Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

‘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.