William King - The Queen's assassin

She nodded. “We’re running out of time,” she said. “The ritual has started.”

Jaderac chanted. His followers echoed the words. Smoke, bearing the substances they had extracted from the ghoul corpses emerged from the censers they bore, and floated out over the graveyard.

Black fog flowed towards him, entered his mouth and his nostrils, extended tendrils into his lungs and brain. He felt the fog now, as if it were an extension of himself, as if he had fingers of mist. Playfully he touched Sardontine with them. The old Lord flinched but kept chanting; what else could he do. Like all of them, he knew the ritual could not be interrupted on pain of the most severe sorcerous repercussions.

Jaderac extended his misty limbs and touched the ground. For days now, his followers had been preparing this area with alchemicals, letting them saturate the ground, sink deep into the earth until all that was needed was the catalyst and the ritual to call all the creatures down there back to unlife. He sensed the substances responding to his touch. He sent his consciousness burrowing downwards, worm-like, and felt the presence of the decomposing forms and the tiny semi-sentient fragments of necromantic energy with which the graveyard had been seeded. He gave orders. The dark spirits flowed into the bodies, providing all that was needed to complete an alchemical reaction already begun. Bodies began to move, to claw their way towards the surface, guided by Jaderac’s implacable will.

He stood at the centre of a great web of energy now, as it slowly extended its way through the graveyard. He touched the bodies hidden in the mausoleums and felt them respond. They too were filled with death energies. Jaderac called them to him and sent his misty tentacles on through the graveyard.

In a hundred crypts, dead eyes sprang open, green witch-fires burning in them. A hundred corpses rose and began to shamble out into the night, their minds filled with an unholy hunger.

Rik listened to the clock tick. It sounded loud as a drum in the quiet of the apartment. He notched the tip of another truesilver bullet and put it in his pocket. He doubted he would get the chance to use it but it was best to be prepared. He had half a dozen of them now.

He wondered what was happening at the graveyard, and how Asea and his comrades were doing. He wished he was with them, but the voices whispered to him that his place was here. That tonight was the night that Malkior would strike. Out there, in the snow, the soldiers of Talorea were moving. Everything was in confusion. There would never be a better time for an assassination attempt.

He thought about the notes they had found, which had told of the ritual. They had the hallmarks of a trap. Rik was sure that Asea knew that as well as he did, but she could not afford to leave the matter uninvestigated. The risks were too great.

The ticking of the clock became louder, and it began to strike the hour. It was midnight. The chimes were echoed by every clock in the building and then Rik felt it, the tearing sensation that told him that somewhere nearby a shadowgate had opened. Now that the moment had come, he felt weak, as if all the strength had drained out of him. He realised that he might have only minutes of life left to him. The voices babbled. Some urged him to hide. Some urged him to seek his prey. He rose to his feet, and invoked the spells Asea had taught him. A moment later, he sprang out into the corridor and raced through the Palace.

Even with his metabolism accelerated by spells of speed and strength fuelled by the stolen energies of the Quan, he felt as if he was too slow. It was like being in a nightmare where he ran towards a goal which seemed to recede before him and which he had no chance of reaching.

As the corridors blurred past, he was not sure he even wanted to reach that goal. Part of him was deathly afraid of confronting Lord Malkior. He knew his chances of survival were not great. Malkior was far older and more experienced in the ways of sorcery than he. He was a Shadowblood with access to all their powers and uncanny skills. Part of Rik wanted to run off into the night and hide yet he forced himself to run on.

A great hatred burned in him, stronger than his fear. Malkior had killed Rik’s mother and would kill Asea and Kathea if he could. He had left Rik to die in the most horrible way imaginable and all the horrors that haunted Rik now could be traced to that. He planned to turn the whole world into a vast prison camp in which all the humans and all of Rik’s friends would be nothing but cattle to keep alive a race of corrupt immortals. Malkior had become the focus for a lifetime of resentment and fear. He was a symbol of all the things Rik had loathed and dreaded in this world, and he had turned out to be worse than ever Rik had imagined him to be. The Terrarch deserved killing, and if there was even a slight chance that he could do it, Rik was going to take it.

Ahead of him the Royal Wing loomed. It seemed eerily silent tonight. Rik prayed it was just his imagination.

“I don’t like this at all,” said Sardec. The mist was thicker and darker than it had been. The smell of corruption had increased. Strange noises sounded throughout the cemetery. The ground shuddered slightly under his feet. Witchlights burned greenly on the branches of trees and the tops of tombs.

“We need to keep going, and find the centre of this,” said Asea. “That’s the only place we can stop it.”

Somewhere a metal gate swung open on creaky hinges. Heavy feet crunched on snow. Sardec doubted that they belonged to any of his men. He turned around. Most of them were lost in the gloom. He could barely make out the outlines of Weasel and Sergeant Hef. That huge looming bulk had to be the Barbarian. Karim crouched by Asea, a naked blade in his hand. The sorceress looked like a warrior goddess in the gloom.

“What’s happening, sir?” asked Sergeant Hef. It was obvious that the question was aimed at Asea. She answered it. “The dead are restless tonight, Sergeant. Necromancers are at work here and we are going to stop them.”

“Oh good,” said Weasel. “I haven’t seen enough sorcery in these past few months.”

“Is there anything you can tell us about how to deal with them, Milady?” asked Hef.

“Don’t let them bite you.”

“Would never thought of that,” muttered Weasel.

“Or get any of their blood on you if you can help it. There is a curse in it that it would be better to avoid.”

“Thank you, Milady,” said the Sergeant.

“Try and keep the men together now. There’s no telling what we might encounter next.”

Jaderac looked out into the night. Dead bodies were there, dead bodies that moved, animated by the dark energy he had summoned. More and more of them emerged from the darkness, drawn by his unholy power. There were dozens of walking corpses. More of the shambling dead appeared all the time. As they did so the mist thinned, as if it were being absorbed into the lungs of his creatures, and granting power to the dark spirits within.

Sardontine and the others gazed out of the pentacle, horror written on their faces. They looked as if they wanted to run, but they knew better. As long as they were within the Elder Sign, the dead could not touch them. They had no such assurances if they strayed beyond its boundaries.

Shots sounded nearby, drawing Jaderac from his trance dreams of power. There were soldiers, just as Tamara had claimed. In a way it was good. They would provide the first recruits for his new army.

The sentries let Rik in. They knew him as Kathea’s rescuer, and they recognised Asea’s seal. No one seemed to doubt his claim that he had an urgent message from the sorceress for the Queen.