Josh Reynolds - Master of Death

He stretched out his hand, stirring the embers of their magic the way a man might stir a campfire. He had not seen fit to craft any more such creatures as those he had summoned that day when the Lahmians had come for him. Their presence had annoyed him on a spiritual level, their proximity grating on his senses like a file on iron. He had freed those wraiths, but had remembered and refined the method behind their creation, like a blacksmith hammering out imperfections.

Words slipped from his mouth. The words were meaningless, a vocal focus as all incantations were, stabbing his will into the corpses at his feet, stirring the ashes of their souls into white-hot fury and drawing them forth in a cataclysmic display of power. As before, so many years ago, that power burst from the bodies like coruscating clouds of inky darkness. The ghosts that fluttered about him seemed to shrink back from these new spirits. If the dead could be frightened, the bound souls of dead necromancers would be the thing that did so. He watched the things gain shape and form and sniffed in satisfaction.

‘Mighty magics indeed, my lord,’ a voice growled behind him. W’soran turned to see Chown riding towards him. The Draesca king’s body and armour were covered in blood, and his great mace dripped a trail as it dangled from his grip. The bat-winged helm seemed to pulse with a satisfied hum upon his white-haired head, and, as ever, W’soran examined it closely, peering up at it, wondering if the piece of him that lurked within it had yet flowered into malign sentience. ‘I would know those secrets,’ Chown continued, his eyes glowing with an eerie light. Then, a moment later he added, ‘If it would please you, my lord.’

Yes, there’s definitely something of me in you, man , W’soran thought in amusement. ‘In time, oh mighty king, you shall know this and many things besides.’ He gestured to the blood that coated Chown’s mace. ‘Victory, then, I take it?’

‘Victory and death,’ Chown said, grinning fiercely. ‘The dogs of Morgheim have fled the field, and my riders harry them. We shall hunt them to the very walls of their lair and bring them to battle, my lord.’ Around him, the dead kings of the Draesca seemed to groan softly in agreement, and their glowing eyes sought out W’soran. He met their gazes and raised his hand in benediction, and the dead seemed to sigh.

‘Aye, that we will, King of the Draesca, and soon to be Lord of the Vaults,’ W’soran said. Chown’s face betrayed his surprise and pleasure. W’soran smiled thinly. ‘Emperor Vorag has sworn it, and as his castellan, I shall ensure it. You will be lord of those mountains, though we must scour them of life.’ Chown gave a grunt of satisfaction. The barbarians were easy enough to placate, W’soran reflected, and their wants were minimal at best. He could easily take back his gift at a later date, should he so desire, after all.

Ullo and Arpad rode towards him, the former holding a knot of heads by their scalp-locks. The slack jaws of the heads sagged, revealing their fangs. By the condition of them, it appeared that Ullo had simply ripped them loose from their owners’ necks. He held up the gory trophies and his black eyes glittered. ‘Ushoran must be desperate if he’s reduced to employing such thin-blooded weaklings. These pups barely had five decades apiece. They were no sport at all.’

‘You say that as if it’s a bad thing,’ Arpad said, grinning. ‘I prefer an easy fight, me.’ He twisted in his saddle, looking around. ‘That’s what this has been from the first.’

‘Too easy, maybe,’ Ullo said, examining the heads, as if trying to glean an answer from their vacant stares. The black gaze flickered to W’soran. ‘What do your magics tell you, sorcerer? Is the empire dying?’

‘Can’t you smell it?’ W’soran asked, spreading his arms and tilting his head. Overhead, lightning flashed in the bellies of the clouds. ‘We are in at the death, Ullo. Strigos lies panting in the mud, our arrows and spears jutting from its hide.’ He inhaled the stink of the battlefield, inflating his narrow chest. ‘Why else would I have stripped my — Vorag’s — territories of troops? Why else would my agents spread the gospel of fire and sword through these black hills as openly as they do? Mourkain will be ours before the first snows of the season fall.’

‘If your acolytes at Crookback Mountain send us reinforcements, aye,’ Ullo rumbled. He scratched a flat cheek with a bloody talon. ‘Have you had word from Melkhior these past weeks?’

W’soran looked at him. ‘What are you implying?’

‘We are far from our territories, sorcerer. We might not have supply lines, as such, but neither do we have an easy route ahead of us. We might be able to raise the dead with every battle, but even they don’t last forever. Our enemies know how to fight them, and how to fight us. We lost Orcuk and Scabeg of Illios in this battle, both of them pinned like flies to the ground by men — mortal soldiers. And half of my spearmen, dead though they were, are no more — burnt by sorcery and blasted to ashes. And Ushoran has been sending smaller and smaller forces against us. There’s not enough dead to replace our losses. We’re fighting for every stretch of ground and our armies are being ground down, slowly but surely.’ Ullo said it all flatly, and without accusation. Nonetheless, W’soran was stung by his words.

‘What would you have us do then, Ullo? Retreat, perhaps?’ he snapped.

‘I speak of caution, not retreat,’ Ullo growled back. ‘Perhaps we should wait until Lukas and Vaal the Thirst have rejoined us,’ he added, naming two of the other renegade Strigoi, both of whom who had taken smaller forces to the west and the north-east, respectively, in an attempt to lead off any reinforcements for Gashnag’s now-destroyed force. ‘With their forces added to ours, we could punch through the ring of fortifications that line the Plain of Dust and reach Mourkain within a fortnight. But if Melkhior doesn’t supply us with reinforcements soon, it’s going to be a slog. We’ll be lucky if we’ve got enough cold bodies to throw at Abhorash when the Great Dragon inevitably unfurls his wings and moves to stop us.’

‘Not to mention that they’ve got their own sorcerers,’ Arpad interjected, gesturing hesitantly to the floating, black spectres that W’soran had wrought from the remains of Morath’s acolytes. Even creatures as brutal as the Strigoi feared the wraiths on an instinctive level, like wolves faced with a maddened bear. ‘Three less now, I admit, but who knows how many he’s got…’

‘One or a hundred, it matters not,’ Chown said. ‘For we have our Lord W’soran, whose might is unparalleled.’ The Draesca flashed his blackened teeth in a grin. W’soran glanced at the savage necromancer and felt a twinge of something that might have been affection, as a parent for an extremely stupid, yet loving, child. The Draesca had always held him in some reverence, a fact that often slipped his mind. The brutal tribesmen viewed him with less fear than the Yaghur had felt for Nagash, for his touch had ever been light. Strangely, they were more than willing to fight and die for him, despite that.

‘Be that as it may, you might be right,’ W’soran demurred. Ullo wasn’t; he was a fool, and over-cautious, frightened as he was of Abhorash. Nonetheless, Ullo was too valuable to ignore or supersede. W’soran knew that the shark-faced Strigoi’s loyalty was held only by that thinnest of threads — a debt of honour. He had saved Ullo at the Battle of the Black Water, and the Strigoi seemed to feel that he owed W’soran his grudging service in return. And Ullo was the only reason that the other renegade Strigoi remained loyal.

W’soran was not deaf to the mutinous whispers of his bloodthirsty servants. Some Strigoi thought he had done away with Vorag, since his disappearance into the eastern mountains. That W’soran was only using the name of the Bloodytooth as a mask for his own desires. That was true as far as it went, though he’d done nothing to Vorag. Indeed, the Bloodytooth’s fate was as much a mystery to him as it was to the others. He’d been too busy, and disinclined besides, to find out what had happened to the would-be emperor of Strigos.