shall ever know peace.
Her shrivelled face contorted into the
ghastly semblance of a smile.

Especially you.

Snarling with fury, Nagash whirled about, tasting the air for traces of the
otherworldly power. It seemed to lie just beyond the line of peaks to the east.
He lurched forward, scrabbling one-handed at the loose scree lining the gully
slope. The Usurper scaled the steep incline with an awkward, spider-like gait.
When he was almost to the top, he turned back to Neferem’s vengeful spirit.

“You haunt me at your peril, witch!”
he croaked.
“When I find the
dark mountain I will have the power to consume souls and command the spirits of
the dead as I once did! I’ll feast upon you, then, and silence your moaning
forever!”

But the queen did not hear him. She was gone, as though she’d never been
there.

Nagash searched for Neferem amid the shadows of the gully for a long time,
muttering bitterly to himself. Once, he called her name, but her spirit would
not be summoned so easily. Finally he turned and scrabbled the rest of the way
up the slope.

At the summit, Nagash saw only a broken sea of foothills, stretching off to
the horizon. The dark mountain had receded from him once again. He turned his
face skyward, casting about for the trail once more, and then continued his
limping course eastward.

Hours later, when the pale moon was close to its zenith, another pack of
scavengers came sniffing into the gully where the Usurper had been. They circled
about the rocky overhang, hissing and chittering to each other in their own
strange tongue. As with any pack, it was the largest of the creatures that
decided their course, cuffing and threatening the rest into submission. They too
continued eastward, moist noses bent low over the rocks as they followed
Nagash’s strange, unliving scent. They loped and lurched and scrabbled along,
sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two.

Nagash had so far passed beyond the grasp of death, but not beyond the jaws
of constant, grinding agony. Every step, every movement of arm or head, sent
waves of vivid, aching pain reverberating through his wasted body. The awful
wounds he’d suffered hardly troubled him at all—or at least, no more so than
the agony that gripped the rest of his frame. It was a consequence of the
elixir, he knew. The magical potion—wrought from blood and life energy stolen
from innocent, anguished victims—allowed him to retain the vigour of youth for
hundreds of years, and was the key to creating an empire unheard of since the
age of Settra the Magnificent.

Normally, it would also heal nearly any injury, no matter how severe, but not
since that fateful day at Mahrak, when the army of Lahmia had thrown in its lot
with the rebel kings of the east and unleashed their strange weapons on him and
his unliving host. He remembered the wall of fire and a crescendo of thunder
from the ranks of Lahmia’s black-armoured warriors, and then watching the massed
ranks of his corpse-soldiers disintegrating before him. The traitors had turned
on him just as he’d won his greatest triumph. Mahrak had been cast down and the
sacred covenant with it. The power of the priesthood and their parasite deities
had been swept aside, so that only he, Nagash the Undying, remained.

As he made his way slowly down the rubble-strewn slope of another dark
ridgeline, Nagash heard a wheezing breath in his ear. It had a rasping, ragged
tone, like wind blowing across the end of a broken branch.

You are no god,
a man’s voice sneered.
Do you remember what I said to
you in your tent at Mahrak? You are a fool, Nagash. An arrogant, deluded fool
who thinks himself the equal of the gods. And look at you now: a madman, clad in
rags, stumbling blindly through a dead and pitiless land.

Shouting in rage, Nagash whirled at the voice, but his footing slipped and he
tumbled head over heels to the bottom of the treacherous slope. He fetched up
painfully against a small boulder. His limbs were twisted awkwardly beneath him,
and at first they refused to obey his will.

As he struggled to force his body into action, Nagash became aware of a
ghostly figure glaring down at him from a little further upslope. Nebunefer was
a frail, ancient little man, clad in the same threadbare robes he’d worn on the
day he’d died. His wrinkled head lay at an unnatural angle, the stub of broken
vertebrae jutting painfully against the taut skin of his bent neck. Like
Neferem, the old priest’s eyes glittered with pure hate.