Master of Death

PROLOGUE

The Worlds Edge Mountains,

(Year -223 Imperial Calendar)

W’soran awoke slowly, reluctantly. Eyelids as thin as parchment peeled back from dull orbs — one a grisly yellow, the other milky white and blind — even as thin, desiccated lips retreated from the thicket of needle fangs that occupied his mouth. The twin leathery slashes that were his nostrils flared, taking in the air instinctively. He smelled the effluvium of age, the cold, harsh stink of rock and the faintest odour of long-ago spilled blood.

The latter brought memories scrambling to the surface of his mind. This place had, once upon a time, belonged to a particularly tenacious mountain tribe: hairy savages who had, nonetheless, managed to wrest some form of civilised dwelling from the mountains. They had built a fastness on a fang-like crag, piling stones upon ancient foundations that W’soran suspected had once belonged to one of the elder races. It had been an impressive feat, given their relative brutishness.

W’soran had butchered the lot in a single night, glutting himself on their blood in an uncharacteristic display of excess. The memory of it, of their screams and cries, of the taste of their rough throats, warmed him. His narrow chest expanded like a pig’s bladder filled with water as he sucked in the phantom scent, luxuriating in the thought.

With it came more memories, shaken loose from a stagnant brain. Names, faces, events flowed thinly at first and then came in a flood, a deluge, crashing and smashing through the cobwebs that clung to W’soran’s mind. He remembered his name, his purpose, his fate and more besides.

He remembered Mahrak, the City of Hope, and how he had been driven from the city of his birth by jealous rivals. He remembered Lahmia, the City of the Dawn, and how it had burned. He remembered Neferata, prideful, spiteful, savage Neferata and the gift she had grudgingly given him. Had given all of them — the gift of vampirism.

That gift had been tainted, he now knew. It had taken him centuries to puzzle it out, to understand the dark joke that had been played on all of them — Abhorash, Ushoran, himself and yes, even Neferata. A joke played by Nagash; Nagash the Usurper, Nagash the Great Necromancer.

Nagash, the Master of Death.

Thirst prickled at the back of his throat, not for water or wine, but for the copper tang of blood. Not even moments after awakening, the blood-lust returned in full. No matter how much he drank, how many screaming, squirming bags of flesh and bone he wrung dry, it never dimmed or dulled. That was Neferata’s gift, eternal thirst to go with eternal life, forever in thrall to base need.

But then, he was no stranger to need. Even now, even after everything that had happened he still felt it, burning in his gut like a slow poison. The need, not for blood or to feel the life of squirming prey ebb from twitching meat, but for — what? — respect, perhaps? Acknowledgement, certainly; the admission of his superiority by those who dared call themselves his peers. For was he not their superior in every way that mattered? Did he not control the charnel winds that gave life to the lifeless and made the black blood of all of those gifted with vampirism quicken in their crooked veins? Was he not as much master as Nagash, as much a king as Neferata was a queen, as much a warrior as Abhorash? But it was not in the nature of their kind to recognise superiority, even when it was proven. He had wasted many years trying to do just that, before recognising the futility of such endeavours.

He gave a disgusted grunt and pushed the thought aside. There was a strange smell on the air. Something had awakened him before his time. His unfinished calculations quivered in his head like beheaded serpents. Irritation washed through him, billowing into anger. He had felt the feather-light touch of another mind, through the link of shared blood; an avenue of contact only open to those upon whom he had bestowed his blood-kiss, those whom he called his apprentices.

‘I was not to be disturbed,’ W’soran croaked, long-dormant vocal cords quivering to life as he forced musty air through them. ‘There are calculations yet to be made.’

No reply was forthcoming. That was not unexpected given the proclivities of his apprentices. They were not social creatures, too much given to introspection and meditation, even as he was. Then, he had earned that right. They had not.

The braziers that encircled him had long since gone cold, and the torches on their wall-brackets were doused. The surge of anger, as cold as a deep mountain stream, overflowed its banks. They should have been in attendance, and braziers and torches lit. That was their duty after all: to watch over him as he meditated and to record his calculations and utterances.

He scanned the room, seeing the piles of parchment and the ratty tomes, bound in human hair and tanned skin, piled haphazardly about him like offerings to some primitive god. Even these had been left unattended. That was perhaps the least of their sins. For W’soran, the grimoires and scrolls were merely tools to be used, absorbed and discarded. It was a lesson he despaired of teaching his followers, many of whom treated the decaying tomes as a mother might a child. It was the nature of the savage to graft import to the inanimate, and, regrettably, most of his followers were little better than the rock-dwelling primitives he had butchered to make this lair.

‘Urdek,’ he rasped, naming the most senior of his current crop of apprentices. That could have changed, he knew. He encouraged a certain bloody-minded initiative amongst his disciples, though he’d thought Urdek was made of sterner stuff than that.

Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong about that sort of thing. In the spirit of practicality, he called out the name of the next most senior apprentice, ‘Kung?’

His pointed, conch-whorl ears twitched as he caught the faintest whisper of sound. A pallid tongue, as dry as the desert lands that had once been his home, flickered out through the nest of fangs, tasting the air. W’soran’s yellow eye narrowed and the dim lantern light in its depths suddenly flared into brilliance as he recognised both scent and sound. ‘Ah. Hello, boy. Come to say hello to your master?’ His fanged mouth quirked in a sly smile and he added, ‘Perhaps to… beg forgiveness for old sins?’

‘Do I require it, old monster?’ the visitor snarled in reply as his hunched, beast-like shape circled W’soran in the darkness, padding about him like a wolf hugging the edge of the firelight. Then, the newcomer had always fancied himself as something of a predator. ‘Maybe it is you who should ask my forgiveness.’

‘Rank impertinence,’ W’soran said, almost gently. ‘I will forgive it, just this once.’ His withered frame twitched in the circle of long-cold braziers. He was still sitting cross-legged, his taloned fingers clutching his bony knees. With some degree of academic interest and not a little bit of sweet pain, he began flexing each muscle cluster in turn, forcing his body to remember how it felt to move. His dust-stiffened robes crackled as he shifted position. ‘Why are you here, my son?’

‘Not your son, old monster,’ the visitor snapped.

‘Tch, such anger, Melkhior,’ W’soran said. ‘And to think, you were once my favourite, and beloved above all others.’ He lifted his hand and curled his fingers, watching the play of the black veins beneath the parchment skin. He was reminded for a moment of the mummies of the Great Land, whose internment into eternity he had overseen in once-beauteous Mahrak.

That had been before Lahmia. His fingers tightened into a fist and his talons gouged his palm. ‘Such anger,’ he repeated. His one good eye narrowed and he unfolded his limbs like an awkward spider as he rose to his feet. ‘Such disrespect for one who has given you nothing less than eternity,’ he said, stretching slowly, in increments. Muscles pulled and bones popped in a symphony of fleshly shackles that seemed to grow ever weightier even as his frame dwindled, shedding its unnecessary bulk across the centuries. He gestured and the torches sprang to life as one, driving back the shadows all in a rush.

Melkhior jerked back, surprised, his flat, black eyes gleaming in the sudden blaze of light and his monstrous features writhing in consternation. Melkhior looked akin to nothing so much as one of the great bats of the deep dark, squeezed and twisted into a mockery of human shape. His quivering spear-blade nose flexed wetly as he exposed his scythe-like fangs in a hiss. ‘As handsome as ever, my son,’ W’soran said.

‘Don’t call me that,’ Melkhior growled, turning his face away from the light.

‘Why? It is what I have always called you — it is what you are. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, did I not raise you up as unto a god? And what is a god, but a father writ large?’ W’soran spread his gangly arms. ‘I have forgiven you, my son.’

‘Have you, old monster?’ Melkhior asked, looking at him sidelong. ‘If so, that would be a first — you nurse grudges like infants, W’soran.’

W’soran folded his arms. ‘Hurtful words, such hurtful words. But you are right. I am tempted to pluck out your heart and eat it, my boy. Even the long years cannot dampen that fire you stirred in me. You know this; why have you come so rudely to my sanctum?’

‘Not much of a sanctum,’ Melkhior said, pulling his ragged cloak more tightly about his malformed body. ‘How the mighty have fallen.’

‘Lest we forget, you did have a hand in that,’ W’soran said. He eyed Melkhior, studying the changes time had wrought in his once-student. The once muscular frame had withered into the semi-hunched simian shape that all of W’soran’s followers assumed over time, like something equal parts sun-spoiled corpse and mangy animal. He had been a warrior once, one of the ajals of Strigos, a proud, tall war-leader of Mourkain. W’soran found a great deal of pleasure in his former student’s degeneration. He smiled, and Melkhior’s eyes narrowed.

‘Even now, you laugh at me,’ Melkhior said bitterly.

‘Because you amuse me, Ajal Melkhior,’ W’soran said as he stepped out of the circle of braziers. Melkhior flinched back and W’soran’s smile grew. ‘As I recall, the last time I saw you, you were driving a knife into my back. Come to try it again, my son?’ He extended a hand, and a sour green balefire sprouted from his fingers, crackling and snapping hungrily. ‘I am not distracted now. I can give you my full, undivided attention. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?’ W’soran purred.

He was not a warrior, as Melkhior had been, though he had played one often enough. Nonetheless, a hunger for conflict roiled within him, as great as his thirst for knowledge. He could not recall whether it had first come with the blood-hunger of vampirism, or whether it was something more innate, a holdover from the man he had been, back along the black line of centuries. To fight, to kill, was a pleasure as sweet as the nectar of human life to W’soran — he had overindulged in it more than once, and to his detriment.

For a moment, he thought Melkhior might try his hand. He could practically smell the urge for violence seething in the other vampire’s gizzards. Melkhior tensed, but then relaxed. Melkhior had always been sensible despite a few notable exceptions, W’soran reflected, curling his fingers and snuffing the eldritch fires that had engulfed his hand. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To warn you,’ Melkhior said.

W’soran guffawed. Bats stirred in the high reaches of his sanctum and tittered fearfully as the sound of it curled upwards. ‘And why would you do that? Does some small affection for poor, old W’soran yet linger in that sour heart, my son?’

‘Stop calling me that,’ Melkhior snarled, his eyes flashing. ‘And you are not half as crippled as you pretend, old monster.’ He pointed a claw at W’soran. ‘Even now I can smell the dark magic festering in your carcass.’

W’soran snorted and let his claws drift up to play with the amulets dangling from his scrawny neck. There were half a dozen of them. Some were crafted after the fashion of the reptilian masters of the far Southlands, while others were the tangled devising of Cathayan craftsmen. All reeked of power to one degree or another, as did everything in this chamber, from the tomes to the wide-mouthed clay jars that crowded the corners.

It was the former that attracted his attention. Some were missing. He knew each scroll and tome by look, scent and position in relation to his circle. A momentary flare of avaricious panic sliced through him, as he realised just which ones were missing, before recalling that those particular volumes were sealed away in a vault of his own devising. He always sealed them away before meditating — they were too dangerous to be left out, unguarded. If his apprentices had free access to them, to the secrets within them, they would massacre one another within a fortnight. Perhaps they had done just that.

All of this occurred to him in the span of seconds. He realised that Melkhior was still talking. ‘Our enemies draw close, W’soran,’ Melkhior said. ‘Even now they may already have penetrated the defences of this draughty pile you call a sanctum.’

‘Well, one has, at any rate,’ W’soran said, stalking towards the bone-decorated archway that marked the exit to the chamber. Skulls had been stuffed into the many nooks and crannies of the archway, and as he passed, he stroked the closest. Never one to waste raw materials, he had decorated his new residence with the remains of the former occupiers — those that he hadn’t raised to serve him in other capacities.

‘I do not deny it, but this time, I have come to aid you,’ Melkhior said, hurrying after him.

Outside the chamber was a corridor that curled around the slope of the crag that the crude fastness clung to like a limpet. W’soran frowned. There should have been guards on duty. Paranoia, honed to a killing point by centuries of experience, flared. Where were his apprentices? Why had they not responded to his calls? Had they attempted to stop Melkhior? He shoved the questions aside as unimportant. He had to get to those tomes. Everything else was replaceable, unnecessary.

‘I doubt that, Melkhior,’ he said, stalking onwards. The vault was buried in the rock of the mountain like a cavity in a tooth. It had taken him a year to carve it with the proper tools and weave the proper spells to render it invisible to all but him. ‘Did you kill them? Urdek and the others, I mean. You always were a murderous one in regards to your fellow students.’

‘Are you listening to me, old monster?’ Melkhior said. ‘I said that our enemies are gathering — yours and mine. He has found you, W’soran. He is coming.’

W’soran stopped, but did not turn. Through a large gap in the wall, he could see the peaks and crags of the mountains, and the silvery glare of the moon overhead. ‘Is he now?’ he said, softly. ‘And how would you know this, Melkhior?’

‘You are not his only prey,’ Melkhior said.

W’soran closed his eyes. ‘Neferata,’ he hissed, hatred oozing from every syllable. ‘So that’s where you went… afterwards.’ He opened his eyes. ‘I looked for you, you know. But you ran too quickly, and hid too well.’

‘I learned from the best,’ Melkhior spat. W’soran smiled. It stung his old apprentice, the thought of cowardice. So prideful, the Strigoi people; they were all brainless, barbarian bullies for the most part. Only a rare few had possessed even a modicum of talent. Melkhior was one, and Morath as well… his smile slipped as he thought of the treacherous necromancer. He had never accepted W’soran’s gift of immortality. He had too much pride, though of a different sort than that of Melkhior. He had had too much pride to follow his master, the being who had made him, into exile, instead remaining to serve his mad king…

‘Do you understand me, W’soran?’ Melkhior hissed, drawing closer. ‘He is coming for you — for us!’

A chill sliced through W’soran. ‘Ushoran,’ he said. He shook himself and said, ‘How soon?’

‘Soon,’ Melkhior said.

‘Why warn me?’

Melkhior was silent. W’soran snorted. ‘She spurned you then, eh? Turned you out and sent you running, your tail between your legs?’ He chuckled and then, more quickly than Melkhior’s eyes could follow, spun about, backhanding his former apprentice against the wall. As Melkhior reeled, W’soran sprang on him, digging his claws into his throat. W’soran swung Melkhior towards the gap in the wall and thrust him out through it. Melkhior’s eyes bugged out as he grasped at W’soran’s thin wrist. His feet kicked helplessly over the abyss below.

‘She rejected you and you came scurrying back to me, like a whipped dog,’ W’soran said. ‘Treachery for the treacherous, eh?’ He cocked his head. ‘I should drop you. You’d make a very satisfying noise upon landing, I think.’

‘You — you need me,’ Melkhior gurgled. ‘I–I can help you!’

‘Could you? Somehow, I doubt that.’ W’soran smiled thinly, but the smile was wiped from his face as he caught the scrape of flesh on stone. He whirled, dragging Melkhior back inside even as a blade looped out of the darkness.

Melkhior squalled as the blade chopped into his back. W’soran dropped him and lunged over his falling body, burying his meat-hook talons into the face of the owner of the sword. The swordsman screamed as W’soran tore the face from his skull in one jerky motion, and staggered back, clutching at his mangled features.

W’soran snarled in anger as he caught the foul scent of the bloody mess in his grasp. It stank of death and grave-mould. His attacker was a vampire. He made to finish his would-be killer, but a shadow passed across the gap in the wall, and he smelled the stink of old blood, bear fat and weapon oil. He twisted bonelessly as a second vampire sprang through the gap in the wall with a guttural roar. W’soran slithered around the blow and caught the attacker’s scalp-lock in his hands. With a curse he drove the latter’s face into the opposite wall hard enough to crack the stone.

Strigoi, he realised. They were Strigoi. Melkhior hadn’t been lying after all.

Still holding tight to the attacker’s scalp-lock, he turned back to the gap, dragged the dazed vampire around and flung him out through the hole. Then he turned back to the one whose face he’d flayed off.

The Strigoi rose to his feet, eyes blazing with equal parts agony and battle-lust in his now fleshless face. With a gurgling snarl he lunged. His hands scrabbled for W’soran’s neck, and his fangs clashed frenziedly as he dipped his head, biting at the other vampire’s throat.

Then his head was bouncing free, along down the corridor. W’soran shoved the headless body aside and looked at Melkhior, who had somehow managed to prise the sword from his back and decapitate the Strigoi. ‘There will be more of them,’ Melkhior said, gesturing with the sword.

‘Irrelevant. I have forces enough here to see off a few pitiful assassins,’ W’soran said, pushing aside the blade of the sword.

‘Then where are they, these forces, eh?’ Melkhior said. His eyes glittered. ‘Where are your worshipful disciples, your bony legions?’

W’soran hesitated. Then he shrugged. ‘It is no matter to me. As you said, I have power enough,’ he said as he made to stride past Melkhior. ‘If this fastness is compromised, I shall find another.’

‘Is that your answer then? Run?’

‘Well — yes,’ W’soran said, striding down the corridor. ‘I am not a warrior, as past experience has made clear. So I will run and I will hide. Let Neferata duel with Ushoran for these peaks if she wishes. There is a wide world out there, and I have an eternity to explore it.’

‘Where are you going?’ Melkhior asked, following him. He still clutched the sword, W’soran noted. His former apprentice had always been more comfortable with a weapon in his hands. He snorted in derision.

‘A better question — why are you still here, eh? You have delivered your warning. Scamper off,’ W’soran gestured without turning or stopping. He kept moving, leading Melkhior through the crude, sloping corridors that connected the numerous large chambers that honeycombed the crag. The whole mountain was structured like a stony wasp’s nest. W’soran thought that it had, at one time, been akin to one of the fire-mountains of the eastern wastes which occasionally spewed flame and ash into the sky. It was long cold now, its fire having gone out at some time in the dim past. It had been ready-made for shaping into a fastness, as its previous owners could have easily attested, had he left any of them alive.

‘Were you not listening? Ushoran knows where you are, old monster! He is closing in on you — his hand is at your throat, though you see it not!’

W’soran ignored him and ducked through the archway that marked the end of the corridor. It opened out onto a large, vaulted chamber. Heavy support columns had been shaped from the stone of the walls and stretched from the rough floor to the uppermost reaches. Several columns had fallen and shattered in some long ago cataclysm and he had had his minions roll them aside when he’d made the place his. Skulls bound in nets of human hairs hung from the great stone stanchions that lined the circumference of the space. Their eye-sockets were empty of the balefires that should have lit them, and they were not screaming in alarm, as he expected, given that he had ensorcelled them to do so. W’soran did not pause. Someone had obviously dispelled his magics and rendered his alarms useless. That explained the lack of guards as well. But where were his apprentices? He grunted in annoyance as suspicions began to percolate. He glanced over his shoulder, considering. Melkhior was still following him, moving quickly.

‘Where are you going? We must make a stand against him. Together, we might be able to-’ Melkhior began.

‘Together? I see you’ve found a sense of humour in our time apart, my son,’ W’soran said.

‘I am not your son, and it is no joke,’ Melkhior almost screamed. ‘We are running out of time. We — look out!’

His claws snatched at W’soran’s robes, hauling him back as something bestial hurtled down from above. Claws cracked the stone as W’soran reeled back, off-balance. The Strigoi was all muscle and fang, a gargoyle-shape that lunged and clawed with lightning speed. Three more dropped down; W’soran realised that they’d been clinging to the upper reaches of the chamber like bats. How many of them had infiltrated his sanctum, he wondered as they crouched before him, crimson gazes blazing in the darkness.

When he’d fled Mourkain, few Strigoi had been able to mould their shapes beyond sprouting claws. Things had obviously changed in his absence. The creatures that spread out around him were more beast than man, clad in crude cuirasses and stinking furs, their faces shredded by gnashing tusks and oversized jaws. One gave a bay of triumph and sprang for him, drawing a sword.

W’soran spat a deplorable word and the Strigoi’s roar became a shocked scream as his flesh withered and dropped from his bones and he came apart at the seams. W’soran stepped back as the pile of dust and bones crashed to the floor before him. ‘Next?’ he asked, his yellow eye bulging as dark magics crackled the length of his arms and swirled about his spread fingers.

They came in a rush, crimson-eyed and snarling. Black fire rippled from W’soran’s fingers, coiling about the first, burning him to nothing in moments. He realised that Melkhior was beside him a moment later when the latter caught a sword meant for W’soran’s skull on his own blade. Melkhior roared and forced the Strigoi back, trading blows. W’soran laughed and turned to the remaining Strigoi, who circled him warily.

‘Did Ushoran really think that he could overcome me this way, with simple brute force? Has his famous guile deserted him?’ he cackled, knowing even as he said it that there was something he was missing. It nagged at him. What was he not seeing? If Melkhior had wanted him dead, why not simply let the assassins kill him while he meditated? Why wake him up?

The Strigoi came at him from either side, confident in their strength. W’soran killed them both with a gesture, his magics flaying the meat from their bones before they could so much as scream. Overconfidence was a persistent weakness of their kind, a predatory surety which served as a crude population control. He had noted it early on in his studies. The only cure was age. Age brought cunning to temper the ferocity. Age brought wisdom, the wisdom to hide his strength, and his secrets; that was why he had built his vault. Nagash had been too trusting with his secrets, or perhaps simply too arrogant to consider that anyone might covet them more than they feared him.

‘Master of Death,’ he murmured, ‘Master of Fools, more like.’

He turned as a heavy body crashed to the ground. Melkhior raised the sword and brought it down, lopping off the twitching Strigoi’s head. His former apprentice kicked the head aside and looked at him. ‘Do you still doubt me, old monster?’ he growled.

‘I never doubted you,’ W’soran said smoothly. He gestured. ‘I knew, here in my heart, that you would come to your senses eventually and return to me.’

Melkhior gave a grunt of bitter laughter. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I am going to collect something very valuable and then I am going to flee,’ W’soran said. Melkhior could prove useful, though only in the short term.

‘The books, you mean,’ Melkhior said softly.

W’soran’s good eye narrowed. Melkhior shook his head. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You prize Nagash’s scrawling even over your own life.’ His eyes flashed. ‘How many of them do you possess now… two, perhaps three?’

Before W’soran could answer, the sound of monstrous shrieks echoed through the forecourt. More than three, or four or even five of them this time, he realised. It sounded like a dozen or more, and all of them looking to take his head. ‘They are coming,’ Melkhior said, backing away. ‘We must go!’

‘Not without those books,’ W’soran snarled, shoving him aside. ‘I require them for a bit longer yet.’

‘Then we had better hurry,’ Melkhior said. They moved swiftly, robes flapping. They sped across the forecourt and through another archway. W’soran led the way, running smoothly despite the fact that he’d been as stiff as a corpse earlier.

The vault lay at the juncture where the fastness gave way to solid rock. W’soran had devised it in such a way that even if his sanctum was wiped from the side of the crag, his vault, and the precious artefacts and tomes within, would remain untouched. Rock walls rose around them and over them in a rough, curved tunnel, braced by heavy wooden beams set into place by dead hands. It was as wide as a plaza and a force of men could pass through it easily. There was no light, for they needed none. They’d left the howls of their pursuers behind, but W’soran knew they would be on them soon enough. The Strigoi could be relentless in pursuit of prey.

At the end of the tunnel sat the vault. It was a simple enough thing… a great wedge of stone, set into a gap like a cork into a bottle. Hundreds of chains, coated in dust and rust in equal measure, lay before it, connected to the wedge by a massive iron ring. As W’soran approached, he saw that the dust on the floor, and on the chains, had been disturbed. He smiled crookedly. Melkhior stood behind him, casting nervous glances back up the corridor.

‘How do you get in?’ Melkhior asked. ‘I see no lock, no handle, save those chains.’

‘The chains are the handle,’ W’soran said. Then, he spoke a single word. It hummed through the air and the stone of the walls and link by link, the chains began to rattle. Melkhior stepped back with an oath, as the chains rose to the height of a man and in the wide space before the stone, motes of pale light appeared and blossomed into ragged phantoms. Men, women and children, their hazy features twisted with incomprehensible agony. They moaned and screamed in silence, writhing beneath the weight of the chains. ‘I forged them in the blood of the former inhabitants of this place as well as my own,’ W’soran explained, ‘and bound their shrivelled little souls to the links… and to me. Only my voice can awaken them. Only my will can make them open the vault.’

Even as he said it, the ghosts began to move forward, straining against the wedge, pulling the chains. Melkhior watched in awe and, W’soran was pleased to note, not a little fear. To bind the dead to their own corpses was a parlour trick compared to this. W’soran preened slightly as the wedge groaned in its housing and began to pull free of the hole, releasing a burst of foul air. It was a ponderous affair, and with every step, the ghosts flickered and twitched in mute agony. That they still felt the weight and pain of their last moments was, to W’soran’s mind, of the utmost delight. They had dared set themselves against him, tried to prevent him from taking what was his, and now they would suffer for eternity for that hubris.

After long moments, the vault was open and the spirits slumped or sank to their knees, as if they were still prone to the fatigue that might cripple living flesh. ‘Only my will,’ W’soran said again. He turned with a nasty smile on his face. At a single twitch of his fingers, the spirits rose as one, screaming silently as their ghostly forms were caught up in a maelstrom and flung together, causing the chains to clash and rattle thunderously. The spirits were smashed against one another, and they merged, still shrieking, into a colossal figure, a giant made of writhing shapes and weeping faces that gathered up the chains and then drove one heaving, squirming shoulder into the vault door. The vault was slammed shut with a roar and the phantoms vanished. The chains fell, and the stone echoed loudly with the sound. Melkhior gaped, uncomprehending. ‘That was why Urdek and the others couldn’t open it, of course,’ W’soran said, examining his talons.

Melkhior froze. W’soran nodded in satisfaction. ‘No bodies. No hint of them. What happened to them, I wonder?’ His smile became sharp and feral. ‘Did you eat them? I recall that’s what you did to that one young fellow, the ajal with the golden hair… did you crack Urdek’s thick skull open and eat the sweetness within when you realised he couldn’t aid you? Maybe your Strigoi friends helped you, hmm? How long have you lot squatted here, in my lair, trying to get at my secrets while I slumbered unawares?’ He exposed his fangs. ‘And then, when you could not, you decided to wake me up and play me for a fool, yes, with staged attacks to harry me and confuse me? Oh Melkhior, you are too clever by half, my sweet boy,’ W’soran said. Black fire crackled between his fingers and he held up a hand. Melkhior glanced back. W’soran clucked his tongue. ‘They won’t get here in time to help you,’ he said.

‘Actually, we are already here,’ a feminine voice said. W’soran glanced up in shock as a lithe shape dropped from the ceiling and a blade flashed. Pain tore through him as one of his hands was removed at the wrist and he yowled, releasing the deadly magics contained in the other at the pale shape of his attacker.

Laughing, she sprang to the wall and nimbly leapt over the coruscating lance of black flame. ‘Now, Melkhior,’ she howled. ‘Take him!’

Melkhior charged forward, bat-face split in a roar of pure hatred. He brought the sword down on W’soran’s shoulder, driving the blade down through bone and muscle in a burst of inhuman strength. W’soran staggered and nearly fell. Shrieking, he slapped Melkhior away with his bloody stump and faced his other attacker. His good eye widened in shock. ‘You,’ he hissed.

‘Me,’ the Lahmian said, ‘I warned you, old beast. And now, you are done.’

With that, the Lahmian danced forward, impossibly quick, her Cathayan blade moving like quicksilver as it cut ribbons from his unprotected hide. He screamed and reeled as stinking smoke rose from the wounds. The blade was edged with silver and every cut was agony. Clutching his wounded wrist to his chest, he tried to fend her off, spitting cursed syllables with desperate rapidity, his mind racing as he unleashed spell after spell. She avoided every one, her sinuous shape curling and sliding through the air like a leaf or a plume of smoke, drawing ever closer to him, until at last her blade bit deep into his belly. ‘Die,’ she purred into his ear as she forced the blade into him. ‘Die, in the name of my sisters, W’soran. Die, in the name of the Queen of Mysteries.’

‘I’ve already done that once, witch,’ W’soran rasped, black blood filling his mouth. ‘I’ll not do it again!’ His good hand shot forward and spidery talons wrapped themselves around the Lahmian’s neck. Her eyes widened as his claws tightened. He would pop her head from her neck.

But before he could do so, saw-edged fangs sank into the side of his throat, and claws into his scalp. He released the Lahmian and clawed wildly at Melkhior, who savaged his throat unheeding. Remora-like, his former apprentice dug his bestial snout into the wound his teeth had made and gulped the ancient blood that spurted forth. W’soran stumbled and sank to his knees. Melkhior hunched over him, ripping and tearing with a terrible fury.

W’soran fell forward, and Melkhior staggered back, covered in black blood, his eyes wide with madness. W’soran tried to push himself up, but he was too weak. ‘No,’ he gurgled, clawing at the stone floor. Through a red haze, he saw Melkhior pad forward, deadly intent writ in his movement. There was a hunger in his former apprentice’s eyes that chilled him, a terrible monstrous hunger that he recognised, and feared. ‘Not like this,’ he croaked.

Melkhior crouched over him and his animal features were alight with hideous joy. ‘I have waited centuries for this, old monster,’ he whispered. W’soran’s fading vision was filled by that ravenous maw dipping towards him, his blood still wet upon the serrated fangs that lined it.

Then, he saw nothing but darkness.