Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

There were dozens of stunted, black-clad bodies clinging to the roof of the tunnel. Their black rags were covered in cave-dusts and their fur was slick with something vile that W’soran knew had served to kill their scent. Each was armed with a bandolier of clay flasks. Even as W’soran raised his hand, one of the skaven plunged its claw into its rags and extracted a handful of flat, metal disks.

The disks hissed as the ratkin sent them spinning through the air. They sank home into W’soran’s palm and forearm, eliciting a shriek of anger as his spell was disrupted. He staggered back, clutching his arm. ‘Kill them!’ he snapped.

Zoar and Melkhior reacted swiftly, unleashing a barrage of deadly magics. Skaven fell, screaming and burning. But not all of them, and not quickly enough — W’soran saw it all in an instant. The plan was obvious, in retrospect, and he cursed himself for not seeing it sooner. The skaven had drawn them in, drawn them deeper into the cramped tunnels, and now they were going to be made to pay. The surviving skaven tore off their bandoliers and hurled them towards the ground.

The ground erupted in green flame and the rock of the tunnel groaned and shifted as the flasks exploded, ripping the heart out of the tunnel. The skaven had used the wyrdstone for explosives. The tunnel was tearing itself apart, cracks running through the walls and floor. Skeleton warriors were consumed in the explosion or crushed by the falling rocks, or swallowed by the gaping floor. As the tunnel collapsed, the skaven, as trapped as W’soran and the others by what the latter now realised had been a suicide mission, leapt down, blades at the ready. A sword chopped into his raised arm, and he felt the sizzle of something smeared on the blade. With a scream, he smashed the skaven into the wall, even as the floor gave out from beneath him.

He heard Melkhior and Zoar scream as they all fell into darkness. Furry bodies slammed into him, squealing curses in their own chittering tongue as they hacked and chopped at him. He could smell something seeping from them; a poison perhaps, or a drug designed to remove their natural tendency towards cowardice. That was the only explanation he could find for their persistence. W’soran struck rock, bounced and spun, tumbling. His fingers found a hairy throat and he tore it open. Incisors sank into his shoulder and he hissed and reached backwards.

More rocks struck him. The explosion had caused a chain reaction. It was collapsing the tunnel and those below, ripping a wedge straight through the network of frail corridors like a knife through a wasp’s nest. Fleshy tails wrapped around him, squeezing and pulling. He couldn’t reach his sword. He caught a blade, breaking it and stabbing at its wielder.

W’soran grunted as he struck an outcropping. A normal man, especially the man he had been, would have been pulped a few moments after the explosion. As a vampire, short of being completely mashed into a fine paste, he had no doubt he would survive it. The skaven must have been desperate. Why else would they risk destroying their own fortress?

What if that was their intent? To gut the mountain and bring all of its glacial weight down on the invaders, entombing them forever. The thought chilled him — he had been buried before. For the first time in a long time, panic surged through him. Suddenly, survival was something to be feared. In animal terror of the great weight closing in around him, he flailed about and his claws dug into the rock. He could smell the fear-musk of the skaven now, and their writhing bodies tumbled past. He couldn’t see Melkhior or Zoar.

He scrambled up, trying to pull himself to safety. The fear grew, sweeping him up into its embrace and sucking him down. How long would he persist, buried in the darkness — centuries, possibly or even millennia; his experiments in that regard had not been forthcoming. He thought again of the vampires he’d left in the dark of Mourkain and he cowered, waiting for the collapse to end.

Stones crashed down around him, and dust swirled, obscuring his vision. As the last rock bounced away, W’soran shoved himself quickly into a crouch. He was unable to rise any further. His armour was cracked and hanging from his thin frame in ragged strips. His robes were torn and his flesh was streaked with black blood. He’d lost his blade. He didn’t bother to call out for his apprentices. If they had survived, they would find him. If they had not, they would be of little use.

The tunnel was little more than a half filled-in grave. There was little room to move and if he’d still been a breathing man, he’d likely have suffocated in minutes. But he wasn’t breathing and he could move. ‘Small mercies,’ he grunted. The rock swallowed his voice.

He looked up. Part of the tunnel had fallen in, across two sections of the wall, creating a small air pocket. Beyond the pocket, the rest of the tunnel was probably buried. He could see the crushed and pulverised remains of a number of skaven caught between the rocks.

Panic teased his thoughts. Suddenly, he was back in his jar beneath the temple, unable to move, to blink the spiders from his eyes or pluck the beetles from his flesh. He wouldn’t be buried again — he couldn’t! He closed his eyes and clamped down on the fear. ‘Why should you fear?’ he whispered to himself. ‘You are fear. You have been trapped before. Think. Think!’ He clutched at the abn-i-khat amulets dangling from his neck and squeezed them.

Abruptly he opened his eyes. He looked down, and the panic fled like a morning mist. ‘Haaaa,’ he breathed. The amulets glowed and trembled in his fingers. He held them up to his mouth and blew on them, expelling a lungful of sorcerous breath. The glow grew, and he felt the sickly warmth of the stones on his palm. Gathering his legs under him, he wrenched one of the amulets loose.

He hesitated. He had never dared take that step in imitation of Nagash. There was no telling what the eating of the stone would do to a being like him, or whether it would even have any effect whatsoever. But if it did… it was concentrated magic. Eating it had made Nagash more powerful than any other necromancer. Eating it empowered the skaven as well. And he needed power. He looked at it, looked at the way it seemed to suck in the darkness around it. The wyrdstone ate light and darkness alike, and the shadows seemed to be dragged towards the nooks and crannies of the amulet, as if grasped by invisible talons.

Even so, the worry was there. Nagash had consumed it and been consumed by it. He had been made both more and less than a man by a lifetime’s consumption of the soft, powdery stone. He had become addicted, requiring more and more of it to empower his spells.

Then, power was a stronger drug than any W’soran had ever heard of. The only thing it was good for was gaining more power. That was what creatures like Neferata and Ushoran had never understood — power was an end in itself, to be hoarded and increased, as the skaven did with their wyrdstone.

The weapons, the secrets of the skaven, would give him that power. They would give him the power to stare down the mad, phantom soul that rode poor, pathetic Ushoran towards oblivion, and to add its power to his own. ‘You think you’re safe, old liche?’ he murmured, examining the abn-i-khat. ‘You think your secrets are safe, hiding in that iron circlet? You think to devour me, hollow me out like a mummy and slip inside to ride me into the dark, far future, my master? You’re wrong, as you were wrong about Alcadizzar. I will be the one to devour you. I will swallow the carrion remnant of your tattered soul, Nagash, and I will be a true master of death.’

W’soran opened his jaws and his tongue, the colour of a leech flush after a feeding, unrolled and extended upwards like the questing tendril of a squid, rising past his thicket of fangs. The tip of his tongue brushed against the amulet, exploring the rough facets. A surge of power rippled through him and he shivered in anticipation. Then, with a grunt, he dropped the amulet into his mouth.