Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

Nonetheless, they were not noticeably quick to join the great majority. The Lahmians had struck with commendable swiftness, while the Draesca watched. His men, whom he’d left on the lower plateau, were dead or dying, all save a tiny knot of warriors who had sought refuge in one of the warrior lodges that spread out in disorganised fashion in a semi-circle around Shull’s laughable palace. One or two of his prospective apprentices lay dead as well. The others were with the Strigoi, watching the approach of the Lahmians with horrified awe through shattered wooden walls and tatty fur windbreaks. There were only six of the Lahmians, and in as many minutes, they had butchered three times their number.

‘And to think, Neferata once accused Ushoran of being profligate with our gift,’ he said, loudly. ‘Six little scullery maids, all in a row.’

His voice echoed down through the courtyard. The Lahmians below were not clad in robes, but in travelling leathers and piecemeal armour. In helms and cloaks, at a distance, human eyes might mistake them for men. Up close, there were too many curves and too few scars. They turned like hunting hounds at his call, their gear spattered with blood, their jaws agape and their weapons dark and dripping.

W’soran clapped his hands together, once. ‘Well then, little maids. Here I am. Come and get me,’ he said. They did so, and in a rush, moving like quicksilver blurs up the stairs. They came at him from all sides, closing in too swiftly for his eye to follow.

Even as they drew within a sword’s length, the ground beneath them ruptured and split, disgorging the dead. Bony talons clawed the air and gaping skulls bit blindly. The moment he had set sandalled foot on the ground, his magics had seeped down into the loose soil, caressing the closest dead into semi-awareness. Besides the honoured interred of the tribe, there were also mass graves at the entrance to every lodge-house, where enemies of the Draesca were buried alive in order to bring good fortune to those who resided in the lodge. These skeletal horrors, wrapped in roots, rags and chains, burst from their pits to grapple with the surprised vampires and drag them down into the churning dirt. One alone managed to avoid the clutching hands, and she hurtled towards W’soran, blade scything out towards his neck.

His palm brushed aside the blade as the talons of his free hand buried themselves in his attacker’s throat. He met her doomed gaze with one of amusement and gave a chortle as he twisted and yanked, tearing out her throat in a spray of black ichors. The body toppled past him as he stepped daintily aside and started down the stairs. The other vampires were tearing themselves away from the dead, albeit slowly. They would be free soon enough, however. W’soran paid them no heed. He clasped his hands behind his back as he walked.

‘It should come as little surprise to you, or your mistress, that I am not a worldly man,’ he called out, over his shoulder. ‘I know little of spying or politics. But I do know quite a bit about faith. I was a priest once. I was a speaker for the dead, a preparer of corpses and a master of the mortuary rites. I prepared the dead for their final journey to the gods, and saw to the proper sealing of tombs. I buried poor men and rich men, powerful men and weak. All were equal in death, I thought. Foolishly, as it turned out. Even the dead have their own hierarchy.’

He stopped before the crumpled bodies of the men who would have been his apprentices. Even in death, their bodies so much cooling meat, there lurked a kernel of dark magic within them. One had been the shaman of a hill tribe, and still wore furs that stank of dark caves and bat droppings. The other had been a hedge-witch, surreptitiously plying his trade on the fringes of settlements. Both had had the potential to be something greater. W’soran had smelled it in them, and he found it almost insulting that they had been so casually slaughtered before achieving that potential.

At the top of the steps, the doors to Shull’s palace were torn from their hinges by the flying body of a Lahmian. Iona had struck them with crossed forearms and she spun about, landing in a crouch, her snarling features pointed towards the wights that pursued her. She was bloody, but seemingly unbowed. Yet another failing of Neferata’s teachings — her creatures did not have the good sense to know when to give up.

He turned back to the bodies. With an almost gentle gesture, he raised a hand over them. The essences of the two dead men rose at his motion, seeping through the rents and gouges in their mutilated bodies like smoke through the slats of a burning hutch, to coalesce beneath his palm in two swirling spheres of absolute darkness. Yes, there had been great power in them, waiting to be unlocked and honed. And that power was frustrated and angry. He let slip a bit of his own magic to join theirs, and the spheres bulged and bristled, forming twin shapes, quite unlike anything he’d seen before. Then, he had never before tried to draw forth the spirits of slain magic users.

There was a hideous beauty in the slow flowering of the nightmare shapes. He could feel them drawing strength and substance from the stuff of death which inundated the town, in a way that was at once familiar and strange. Smoky shapes that might have been bones or serpents or something in-between roiled within the masses.

‘Fascinating,’ he murmured, watching as the shapes writhed in the air before him, changing and stretching. A surge of curiosity snapped through him, as strong in its way as his thirst for blood. He had been too long away from his laboratory and library, too long away from his alembics and tomes. He thought of the entombed Lahmian, Layla, and blind, mad Iskar. He’d ordered the skaven to be fed regularly on gruel made from its own kind, laced with abn-i-khat, and the result was an impressive longevity. Layla, on the other hand, was rotting on the vine, kept alive only by his good graces and the vat of skaven blood he’d ordered her submerged in.

As he thought of one Lahmian, a second almost killed him. Only the hiss of parting air alerted him to the passage of the blade. He whirled and struck her wrist with bone-splintering force, knocking her sprawling. Even as she fell, however, Iona lunged to take her place, red hair wild and knotted with gore. ‘Murderer,’ she snarled. He stumbled back as she struck at him with her palms and feet, bending and snapping and spinning so fast that it was all he could do to avoid the blows. ‘Monster,’ she growled, dropping low and kicking his legs out from under him.

He fell atop the bodies of his late followers. Behind Iona, two more Lahmians approached. Their sisters, including the creature called Varna, looking decidedly the worse for wear, were busy holding off the wights. W’soran squirmed back, chuckling. ‘If I am a monster, I am not alone, little maid,’ he said.

He looked up, at the ethereal shapes coiling and twitching above him. They looked like nothing so much as rag-clad bones wreathed in smoke. He flung out a hand. ‘Kill them!’ he bellowed. He had no idea what sort of spirits he had conjured. Now was as good a time as any to see what they were capable of.

The two rag-clad phantoms shot forward, spiralling through the air towards the Lahmians. Iona, quicker on the uptake this time, leapt to one side. The two following her were not. One was jerked into the air by bony hands like a toy. She screamed as her alabaster flesh puckered and blistered at the touch of the thing. A gout of frigid air burst from her open mouth and a hellish frost formed on her limbs and face, even as her struggles weakened. The other suffered a similar fate, her flesh blackening with an impossible cold, and her hair cracking and falling from her scalp in brittle lumps as she was dragged into the air and wrapped in fluttering rags and rattling bones.