Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

‘Would that I could trust you to do so, my son,’ W’soran said, mock-gently. ‘But your way of waging war is too savage for my plans. You would attempt to gut the beast, before properly bleeding it. You have no patience.’

Melkhior opened his mouth, as if to protest. Then, with a grunt, he fell silent. W’soran nodded in satisfaction. ‘Maybe there is hope for you yet,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me — our envoys to the ogre tribes and the dawi of the eastern wastes… have they returned yet?’

‘The dawi have agreed to provide us with arms and armour, in return for slaves,’ Melkhior said. The dawi — or dawi zharr , as they called themselves — were an odd lot, quite unlike the stern rulers of the mountain deeps. It had been a lucky accident when his legions had stumbled across them. They were vile creatures, with a penchant for casual cruelty that W’soran could almost admire. But they made wonderful arms and armour; things far better than the crude armour crafted by his dead smiths. The armouries of Mourkain were full of wargear manufactured in the workshops of the Silver Pinnacle previous to Neferata’s usurpation of the mountain hold from its previous owners. W’soran intended to match that with dwarf-forged weaponry of his own.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We’ll send out the first caravan this month. And the ogres?’ he added.

‘I believe they ate our envoy,’ Melkhior said.

‘How many does that make?’

‘Sixteen,’ Melkhior said.

W’soran grunted. The ogres rarely travelled far west enough to trouble the tribes of the mountains, but when they did, nothing but death and destruction followed in their wake. They were fearsome beasts, and all the more so if they were under his banner. ‘Send another,’ he said.

Melkhior nodded. ‘Should we send riders in pursuit of Vorag?’

W’soran hesitated. Then, ‘No.’ He did not elaborate. Let Melkhior draw his own conclusions. They continued their ascent until they reached the uppermost levels of the mountain. W’soran forced Melkhior to run through everything that had occurred in his absence; even the smallest of matters did not escape his notice.

By the time they reached his laboratories, W’soran’s keen mind was scheming anew. Plans always sprouted more plans. Neferata wasn’t the only one who could spin webs within webs. When he entered his chambers, the smell of Arabyan incense and spoiled meat coiled about him. He closed his eyes and inhaled, tasting the sour scent of the dark magics that stained the stones after almost a century of experimentation.

When he opened his eyes, his gaze was drawn immediately to the cage hanging from the ceiling, where Iskar crouched, watching him with his new, glittering eyes. W’soran had plucked the skaven’s ruined orbs from their sockets and replaced them with new ones, cultivated and grown in a febrile tumour of flesh kept alive by a serum crafted from powdered abn-i-khat and vampire blood. Iskar’s eyes looked like faceted emeralds, and they cast a sickly glow on anything the ratkin looked at. It hissed silently, baring its rotted fangs around the strange leather and iron muzzle that simultaneously pinioned its jaws and trapped its tongue. Drool dripped from its maw and dried foam coated the corners of its mouth.

Despite this, the skaven looked stronger than it had in a decade. No longer was it a withered thing, but instead muscled and sleek. W’soran leaned close to the cage and made satisfied noises. He looked at Melkhior. ‘I see the improvement in its diet has had gratifying results,’ he said.

‘I still don’t understand why it’s still alive. What use is it now — especially if you’re not intending to use those weapons?’ Melkhior asked. He stepped aside quickly as a severed hand, a coiled, sharpened spinal column grafted to its wrist stump, skittered past like a fleshy scorpion.

‘Knowledge is sometimes its own reward, and I am loath to dispense with a potentially useful tool,’ W’soran said. ‘At the moment, I’m merely curious as to how long this beast will live. I’d wager it’s already survived well past its allotted span.’ He sniffed and turned.

Half-dead, half-living things hung from the great chains that draped the open spaces of the cavern like a massive web of iron. He had begun experiments in grafting living flesh to dead, to see what effect the one had on the other. A thing that had the heads of an orc and a skaven on its malformed shoulders squealed and thrashed as he drew close to it and traced the suture marks that marked where green flesh had joined hairy. ‘Wonderful,’ he chuckled, ‘so persistent.’ He looked at Melkhior. ‘I do so miss this place, when on campaign.’

‘Then perhaps it is time for you to leave the dirty business of war to me, my lord,’ Melkhior said. ‘I am ready to serve you, in any capacity you desire, and I would be happy to lead our legions to war.’

‘Are you deaf, or simply forgetful?’ W’soran asked. ‘My decision is final, no matter how much you whine.’ He stretched out a hand and whistled. Slack-jawed human heads bobbed obscenely through the air of the laboratory at his call, fluttering on bat wings that had been grafted to their skulls. A cephalopod-like mass of spinal columns and squirming intestines, protected by sheaths of crusty blood and bile, flopped towards W’soran like a dog welcoming its master home. He clucked welcomingly and bent to stroke the quivering, bulbous face that briefly surfaced from the writhing morass, its tongue lashing across his fingers. He moved on, and it squirmed into the shadows after giving Melkhior a wet growl.

Rank upon rank of heavy sarcophagi, plundered from Nagashizzar by Vorag in earlier years, lined the walls of the cavern, and W’soran’s servants inspected, measured and tested the dead things within. Ancient experiments he’d long thought lost, now returned to him again — old kings of the long-extinct Yaghur now mummified and wrapped in sorcerous linens. W’soran paused to examine them and nodded as one of his cowled scribes croaked a reply to a brief question. He patted the squatting creature affectionately and turned to a heavy half-sphere, constructed from thick shards of amber set into a bronze frame that occupied a space nearby.

Over it hung the limp, bloodless corpses of a dozen orcs, the bodies hung head-down, so that their foul fluids might plop into the sphere. More of the crooked scribe-things scuttled about the place, stirring its steaming contents and striking the bodies above with long poles in order to free the last drips of blood.

‘And is this a matter of curiosity as well?’ Melkhior grunted.

W’soran sank to his haunches and peered through the thick amber. A dull form floated within, barely discernible in the opaque stew of blood. Layla of Lahmia yet lived, albeit after a vastly diminished fashion. ‘In part… more, I wish to know at what point our kind finally give out. Removing the head or the heart will drop even a being of my age and potency, but if they could be reattached or healed somehow… would these old bones still live?’

He gestured to himself. ‘We are not true immortals, Melkhior. We are merely more persistent than the run of the mill beast. Even the resurrected dead are not immortal. They suffer cessation, if not true death. I believe we do the same. Both Neferata and I were pinned through the heart, and left for dead, and we both walk now among the living. Abhorash, I’m told, was devoured by a great beast in the Southlands during his exile, and yet even now bestrides the earth like an infuriating colossus. And Ushoran was set on fire and eaten by jackals. I wish to know why our flesh resists the corruption of death. Rather, say, I wish to know why it does it in some cases and not others…’

He placed a hand against the glass. ‘I wish to know the secrets of life and death. I wish to know where the dividing line is, and how it might be erased entirely. There is a saying, in Araby… what is not dead can eternal lie and over strange eons, even death may die . It is as true as it is trite.’ W’soran stood. ‘Nagash is both dead and yet not. Something of him, of his black will, persists, like a flea in the fold of a jackal’s skin. True immortality…’