Master of Death

Chapter One

Lahmia, the City of the Dawn

(Year -1200 Imperial Calendar)

The first thing he saw upon awakening was Ushoran. Given that the last thing he’d seen had been Neferata, her beauteous features contorted in an animal snarl as she thrust a jagged chunk of wood into his heart, it was an improvement, though not by much.

The Lord of Masks drew back, the damnable splinter of wood in his grip. He was as W’soran remembered him, the dull glamour masking the bestial shape within, a mask within a mask. Which was the true Ushoran? W’soran knew that he could find out easily enough, but he didn’t particularly care. He never had, in truth. Let Ushoran play his silly games, and hide his crimes in double-talk and feigned innocence. W’soran had never feared consequence or result, for opportunity was born in both.

‘W’soran,’ Ushoran said, softly, as if he were afraid to awaken the other vampire.

‘Ushoran,’ W’soran replied. He was lying on the floor of the temple cellar. She hadn’t bothered to move him very far. He felt a glimmer of insult — had she even considered that someone might attempt to find him? Then again, no one had. Maybe she was smarter than he’d given her credit for. Or perhaps she was simply more paranoid. He thought he knew which was more likely.

‘It’s been-’ Ushoran began hesitantly.

‘Twenty-two years,’ W’soran cut him off. ‘Twenty-two years folded up and crammed into a jar,’ he said, letting only a hint of the bitterness he felt seep into his words. It gnawed at his guts, to have been so close, only to be ripped away at the moment of enlightenment. He raised his arm and felt for the already healing place where Neferata had rammed the stake that had pierced his heart. And for what — spite? Or perhaps jealousy; she had never been one to share power. It all came down to power in the end. And hers was as nothing compared to that which he had touched in those brief, beautiful black moments before she had consigned him to spiteful oblivion.

Nonetheless, he could still feel it, echoing in his bones. The ritual had been a success, more so than he had dared to even hope. He had cracked the bones of the world and touched divinity itself. Not one of the old, weak gods of the Great Land, but a vibrant god, a new god. The Undying King himself, his eyes blazing like baleful suns, had graced W’soran with a moment of his attentions. The Great Necromancer had answered his call, and in that moment, Nagash, the Master of Death, had claimed a new servant in W’soran of Mahrak.

He could feel the pressure now, in his head. He had always felt it, since Neferata had given him the blood-kiss, but only now did he recognise it for what it was. The others did not see it. They would never see it. Nobility were blind to any powers that were not their own, but W’soran, who had always served, recognised the hand of a master easily enough. Nagash’s hand was at their throats and his blood was in their veins. And soon enough, he would join his true master.

But first…‘I take it I’m forgiven. No, don’t bother. Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?’

‘I see two decades of pickling has only sharpened your tongue,’ another voice intruded.

W’soran didn’t bother to look. He recognised the voice easily enough. No one else sounded that petulant. ‘Hello, Ankhat,’ he said, slowly sitting up. ‘Still clinging to Neferata’s hem?’

‘Put the stake back in him,’ Ankhat snarled. ‘Put him back where we found him. Lahmia will survive without him.’ The nobleman had never liked him, W’soran recalled. Indeed, he had even helped Neferata disrupt W’soran’s ceremony. He had tattled like a child hoping for a reward. More jealousy, more narrow-minded spite, and as with Ushoran, perhaps a touch of fear; only a few among the Lahmian Court did not fear W’soran in some small way, though it was a fear born of shallow assumption rather than true understanding, and for that he hated them. For all that he despised her of, W’soran knew that Neferata feared nothing. She could not conceive of defeat, or of submission to another.

Perhaps he would bring Nagash her head, as a gift.

‘Neferata has commanded that we free him,’ Ushoran said smoothly, not taking his eyes from W’soran, as if he’d heard the other vampire’s thoughts. Maybe he had. Neferata’s blood had awakened strange talents in each of them. W’soran idly wondered if such abilities were transferable between vampires. What part of Ushoran’s brain would he have to excise in order to do so?

Ushoran continued, ‘And so we have. Let the consequences be on her head.’

‘Why?’ W’soran asked. ‘Why would she do such a thing?’ But he already knew. He had foreseen it the moment he had learned that the petulant prince of Rasetra had escaped.

‘Alcadizzar,’ Ushoran said.

The Dark Lands

(Year -326 Imperial Calendar)

The cavern was immense. Its inhabitants had worn the stones of the floor smooth, generation by generation, and the walls had been bolstered by supports crafted haphazardly from both stone and wood even as it had grown, its circumference increasing with the population of the mountain. Great, crude chimneys were driven into the curve of the roof, carrying out smoke and bringing in fresh air, as well as allowing for the ingress and egress of the more agile inhabitants. Irrigation canals had been carved into the rock walls and slithered across the floor, creating a weird pattern of filthy, sluggish water that seemed to be going nowhere in particular. Vast, primitive portcullises crafted from badly forged metal were embedded in the walls at irregular intervals, marking hundreds of exits and entrances, leading up into the heights and down into the depths.

From each of these, bipedal rats poured into the cavern, and it seethed with their numbers. Rat-things squirmed forward with a frenzied murderousness not usually found in vermin, unless they were cornered. Which, W’soran suspected, these very much counted as, given the situation. This was a bastion under siege, and its defenders fought with tooth, claw and spear to hold it against the silent ranks of the invaders. Wave after wave of screaming, chittering ratmen broke against skeletal phalanxes composed of dead men stripped of flesh and feeling alike. The walking dead fought without frenzy or fear, moving remorselessly forward at the behest of the minds of their masters, and their masters’ master.

Despite their advantages, the dead didn’t have it all their own way. The rat-things had weapons aplenty. One such, a grotesque giant rat-like behemoth that was all bulging flesh and exposed muscle, a tube of stitched meat that wailed from a dozen snapping mouths, raced towards the ranks of skeletal warriors, urged on by its verminous handlers, who clung precariously to the rickety howdah strapped to its undulating spine.

‘Kill it with fire!’ W’soran howled as he gestured towards the lumbering abomination which was waddling speedily towards his position. Its thunderous squeals buffeted his ears as it clambered across the cavern floor, its dozens of legs lending it ungainly speed. The rat-things had lashed and bolted the contraption on the monster’s very bone, and ballistae had been mounted atop it. One fired even as W’soran spoke, and the great, crude bolt crashed through the ranks, crushing dozens in its flight. Smaller shapes, neither wolf nor rat but some foul amalgamation of both, loped to either side of the titanic monstrosity, uttering high-pitched bays of hunger. There were hundreds of them, W’soran realised, even as he knew that this was only the first line of the enemy’s defence.

The rat-things who occupied this hole called themselves skaven. The mountain was riddled with them and their foul warrens, from the crags to the roots; it would take months, if not years, to cleanse it of their presence. If the mountain hadn’t overlooked one of the largest passes through the mountains, Vorag likely wouldn’t have bothered. As it was, it had been easy to convince the Bloodytooth — as his followers called him — to attack, especially after a number of black-clad skaven had attempted to assassinate the renegade Strigoi vampire.

The skaven had made the mistake of trying to warn Vorag off from dallying in their territory overlong, and had attempted to murder him in his tent. W’soran couldn’t blame them, though he did fault their methodology. The assassination attempt had been swift, savage and, sadly, futile. Vorag had survived, and, for all that he was a brute and savage, but he was nothing if not courageous. An attempt on his life was practically an invitation for retaliation. A crude, curved knife in his pillow and soon enough, Vorag’s rag-tag horde of Strigoi exiles — and W’soran and his small coterie with them — was besieging the fastness that the skaven called Crookback Mountain.

Granted, Vorag had set his eyes on the mountain from the start. It commanded the passes of the north-eastern edge of the Strigoi Empire, and trade, such as it was, flowed steadily through those passes to the east. After Vorag’s disastrous attempt at usurping the throne from Ushoran, and the resultant civil war between rival factions of Strigoi — supporters of Ushoran on one side and everyone else on the other — the Bloodytooth and his followers had fled Mourkain and the Strigoi Empire, to regroup and plan anew. The mountain, with its command of the region, would be an ideal citadel from which to strike at their enemies, and to rebuff any attempt by said enemies to collect the scalps and fangs Ushoran demanded in recompense for Vorag’s betrayal. In time, it might even rival Mourkain, and a new empire would grow about it, with Vorag on the throne, and W’soran behind him, whispering in his ear. But first, they had to deal with the skaven.

W’soran had fought them before, in the cramped dark beneath Nagashizzar centuries earlier, and his knowledge had only increased in the interim. They had caught captives early and often, the beasts being more inclined to flee or surrender than fight when their numbers were limited. Nagash had never bothered to learn more than the most rudimentary secrets of the skaven during the long war for the abn-i-khat mines, but W’soran recognised that there was some power in even the most inconsequential bit of trivia. After a few weeks with the flensing knives he knew their pestilential race inside and out, everything from the subtleties of their tittering language to the way certain glands squirted an acrid musk when they were frightened.

They had entered the mountain easily enough through the great clefts and labyrinthine tunnels worn into the rock millennia earlier by long-since vanished rivers. The skaven had crafted hidden gates and barbicans in those tunnels, but the defenders, used to the half-hearted assaults by the savage greenskin tribes of the region, had been unprepared for the speed and inexorable momentum of the initial undead attack. Vampires had rooted the ratkin out of their dead-drops and hidey-holes, flinging them squealing from the heights down onto the spears held aloft by bony hands. Even the multitude of deadly traps — deadfalls and unstable tunnels, among others — had done little to discourage the invaders. The dead were nothing if not durable, and failing that, easily replaceable.

It had been a simple enough matter to draw the slaughtered skaven to their feet and send the bodies forward to lead the invasion of their own lair. W’soran thought that there was poetry in it. The vile little things were as treacherous as they were disease-riddled, and coups came to the living skaven as naturally as breathing. Why should their dead be any different?

Battle had become a constant as they pushed deeper into the mountain. Vorag’s army had divided into dozens of smaller forces, each one led by one of his chosen warriors. Including this one, led by an idiotic Strigoi brawler called Rudek. W’soran seethed, but privately. Vorag did not trust him, despite the fact that it was W’soran’s magic that ensured that he had an army in the first place. But that would change, and sooner rather than later, if he had anything to say about it.

W’soran stood, surrounded by his acolytes, on an armoured palanquin, held aloft by the barbaric shapes of a dozen massive ghouls who were chained to it. He had bred the beasts himself in Mourkain, weaning them on vampiric blood and flesh. As a consequence, they had grown to elephantine proportions, each one a match for twenty lesser foes. They were armoured as well, bolted into heavy iron cuirasses, gorgets and greaves to protect them from stray missiles. Their malformed simian skulls were encased in leather and brass muzzles, to keep them from biting any of his acolytes who wandered too close to the edges of the palanquin. Fed on vampiric juices as they had been, the brutes now craved it with an addict’s frenzy. The ghouls bellowed and shifted in place, eager for the coming fray.

W’soran snarled and gestured. ‘I said burn it,’ he snapped. His acolytes flung out their hands as one and spoke with him as the sorcerous incantation left his withered lips. The air grew hot and began to smell of boiled meat as the spell rushed through the musty air of the great cavern and struck the monster. The abomination reared up with a shriek that shivered the stalactites from the upper reaches of the cavern as weird green flames crawled across its pustule-ridden frame. It screeched again and again, thrashing in agony. Its claws flailed, crushing wolf-rats and uprooting stalagmites as it hurled itself down and rolled over, trying to snuff the eldritch flames.

As he’d hoped, the howdah, with its complement of artillery, was crushed beneath the thing’s weight. As the abomination regained its feet, he saw that the contraption had been swept off it entirely, tearing great wounds in its back in the process. It hunched and mewled in pain, its screams setting his teeth on edge.

Strigoi warriors bounded forward with howls of glee. Inhuman muscles bunched beneath their armour as the vampires hurled themselves on the wounded beast, stabbing it with swords and spears and tearing at it with claws. Vorag had been profligate in gifting those who had followed him into the wilderness with the blessings of undeath. Too, years of battle had seen his forces slowly but surely shed the living in favour of the dead the way a snake shed its skin. There were no living men left in the army of the Bloodytooth — only the silent dead. Blocks of skeletal infantry moved forward, carrying spears or bows, and more vampires loped through their ranks. There were more ethereal components to the besiegers’ force as well: spectral maelstroms, composed of hundreds of moaning, gibbering spirits bound to W’soran’s will, surging forward towards the army marching to meet them.

Black-furred skaven wearing heavy, red-daubed armour marched in semi-orderly blocks, hefting cruel-looking halberds. Ahead of them, untold masses of scrawny slave-soldiers scurried forward. At the back of the army, bellowing rat ogres shook the chains that bound them to the massive war machine they hauled into position, as shrieking overseers snapped whips over their blunt skulls. The machine was shaped something like an overlarge ballista: a weird amalgamation of wood and metal crafted like no engine that W’soran was familiar with, and somewhere amidst that confusion was the commander of the skaven forces facing them. The longer he examined the war machine, however, the more the shape of it put him in mind of the dragon staves that dead Lahmia had once used in war. Which had unpleasant implications, should the skaven ever actually use it.

The abomination gave a final scream and collapsed, its flabby shape crumpling. The Strigoi crouched on it, howling and whooping. The front ranks of the skaven hesitated, but their masters drove them on with chittering curses and snapping whips and the slaves started forward. The dead moved to meet them, marching in silent unison. As one, the front ranks of the skeletal spearmen lowered their weapons and locked shields. In life, they had been as disciplined as the barbaric Strigoi could get, and that had not changed in death.

W’soran watched, awaiting the impact of bone on flesh, when a slender shape suddenly landed on the palanquin, startling him. He spun about with a hiss, hands raised and an invocation on his lips. He swallowed the words as he realised who it was. ‘Rudek,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be leading a heedless assault of some sort?’

‘And shouldn’t you be hiding, sorcerer?’ Rudek countered, his red eyes narrowing. ‘That is what you’re best at, after all.’ He was handsome, as the Strigoi judged such things, with sharp features and dark hair bound in the customary scalp-lock. Slim and long-limbed, with the grace of a born swordsman and the agility of a cat, Rudek was one of the more devious of Vorag’s pets. W’soran despised him.

‘Watch your tongue, Rudek,’ one of W’soran’s acolytes growled. Melkhior threw back the hood of his robe, revealing his animalistic sneer, and slapped a claw to the sword sheathed on his hip.

Rudek turned with a lazy smile. ‘Ah, the coward speaks up.’

‘I’m no coward,’ Melkhior snarled, his flat, black eyes pulsing with anger.

‘Then why are you here with these thin-blooded grave-robbers and not out there with the rest of us, cousin?’ Rudek hissed, flashing his fangs. The hair on the back of his neck had stiffened like the quills of a porcupine and he hunched forward, arms spread. Melkhior’s round maw split to reveal his own impressive nest of teeth, and his sword-hilt creaked in his grip.

W’soran watched the confrontation in amusement. He’d forgotten that Melkhior was related by blood to many of Vorag’s followers. The nobles of the Strigoi, whether living or undead, were interrelated to a degree that even a Nehekharan found to be ridiculous. It made such confrontations rather more heated than they would have been otherwise, as well as more amusing.

He clapped his hands together before either vampire could make a move. ‘Why are you bothering me, Rudek? I have spells to cast,’ he said.

Rudek turned back to W’soran, his sneer returning. ‘Yes, and at my command, necromancer,’ he said. ‘We are to smash the vermin here and hold our position. Lord Vorag wishes to make a final push into the heart of this nest. He believes that the vermin are retreating here from throughout the mountain, thanks to our valiant efforts.’

W’soran turned away, scanning the cavern. It was by far the largest such space they had yet encountered, as well as the most built up. The upper reaches were strung with rickety walkways, and strange towers and balconies had been grafted onto the larger stalactites like barnacles; the walls of the cavern had quite obviously been hollowed out, and rough stairways curved in and out of them in places. Strange metal globes of enormous size, full of burning incense, had been strung up here and they cast a milky pall over the whole of the cavern. It reminded him of similar open areas he had seen in the depths of Nagashizzar, that had heralded the entrances to the deep burrows and breeding pits of the skaven.

He was forced to admit that it made sense, though he doubted Vorag had arrived at the conclusion through any studied process of consideration. Rather, it was the instinct of a jackal hunting a rodent and knowing that its prey will seek shelter. He glanced back at Rudek. ‘And how would you suggest we go about holding this place, Rudek? We have barely a third of the army here, and we’re likely sitting right on top of the main nest of the ratkin. There’ll be millions of them in here with us before long.’

‘Then we shall have a chance to see just how effective your magics are, sorcerer,’ Rudek said, grinning. ‘I will lead the attack, and you will join me.’

W’soran hesitated. Idly, he stroked his dead eye and the scar that crossed it. ‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then I will butcher you here and now,’ Rudek said with a shrug. ‘Your choice.’

I’d like to see you try, you preening ape, W’soran thought. What he said, however, was, ‘I shall join you. It would be my pleasure.’

‘I thought you might see it that way,’ Rudek said, laughing. ‘Do not tarry, W’soran. There is blood to be spilt and rats to be spitted!’ A moment later he was gone, bounding from the palanquin and racing away towards the forefront of the battle. Other Strigoi joined him as he moved, like wolves being summoned to the hunt by the pack-leader.

W’soran grunted. It was an inconvenience, but one he could easily turn to his advantage, if he were quick about it. He turned to Melkhior. ‘Stay here and oversee our works. Keep the dead on their feet and the rats off our flanks.’

‘I will come with you,’ Melkhior said, drawing his sword. ‘You will need my help, master.’

‘Melkhior, the day I need your help to murder a cousin of yours is the day they roll me into a crypt and shut the door,’ W’soran said. Melkhior blinked.

‘What?’

‘Why else do you think I agreed to his idiotic demand? I’m going to kill him,’ W’soran said, bluntly. ‘Do you have a problem with that, my son?’

Melkhior looked at him. ‘He’s not a close cousin,’ he said, after a moment.

‘I’m simply overjoyed to hear it,’ W’soran said as he moved to the edge of the palanquin. Quickly, he flung off his cloak, revealing the curved and scalloped plates of the Strigoi cuirass he wore beneath. Cruelly hooked pauldrons protected his skinny shoulders and a flaring gorget encased his throat like the crest of some great Southland saurian. Bracers decorated with intricately wrought sigils covered his forearms and greaves of similar design protected his shins. He drew the Arabyan scimitar from its wolf-skin sheath on his hip and leapt from the palanquin.

He could feel Melkhior’s glare on his back even as he moved after Rudek and the Strigoi. Whether he was angry about being left behind or about W’soran’s plans the latter couldn’t say. Nor did he particularly care. Let him stew. Melkhior was entirely too fixated on hierarchy; so much so that he spent the bulk of his time machinating against his perceived rivals rather than on his studies.

W’soran shook his head in disgust as he threaded his way through the ranks of the dead. If only Morath hadn’t been so blinded by his petty fealties, he might have joined W’soran in his self-imposed exile. That one was a student worth the name. His grasp of the darkling magics that rode the winds of death was instinctual, equal even to W’soran’s own. In time, he might have even been a match for his master. Not now, however. For now, he was Ushoran’s plaything, a slave to a slave.

Then, are you any different, playing loyal servant to Vorag? a treacherous part of his mind whispered. Irritated, he swatted the head off an unoffending skeleton. It bounced away across the rocks, joining the bones and bodies that littered the ground between the two forces. The skaven had pulled back after their initial clash, retreating in a wave of fear-stink. Their lines pulsed and squirmed as the overseers within their ranks tried to whip the survivors into some form of martial order. W’soran paused to watch, interested.

The skaven were a stable mutation, likely the result of excess exposure to the warping effects of abn-i-khat at some point centuries ago. He had seen and studied other such mutations in his time — the beastmen of the northern mountains, for instance, were of similar origins, though they were far less stable. He had dabbled in recreating the effects himself, in his experiments in Mourkain. He smiled as he thought of the vast, hidden crypts he’d left behind in the bowels of the mountain the city rested on, and the dozens of sealed stone sarcophagi in those crypts. Each sarcophagus contained a Strigoi who, despite receiving Ushoran’s blood-kiss, for want of influence or friendship or simply common sense, had lost favour with their master and been turned over to W’soran to do with as he wished, when he himself had had the master of Mourkain’s trust. Those sarcophagi had been crafted with veins of abn-i-khat, which was easy enough to find the further north you went, running through them. He shivered in pleasure as he imagined the changes that must have been wrought in those captive vampires. It was too bad he would likely never find out.

Unless he could find a way to recreate those experiments in peace and privacy; for that, however, he’d need a secluded hideaway. A mountain fortress, for instance… W’soran grinned and continued on. Plans, plots and schemes tumbled through his crooked brain, and he forced them aside. He had to concentrate on the here and now. Things could still go wrong. The Strigoi — Vorag — had to trust him. And to trust him, they first had to respect him. But savages respected only physical might, and that meant getting his hands dirty.

He swung the scimitar experimentally as he approached the gathered Strigoi, re-familiarising himself with its weight and balance. He’d learned the art of the blade in his youth, when duels were still common amongst the priesthood of Mahrak. Since then, he’d fought in hundreds of conflicts, wielding both sorcery and sword with equal intent.

‘You almost look as if you know how to use that thing,’ Rudek said. The Strigoi with him laughed at the perceived witticism. W’soran sneered.

‘I learned the ways of the blade before you gnawed your first teat, Rudek.’

Rudek frowned and turned away. ‘We’ll see about that, sorcerer. The skaven have yet to deploy their war machine. I think it would be wise to see that they never get that opportunity.’

‘I follow your lead gladly, my lord,’ W’soran purred, bowing shallowly. ‘If they hold true to form, that is where this rabble’s commanders will be as well. If we kill them, this lot will flee.’

‘I forget that you have fought them before,’ Rudek said. ‘Is it hard for you, then?’

‘What, my lord?’ W’soran asked.

‘To fight creatures you so obviously share a kinship with,’ Rudek said. Before W’soran could reply, Rudek drew his blade and thrust it into the air. ‘For Strigos and the Bloodytooth,’ he roared, and sprang forward into a dead sprint. The others followed suit, and W’soran, slowly, reluctantly, followed them. Behind the vampiric spear-point came the skeletal ranks, marching steadily, if much more slowly than their bloodthirsty masters.

It was a by-now familiar tactic — the Strigoi had a fondness for the close-in, red wet work of war. Lines, columns, ranks: all of that irritated a people whose first, last and only instinct was to charge. It had taken Neferata and Abhorash, once-champion of Lahmia and now lickspittle of Mourkain, centuries to mould the army of Strigos into a disciplined fighting force equal to any that had ever marched across the dry sands of the Great Land. Needless to say, the nobility, forever frozen at the height of their barbarity like insects in amber by immortality, often forgot those lessons. That could be dangerous, given the persistence and numbers of the skaven. W’soran almost laughed. It would be easy enough to see to Rudek, in the battle.

On the flanks, W’soran heard the howls of those forces he had brought with him into his exile — mobs of so-called ‘crypt horrors’ as the Strigoi had taken to calling them. It had taken him decades to perfect the process of their creation, and they were the perfect shock troops. The bloated, gigantic ghouls lumbered forward, swinging mauls, clubs and other outsize weapons as they loped ponderously towards the skaven. They were followed by packs of normal-sized ghouls, their grey flesh marked by W’soran’s brand. Through blood and black sorcery he had bound several clans of the corpse-eaters to himself, and they raced ahead to join the Strigoi, caterwauling and shrieking, propelled by his will.

Sizzling bursts of magic streaked overhead to crash against the skaven lines. Melkhior might be unhappy with his lot, but he was effective regardless. W’soran ran swiftly, ignoring the barrage of sling stones that were loosed from the ranks of the ratkin to patter against the armour of the vampires. Occasionally there were crackles of green lightning from the looming war machines, and the smell of burning abn-i-khat grew stronger the closer they got. W’soran snorted; the vermin used the stone for everything, from lighting fires to powering their mechanical constructs to foodstuffs. He thought that was likely why the war machines hadn’t been put to use yet — the stone took coaxing to release its strange essence, and even then it was highly volatile.

More sling stones flew, and then the Strigoi were upon the front ranks. W’soran narrowly avoided a spear-thrust and swept his scimitar across the throats of three skaven. Rudek had leapt high, avoiding the front ranks altogether, and crashed down amongst the back rows. His formerly handsome visage had twisted into an inhuman mockery, all teeth and eyes. He savaged the ratkin, slaughtering them with abandon, ripping them open and tossing them into the air. The others followed suit, tearing holes in the semi-orderly ranks of the skaven.

W’soran did his best to keep up. He did not relish combat in the same way, though pain and the expressions thereof were like the sweetest nectar to him. The screams of the skaven filled his ears as he carved his own path. Spears drove at him from all sides, the points skidding off his armour. He snarled and hacked through the spears and the hands that wielded them. Limbs and blood spilled to the ground. In moments, the skaven broke and began to flee, stampeding backwards to escape the rampaging vampires. The larger, black-furred skaven moved forward, heedlessly trampling the survivors in their efforts to reach the Strigoi. W’soran saw no reason to engage in any more pointless combat. His blade and armour were doused in the foul blood of the ratkin; more than enough, in fact, to impress upon the Strigoi his courage.

As the armoured skaven approached, he extended a hand and a dark mist coalesced before him and slithered towards the enemy. The mist billowed and spread as it moved, and swept over the ratkin with predatory intent. They screeched and clawed at themselves as it seeped into their mouths, noses and eyes. Heavy, muscular bodies withered and crumpled like drained wineskins as the mist drew out their lives like an ethereal leech.

W’soran laughed as the armoured ranks melted away before him. It was so much more satisfying to kill with a gesture than with the swing of a sword. He stepped over the bodies without a backward glance. Behind him, he could hear the tread of bony feet as the army pressed forward.

More skaven boiled out of concealed holes and tunnels, racing to the defence. Rudek and the other Strigoi pounced on them, butchering them. W’soran ignored them, and headed for the war-engine. The skaven had dragged it from the wide, gaping mouth of a tunnel and set it up facing the undead. Slaves and overseers scurried and clambered over the engine, doing what W’soran couldn’t say. Even as he loped towards the closest, he saw that a massive chunk of abn-i-khat had been mounted inside its brass and iron frame. On the platform that the weapon was mounted on, a group of skaven stood, watching the approaching undead with a disturbing lack of concern.

The air suddenly took on a greasy feel and W’soran’s hackles bristled. A trio of Strigoi bounded past him. The war-engine shuddered like a dying beast as lightning squirmed across its hull, and suddenly W’soran had the unpleasant feeling that the whole battle so far had merely been a distraction, to ensure that the skaven got their toys positioned properly.

Light burst from the stone and a crackling bolt was spat from the copper tip of the engine. The Strigoi ceased to exist a moment later, their bodies rent asunder by the bolt of sickly green energy. W’soran was thrown from his feet by the force of the explosion. More bolts were fired as the engine shuddered and vomited death on the approaching undead. Whole ranks of skeletal warriors vanished into dust and screaming ghouls were sent tumbling into the air, their flesh peeling and blackened. Green smoke obscured the destruction a moment later.

W’soran staggered to his feet, momentarily stunned by the sudden display of raw power. Thus, he did not detect the pad of heavy paws until too late. Alerted at the last moment, he spun about, only to be seized in an iron grip and wrenched from his feet as the snarling maw of a rat ogre gaped hungrily before him. He struggled, but to no avail. With a hungry bellow, it hauled him towards its open jaws.