Master of Death

Chapter Six

The City of Bel Aliad

(Year -1152 Imperial Calendar)

‘Nightfall crept into our souls and changed us all,’ Abhorash said softly, sitting slumped in his chair, clad in armour that was unadorned but well-kept. He was dressed as a kontoi, one of Bel Aliad’s noble horsemen. The night-wind coiled softly through the open windows of his chambers. He had been awarded a small palace, near the centre of the City of Spices, for his efforts in helping the Arabyans make it their own.

He raised his hawk-like features and his lip twitched, revealing a length of fang. ‘Some more than others,’ he added. His hand found the pommel of the long blade that leaned against his chair, still sheathed, but no less intimidating for all that. He smiled coldly and said, ‘and some of us not at all, eh, W’soran? Except for that eye, I mean.’

W’soran stiffened and made to retort, even as his hand flashed to his unseeing eye. The arrow that had pierced it at the Battle of the Gates of the Dawn was long gone but the damage was done. His eye had yet to properly heal, instead remaining a milky, sightless orb. Ushoran held up a hand. ‘Be quiet, old monster. If you insult him, we will achieve nothing,’ he hissed.

‘You will achieve nothing regardless, Ushoran.’ Abhorash pushed himself to his feet, his armour creaking. ‘I have left mercy long behind me, and am in no mood to take part in your damned fate, whatever it might be. Go back to your fell master and leave me be.’

‘But surely it won’t hurt to hear us out, eh? Otherwise you’d have set those ravening devils of yours on us,’ Ushoran said, indicating the silent, unmoving shapes of Abhorash’s Hand — the four men who’d stood by him since Lahmia’s fall. W’soran knew them by name, if not by appearance. Walak of the palace guard and his cousin Lutr, of the harbour guard, were both Harkoni hillmen rather than true Lahmians, and had been given position in the military by Abhorash in better times. Mangari of the Southlands, a savage-turned-soldier, and Varis of Rasetra, a cunning duellist and former mercenary. Each was almost as formidable as their master and their eyes glowed red through the chainmail masks they wore beneath their ornate, high-peaked Arabyan helms.

W’soran seethed at the touch of those gazes. He longed to burn the impertinence from them. But Ushoran had convinced him to approach Abhorash peacefully, in contrast to his aggressive pursuit of Ankhat and, later, Neferata. In the months since his capture, the Lord of Masks had swiftly — indeed, more swiftly than W’soran had anticipated — regained his faculties. Even as W’soran had hunted for Ankhat, Ushoran had begun his hunt for the others, infiltrating the cities of the coasts of Araby and Nehekhara, his guise switching and changing month to month as he moved once more among mankind.

Nagash had already enacted the initial stages of his great plan. Soon, there would be no time to search for the wayward members of the Lahmian Court and bring them to heel at Nagash’s behest, and once again W’soran would be the fool. He imagined Arkhan’s look of arrogant triumph — no mean feat, given the liche’s lack of a face — and ground his fangs in annoyance.

He had already lost Neferata to a moment of foolish indiscretion. He had thought to overawe her with his power, and had attacked her where she laired in the desert, surrounded by an army of ragged tribesmen. He traced the barely-healed scars that covered his throat. Neferata had resisted more strongly than he’d anticipated, and her handmaidens were as deadly as he remembered. They’d almost killed him. Only Ushoran’s intervention had allowed them to escape.

Now, she was in the wind, and Ushoran had convinced him to cease hunting her and to instead set a trap. W’soran grunted and the moment of reverie passed. Ushoran and Abhorash were still speaking. ‘And you are sure she is coming here?’ Abhorash said. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at them.

‘There is nowhere else,’ Ushoran said. ‘She is not a creature of the deserts and the discomforts of the wilds. She wants a city to rule, with civilised folk, not barbarians. Bel Aliad is the closest, and the tribes will be inclined to attack anyway given their history. The question is, what are you going to do about it?’

‘Why should I do anything?’ Abhorash said.

‘Because otherwise she will take this city, and when she has done that, Nagash will take it from her, as he intends to take Nehekhara,’ Ushoran said bluntly. He made a fist for emphasis. ‘This city — these people — they will die for her ambition, even as Lahmia did.’

‘Again, what is that to me?’ Abhorash said, but more softly this time. W’soran felt a flash of disdain. Ushoran knew Abhorash’s weaknesses well enough, it seemed. Abhorash had always been too concerned over seeming to care as to the fate of his inferiors. Even as he had supped on them, he had taken no more than was necessary, and had treated it as one might a distasteful duty. He curried favour from insects and played hero to apes, greedily supping on their adulation even as the rest of them did so with blood.

‘Perhaps nothing or perhaps everything… you’ve served the masters of this city for months, Abhorash, training their household cavalry in the ways of war. You have seen off desert raiders and brigands aplenty. The people hail you as a hero. Will their hero vanish, as the long, final night descends? Will you leave them as you left us?’ Ushoran asked.

‘Quiet,’ Abhorash growled.

‘It’s true and you know it, champion,’ W’soran interjected, spitting the word. ‘You abandoned the city to Neferata and she bled it dry and served its husk up to Alcadizzar. Will you do the same again?’

Abhorash’s snarl was terrible to hear. There was a depthless fury there, and W’soran stumbled back. He raised his hands, ready to defend himself, when Ushoran stepped between them. He faced Abhorash unflinching.

‘Nagash is coming, Abhorash, and he will be unstoppable. The things we have seen…’ Ushoran shook his head. ‘But you can spare this city his wrath, just as you can spare it Neferata’s.’

Abhorash narrowed his eyes. After a long moment, he said, ‘What would I need to do?’

Ushoran glanced at W’soran, and then turned back. ‘What you should have done the moment you first learned what Neferata had become, champion,’ he said.

‘I will not kill her,’ Abhorash growled.

Ushoran raised a placatory hand. ‘No. She is a queen, after all. And one does not simply kill a queen.’ He smiled grimly. ‘No, you will capture her, champion. You will capture Neferata for us…’

Crookback Mountain

(Year -321 Imperial Calendar)

‘Why did you run here, W’soran?’ Stregga asked, sliding a hank of skaven fur across the wet surface of her sword to clean it. She sat on a dead rat ogre, her limbs clad in battered leather and bronze armour, her hair hidden beneath a conical Strigoi helm. She peered down the length of the blade, one fang exposed as if in consternation. ‘Surely there were safer places?’

‘Safer than at your lord’s side, you mean,’ W’soran said, wrenching his scimitar from the body of a skaven. ‘And yes, quite likely,’ he added. Dozens of dead skaven littered the corridor. ‘I could have returned to Cathay, perhaps, or gone into the west. Perhaps I have become a patriot, in my dotage, eh?’ He looked at her slyly. ‘Why has your mistress remained? Why does she not flee far from these climes? Why tempt fate?’

‘Neferata does not flee,’ Stregga said stiffly.

‘Neferata always flees. She has always run from that which she does not wish to confront,’ W’soran said. ‘I have no doubt that when Ushoran trounces her rabble in the field, she will flee yet again.’ He looked at her. ‘Will you go with her then, I wonder? Or will you remain here, with your new master?’

‘Vorag is not my master,’ Stregga said, rising smoothly to her feet. ‘He is my lover and my king, but I have but one mistress, and he is not it.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘It wasn’t a question worth answering,’ Stregga said, turning away from him. ‘Besides, you didn’t answer mine, either.’

W’soran grinned and gazed about the corridor. Several ranks of skeletal spearmen waited patiently for orders, the points of their spears dark with skaven blood. There were a number of Strigoi with them, including several newcomers — frontier ajals unhappy with Ushoran’s reign, mostly, though there were a few who were genuine idealists, looking to create a vampiric utopia free of so-called ‘outsiders’. Vorag had sent them all down into the tunnels as a test of loyalty when the skaven had come to call. Most were returning relatively unscathed, though there were a few missing faces. The skaven had refined their methods for dispatching lone vampires — lassos, hooks and flames, if the remains were anything to judge by.

As he’d predicted, the skaven had attacked within a month of the sentries being pulled from the depths. The ratkin had boiled out of the darkness like the waters of a flood, sweeping through the lower reaches of the mountain with a speed that belied their habitual cowardice. They’d made for his laboratories straight away, and he’d defended them with a ready savagery that had set the skaven to flight amidst a cloud of fear-musk. But other sections of the mountain had not been so well defended. The lower corridors had fallen quickly, and were soon filled with squirming hairy bodies.

Even now, the great central cavern, which stretched up into the uppermost reaches of the mountain, was the scene of massed combat. Rank upon rank of skaven hurled themselves against the dead with a frenzy that bespoke chemical or perhaps sorcerous inducement. The echoes of that struggle carried dully through the rock around them. Battle had been joined in full several days earlier, and the pace of it had neither slowed nor ceased since. The skaven were determined to recapture their citadel at any cost, and were apparently willing to sacrifice as many of their kind as it took to do so.

‘We should return to the main cavern, Stregga,’ Khemalla said, loudly. Like her sister-in-darkness, she was clad in armour, and carried one of the heavy, cleaver-like blades that the Strigoi favoured. ‘We’ve stymied this flanking effort, but Vorag could still be overwhelmed.’

‘I doubt we’ve stymied anything,’ W’soran said, speaking over the assenting grunts of the Strigoi. ‘There’ll be more of the ratkin coming. These were only meant to establish a strongpoint.’

It hadn’t taken much in the way of cunning to ensure that the Lahmians — as they insisted on referring to themselves, much to W’soran’s annoyance — had stuck to him. He had no doubt that they were planning to play witness to his end, even as he plotted to do the same. The cramped, dark tunnels were the perfect murder-ground. In the confusion of battle, a ready blade could slide into an unaware back with little difficulty.

He’d left Melkhior and Zoar with Vorag, to help him hold the skaven in the central chamber. His remaining apprentices guarded his laboratories and the repurposed skaven workshop, slaughtering any skaven foolish enough to attack and then animating them and sending them back into the tunnels to kill their living companions. He himself had volunteered to lead the flanking effort, knowing that the Lahmians would insist on accompanying him.

‘What do you know of war, leech?’ one of the Strigoi growled. He was a burly creature named Faethor and he belonged to the Lahmian called Layla. Even amidst the current conflict, Faethor had been accosting any Strigoi who stood against declaring open war on Ushoran and marching into the eastern reaches and challenging them to duels. Many fangs hung from a rawhide thong about his neck, attesting to his success in that regard.

‘Oh, is it my turn then, Faethor?’ W’soran said. ‘Is it time for you to deprive Vorag of yet another strong arm for your pale lady?’

‘Careful with those barbed words, old monster,’ Layla said, as she stepped from behind Faethor. ‘The Strigoi are a warrior-people, and they may take your insults and accusations more seriously than you intend.’

‘My accusations were serious enough,’ W’soran said. ‘Though I doubt even Faethor is foolish enough to challenge a withered old thing like myself amidst a battle…’ He grinned at the Strigoi. Faethor purpled, the skaven blood he’d glutted on flushing through his pale skin.

Before he could respond, however, the sound of pattering feet and squealing filled the air. Part of the corridor wall crumbled suddenly, unleashing a flood of rag-wrapped skaven tunnellers, wielding short, heavy blades and long knives. The skaven crashed into the skeletons, shattering them before they could react. Faethor and Layla spun about, striking out at the ratkin. One, clad in a strange mask complete with heavy goggles and bulbous tubes, bounced beneath a sword-blow from a Strigoi and flung a heavy globe of some viscous liquid towards W’soran.

W’soran reacted swiftly. He lashed out with his sword, striking the globe in mid-air. A foul-smelling gas billowed from its shattered remnants and W’soran hissed, tasting abn-i-khat. The masked skaven hurled two more globes before Khemalla reached him and brought her sword down on his skull, splitting it from crown to neck. More gas exploded out, rapidly filling the corridor. The surviving skaven had retreated as quickly as they had come, slithering back through the hole they had made.

‘What is this foulness?’ Stregga snarled, swiping her sword through the gas.

‘Poisonous gas,’ W’soran said. ‘If we breathed, we’d be dead. I don’t think they’ve quite figured out what we are just yet.’

‘Small favours,’ Khemalla grunted. Then, she screamed as a spear-point burst through her shoulder and sent her stumbling forward. W’soran and the others turned as more skaven burst through the gas clogging the corridor. The tunnel-attack had been a diversion, meant to allow the newcomers to get close. All of the ratkin had masks similar to that worn by the slain globadier welded to their flat, skull-fitted helms. These were not the brown-furred common vermin who normally led such attacks, but the heavier, black-furred variety. Clad in thick armour, the skaven charged relentlessly forward, spears thrusting out.

Stregga stooped to haul Khemalla out of the path of the advancing vermin, and W’soran was tempted to strike her then and there. But there were too many witnesses, and even if he’d succeeded, he’d have still had to fight his way free of the tunnel. ‘Fall back,’ he shrieked, ‘fall back! Let the dead earn their keep!’

‘Coward,’ Layla spat, even as she and Faethor followed him back into the ranks of skeletons.

‘But in one piece, which is the important bit,’ W’soran said. The Strigoi were following his example, melting back through the lines of the dead, even as the front rank of skeletons raised their shields and lowered their spears. ‘A shame you left your wights with Vorag,’ he said. ‘We could have used them.’

‘They’ll serve us better keeping the Bloodytooth alive,’ Stregga said, holding Khemalla upright. ‘At least until we can get back to him. Can your bone-bags hold them, sorcerer?’ She looked at W’soran, who shrugged.

‘It depends on whether they’re planning any other tricks,’ he said, even as he knew full well such would be the case. The skaven had begun launching attacks similar to the one that had nearly seen him permanently entombed several years previously. They caught the undead forces by surprise and dropped the weight of a tunnel on them. There was more than one Strigoi still trapped in those collapsed corridors, screaming into the silent dark.

The plan was childishly easy to discern, if you knew, as W’soran did, how the ratkin thought. Collapsing the tunnels choked off the avenues and approaches to the central cavern, forcing the Strigoi to retreat and reform their lines. The skaven, however, were burrowers without peer, and used tools and simple brute force to dig twenty new tunnels for every one they destroyed. The Strigoi, on the defensive, had no time to do the same, even if such labour had been their inclination. There was only one tunnel remaining now, the one they occupied. Once it fell, and reinforcements were cut off from the main cavern, the skaven would make their final assault.

While the thought of being caught in such a collapse again caused him no end of discomfort, there was no other way to achieve his ends without making an enemy of Vorag. The Lahmians had to die, and it was best if it seemed as if the skaven were responsible. He touched the top of his cuirass, where the fraying cords of the abn-i-khat amulets he wore were bunched, for reassurance. When their flanking effort failed, the skaven would likely launch their attack. And, if his luck held, he would be in the perfect position to play the hero.

The first line of the skaven crashed against the skeletons and W’soran gestured, pulling tight on the skeins of death-magic that animated the ancient bones. The skeletons wavered and the skaven took advantage, smashing them aside with victorious squeals. W’soran looked up, and saw the tell-tale cracks forming in the ceiling and walls. The corridor shuddered slightly. None of the Strigoi seemed to have noticed yet. It was a pity that so many would have to be sacrificed, but W’soran took the long view, and besides, what need had he of preening bully boys?

Despite having the advantage, the skaven began to retreat, backing away up the tunnel. Faethor gave a bellow of triumph. ‘They run! At them, wolves of Strigos,’ he roared, lunging through the ragged ranks of the dead, even as W’soran had hoped. With the others occupied, he could ensure that Neferata’s pets met their well-deserved fate. The Strigoi gave tongue to the war-howls of their people and loped free of the thicket of bones.

It took W’soran a moment to realise that Faethor wasn’t with them. The big Strigoi had leapt for the wall even as his brethren streamed past, and now scrambled across the cracked ceiling of the tunnel like an oversized spider.

Danger had always lent clarity to thought for W’soran. Obviously, the Lahmians had decided that his time had come, and Faethor was to be their weapon. With a snarl, Faethor dropped towards W’soran, chopping out with his notched blade. W’soran barely interposed his scimitar in time and was forced back against a shifting, groaning wall. He looked about wildly, trying to spy the Lahmians. They would not leave his death to a fool like Faethor.

‘Now you die, leech,’ Faethor said, hacking at him with determined savagery. ‘Rudek was my kin, and I know full well how you served him. And just now, I felt your magics as our dead men quailed. The Lahmians are right — you cannot be trusted!’

W’soran didn’t bother to reply. He blocked another blow and lashed out, trying to drive Faethor back, to clear enough room to work magic. At the other end of the tunnel, the Strigoi tore into the skaven ranks. The dead hesitated, turned and retreated from the battle, closing in on Faethor. Spears dug for the Strigoi, forcing him to leap aside, away from W’soran. ‘Treachery,’ he roared.

‘Indeed,’ W’soran said, almost amused. He directed the dead forward. ‘Kill him.’

The corridor was shaking now. There was no sudden explosion this time, but instead a gradual shifting of weight, as if the skaven were coaxing the mountain to move. Dust and bits of rock fell from the ceiling, pattering across his head. Faethor stepped back, cursing and snarling as the skeletons closed in.

A whisper of sound tugged at W’soran’s attention. He whirled and saw a thread of movement, almost too quick to catch. Black blood burst from his throat. The pain struck him a moment later. He clapped a hand to his torn jugular as he choked on his own fluids. For a moment, just a moment, he was back in Lahmia, in the temple, and Neferata was loping towards him, inexorable and deadly. Again he felt the hot flash of the old familiar terror — the fear that took the form of the dark and cramped confines of a jar.

Layla darted forward, her eyes alight with murder-lust. Her blade bit into his as he wove a desperate defence. ‘She warned us about you, old beast. She warned us that you would try and turn Vorag against us, that you would strike at us through cunning and deception. And she has decreed that you must die!’

W’soran could respond with only a gurgling snarl. He saw Stregga moving in on him from the side, and Khemalla as well, circling him as Layla drove him back. Behind them, Faethor gave a despairing howl as the relentlessness of the true dead won out against the ferocity of the near-dead. Spears pinned the Strigoi to the wall, puncturing his heart and skull. W’soran flung out the hand that had been clutched to his throat, spattering blood across Layla’s face. She reeled with a cry of disgust. W’soran sank beneath Stregga’s blow, and the Lahmian’s sword drew sparks from the tunnel wall. She grunted as W’soran crashed against her, knocking her from her feet.

W’soran whirled, barely countering a blow from Khemalla. The three Lahmians were all on their feet again, and closing in. He swung his scimitar in a wide circle. He was stronger than they, but they were better warriors, and faster. They were hemming him in, keeping him from concentrating for even a moment. Neferata had schooled them well in how to combat sorcerers. The Strigoi were falling back. They had realised that they were alone, and unsupported. The tunnel was shaking now, and the rocks were grinding loudly.

Khemalla shrieked like a banshee and lunged. Her blade skidded along the side of his cuirass as she sought to spit him. Layla darted to the side, climbed the wall, and leapt down, her blade smashing against his pauldron, and he was sent spinning about by the force of the blow. Stregga’s blade chopped down into his forearm. W’soran screamed.

Then, at last, the roof caved in. The returning Strigoi were blotted from sight by the falling rocks. Stregga pulled back for another blow and gaped upwards as the world fell in on them.

W’soran seized his moment. He slithered through the falling rocks like a striking snake. His talons pierced the flesh of Stregga’s throat and he coiled around her with every iota of speed he possessed. Then, with a hiss, he bit down on the other side of her neck, savaging flesh and cartilage, and finally bone, as her black blood — Neferata’s blood — pumped down his throat.

He swallowed Stregga’s final scream as the tunnel fell in on them. Amidst the thunder of rocks and the growl of the mountain, he slapped his palm down flat on the ground and the shadows swirled about him like a swarm of insects. Ghostly scarabs the colour of oil and the grave fluttered around him with a sibilant clatter, their phantom shapes somehow protecting his thin one from the falling rocks. The scarab-jars he had used to escape his enemies in Nehekhara were long gone, but the fluttering spectres of the insects that had been contained in those jars were still his to command, bound to him by unhallowed rites and the force of his own will. They protected him now, their constantly moving forms deflecting the rubble that pounded down on him, creating a cone of safety.

The last rock fell with a crash. It had been his intention to simply allow the skaven to bury his problems for him. The Lahmians had forced him to get his hands dirty. Dust stung his eyes and nose as he slid his fangs from Stregga’s throat. She flopped limply from his grip, her eyes opaque and white and her once lush form withered and thin. He had drained her dry. Her vitality coursed through him, adding to his own and filling him with a feeling of invigoration that left him feeling slightly light-headed. It warred with the old familiar fear of being buried, numbing it.

W’soran paused for a moment, looking down at the corpse, searching for any hint of life. There was none. If a vampire could be said to have met the true death, Stregga had. Perhaps he would tell Vorag that the skaven had taken her captive. A slow grin pulled at his thin lips. Yes, that would be amusing.

The forms of the scarabs faded like an evening mist and he drew his cloak to him. He pulled his amulets from beneath his cuirass and rubbed one with his thumb. It had been years since he had eaten one, but he already felt the craving, almost as strong as his thirst for blood, rising in him. It was like an itch he could not scratch. A soft whisper, just out of earshot, tempting him, reminding him of the power that could be his, if he had but the courage to take it. Stregga’s blank eyes glared at him contemptuously, as if she saw his hesitation and mocked him for it. ‘Your mistress has tried to kill me more than once, witch. And she has failed this time, as she has failed in every other attempt,’ he said to the body.

‘She… only… needs… to… succeed… once,’ a voice coughed, startling him. He turned, and snorted in amusement. Layla had been attempting to reach him, perhaps to save her sister-in-blood, or perhaps simply to take advantage of the distraction Stregga’s death provided. She had been caught in the collapse, half-buried in the rubble. Her head and one arm protruded from the tightly packed rocks and dark blood stained the stone in a cruel halo about her pale flesh. More blood coated her chin and streamed from her nose and eyes. Even with the weight of the mountain on her, the Lahmian still somehow lived. ‘Just once, old monster,’ she whispered hoarsely.

‘Yes, but perhaps she will think better of it henceforth, eh?’ W’soran said, sinking to his haunches in front of her. Still clutching his amulets in one hand, he reached out with his other and grabbed her crimson-stained hair, twisting her head up and to the side so that he could examine her face. ‘Especially when her hunting beasts do not return to their kennel, bearing my scalp,’ he said. ‘If your mistress bothers to rip your screaming spirit from the audient void to question you, you will say this — no more running. W’soran of Mahrak makes his stand here. In this place, I will build my own Lahmia, my own Nagashizzar. A city of the new dawn and corpse winds, wherein I shall build the chains that will drag down this fallen world and make of it something perfect. I will show both Neferata and Nagash for the frauds they are and were, mewling things demanding titles that are not their right. I spit on queens and grind kings beneath my heel, witch.’ He yanked on Layla’s hair, eliciting a grunt of agony. ‘You will tell her this, when you next see her,’ he snarled. ‘Your noisome shade shall pass my words on to your queen, squatting in her tomb.’

He released her and stood. There were half a dozen amulets dangling from his long fingers and they seemed to pulse in time to the beat of sour blood in his head. He stared at them, half in longing and half in fear. The first time, there had been no choice. It had been the wyrdstone or entombment, perhaps forever. But now he had a choice. He could escape without them. He was not injured this time.

He looked about him, and felt the closeness clawing at the edges of his mind. He fought it down, wrestling the gibbering terror that clung to him like an unwanted passenger into a box in the back of his mind. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he hissed. ‘I’m not.’ His words sounded petulant, even to him.

This wasn’t about fear this time. It was about expediency. That was all. He needed power. The amulets provided power. And what they took in return, he was willing to sacrifice. He had ever done so, so why hesitate now? He held the amulets up and examined them. The darkling glow of them was comforting at first glance, but it grew less so, the longer he looked.

He needed power, if he was to do what needed doing. He hissed and opened his jaws to skin-splitting width, and dropped the amulets in, one after the other. Fire burst along his mummified nerves, greater than before. His shrivelled muscles swelled and his eyes bulged as a daemon-heat was kindled within him. It happened more quickly than before, and he was almost overwhelmed. Oily smoke issued from his pores, wreathing him in a cloak of foulness. His hands twitched jerkily as he sank to his knees, wheezing and hissing. The mountain seemed to press down on him from all directions — he could feel its weight in every nerve and on the tip of every hair.

He coughed, trying to dredge up a scream, but all that escaped his mouth was an explosion of boiling gas. He felt like a fire-pit overstuffed with kindling, and the very air wavered about him as a vile heat radiated from his scrawny form. He clutched his sides, fearing that the surging energies that roiled in his gut would tear him apart.

The world pressed in on him, and for a moment, he could see everything, every part of the mountain, every battle taking place from its roots to its tip, including those that had yet to take place and those that never would. He saw the heaving veins of raw magic that threaded through the air around him and the frothing abominations that they emanated from, and he knew that they saw him as well. He saw faces as wide across as oceans and full to bursting with such hideous malignancy that even his sour, stunted soul quavered at the atrocities promised in the thinnest of smiles or the briefest flicker of an eye. For a moment, his sanity trembled on the edge of that vast, crumbling precipice.

Then, the rocks echoed with the sounds of insects scrabbling. For a moment, he thought that he had somehow inadvertently summoned his scarabs once more, before he realised that they were not his, for these, rather than being pale phantoms, were as black as Usirian’s pit. Their shells swallowed light and even his inhuman gaze could not fully discern them. They were equal parts smoke, filth and insect and they spun about him in a wild dance.

The voice, when it came, seemed to thrum through him, riding the fires of the abn-i-khat into the very recesses of his soul. I SEE YOU, it seemed to say. I SEE YOU, MY SERVANT, MY MOST FAITHFUL SON.

He watched in horror as the skittering insects flowed over one another, forming the crude approximation of a great face at his feet. It was Ushoran’s face, and yet not. Another face looked through Ushoran’s — a hateful, terrible face that seemed at once pleased and angered.

‘No,’ W’soran said, covering his face. ‘No, not yet! Not yet!’ His former bravado was gone, stripped away in a moment of uncomprehending terror. He was trapped, sealed in rock with the King of Nightmares and beyond him, the Court of Chaos, his mind and soul open for the flaying. He howled and gibbered, flailing at the faces that leered at him, promising torments of exquisite intricacy.

The voice did not respond to his maddened screams. When he finally lowered his hands, the scarabs were gone, as if they had never been. The only sound, in the cramped confines of the space, was Layla’s hoarse, croaking laughter. ‘You — you’re… mad,’ she wheezed. ‘K-killing you would be a mercy…’

W’soran shrieked and threw out a hand. Black energy burst from his crooked fingers and struck the trapped and cackling Lahmian, washing over her face and boiling the flesh from her head. Her screams ended abruptly. Only a blackened skull remained. Panting, W’soran turned and raised his hands. The tumbled rocks turned to slag as he gestured.

Even as he stepped into the newly-made tunnel, he knew that Nagash was watching. He knew, as he strode quickly into the darkness, erasing the stone from his path, that Nagash would always be watching. The shadow of the Undying King would cover his path until he forcibly removed it.

Chewing the shards of abn-i-khat, W’soran lurched onwards, to claim his citadel in fire and blood.