by C. L. Werner
Brunner looked over the room quickly, unmoved by the horror and loathsomeness of the things the necromancer had accumulated in his twisted studies. What interested the bounty hunter was the object lying upon a long wooden table in the centre of the room.
The mummy stretched nearly the entire length of the seven-foot table. Encased in mouldering funeral wrappings that had become grey-green with age and decay, the corpse was like some withered ogre. Brunner could see that in life, Nehb-ka-menthu had been a powerful man, broad of shoulder and long of limb. The bounty hunter strode closer, curious despite himself to get a better look at the long-dead priest-king of Khareops. He could see that the wrappings still bore faint traces of pigment, like oily smudge marks, presumably the last remains of the once vivid and vibrant picture writing of the liche-priests of Nehekhara.
The cloth was stretched tight about the shrivelled remains and Brunner could make out the face of the dead ruler through its mask of grey-green. The face was largely intact, displaying a dome-like brow, high cheeks and a firm jaw. There was a look of power and cruelty about the dead face that suggested an implacable will and a ruthlessness that might endure even the trial of the grave.
Brunner drew away from the mummy, pulling Mahrun’s holy stake from his belt. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to have run into you when you were alive,’ he muttered to the motionless husk. ‘Let’s just make sure you don’t cause me any problems now that you are dead.’ He lifted the stake, holding it above the sunken chest of the mummy, and placed the point against its left breast.
The bounty hunter found himself suddenly and violently thrown to the floor, the stake rattling across the wooden covering. He cursed his lack of caution. He should have heard someone approaching, but he had been so intent upon examining the mummy, that he had failed to hear his attacker’s approach. As he began to lift himself from the floor, a powerful kick lashed into his midsection, throwing him back. The bounty hunter crashed against one of the shelves, knocking books and bones from the upper shelves and snapping one of the lower ones in half as his body smashed into it.
On his back, Brunner could see his attacker now. He was a huge man, thick cords of muscle wove about his limbs, and his chest was a great mass of meat and sinew. He wore ragged clothing, much befouled by mud and less mentionable stains. The man’s head was covered only by a few patchy spots of blond hair, his features broad, his mouth open in an idiot grin. Auburn eyes stared dimly at Brunner, fixed in a bleary dullard’s gaze. In many ways, the bounty hunter was reminded of the thing he had killed in the room above. Perhaps this brute was also becoming a ghoul, sustaining himself on whatever his master did not employ in his foul experiments. The man made some inarticulate sounds with his thick, useless tongue, then shambled toward the intruder, setting down a leather sack he had been carrying.
The half-wit stooped to grab at Brunner’s body, to lift him from the floor in a crushing embrace. The bounty hunter did not give him a chance. He rose to meet the muscle man, swinging around the object his questing fingers had closed on—a broken length of shelf. The splintered wood smashed into the idiot’s face. Bright red blood and yellowed teeth sprayed across the wall behind him. The big man staggered back, one hand clutching at his injury, blood drooling from his ravaged mouth.
Brunner did not give the idiot a chance to recover, but was on him in an instant, smashing the board once again into the man’s head. The wretch staggered with the force of the blow, and retreated from the bounty hunter, making pathetic noises with his malformed tongue. His dim eyes stared stupidly at the man who was now attacking him. Brunner swung the board around a third time, this time cracking the wood across the big man’s skull. The idiot dropped like a pole-axed ox, his big body splintering the scavenged wood on the floor as he fell. Brunner closed upon the prone body, kicking the man’s head with his steel-toed boot. He had felt the strength in those arms and was not about to take the chance that the dreg might get back up.
Panting with his exertions and trying to reclaim the breath the idiot’s kick had forced from his lungs, Brunner knelt and retrieved the wooden stake from the floor. Pausing for a moment to collect himself, he strode back to the table and the withered corpse resting upon it.
‘Where were we?’ he asked as he placed the point of the stake once more over the mummy’s shrivelled heart. Once again, he was kept from finishing his task.
‘Leave that alone and get out of here!’ shouted a voice from the doorway of the laboratory. Brunner spun around, dropping the stake to draw his pistol from its belt. Framed in the doorway was a thin, scraggly apparition. The man wore a loose cassock of dark blue trimmed with grey fur and tassels of hair. His brown hair was greasy and hung in ratty ropes about his unpleasant, slippery face. His skin had an unpleasant, sickly hue, as though he had bathed in pus and not dried the filth from his body.
Like his servant, the necromancer also bore a leather sack, which he dropped to the floor in alarm. From it, the butchered remains of a freshly exhumed corpse spilled onto the floor. The bounty hunter had chosen a good time to make his entrance, the necromancer had been away, securing his sickening materials from one of Miragliano’s morgues. But fortune had deserted Brunner just as readily. The necromancer was home now.
The necromancer did not wait to see if the intruder would comply with his command. In one of his filthy hands, he gripped a severed hand, green with rot. Before Brunner could fire his pistol, the necromancer growled a word of loathsome power. The severed hand gave off a sickly light. The necromancer threw his free hand forward, casting a fistful of dust at the bounty hunter. Brunner dodged the particles of corruption that glowed with the same hue as the wasted extremity held by the necromancer. The dust impacted against the shelves behind Brunner, sizzling like acid as it withered the wood and corroded the leather bound tomes.
Carandini uttered a sharp hiss as Brunner rolled away from the attack. The bounty hunter fired at the necromancer, the shot passing through the loose garment and burying itself in the rotten wood of the door. Brunner swore under his breath. Either some flaw in the symmetry of the ball had thrown off his shot or some dire sorcery warded his target. He rose from his crouch, holstering the pistol and unslinging the repeater crossbow from his back.
The necromancer glared at Brunner, eerie witch-fire gathering in the hollow pits of his eyes. Carandini let the severed murderer’s paw fall and clutched at the empty air with his wasted, claw-like fingers. Low, filthy sounds dribbled from the man’s puffy pink lips. Brunner took aim hastily, determined to put a bolt between the necromancer’s eyes before he could work his black sorcery. But before he could fire, a vice-like grip closed upon his boot, crushing his ankle with the fury of a wolf-trap.
Brunner stared down at his feet. Dull, idiot eyes stared back at him from a cracked and splintered face. There was no question that Carandini’s feeble-minded assistant was dead: pulpy coils of brain hung from the ruptures in his skull. What animated the hulking brute’s movements, what enabled him to reach out and grab his killer, was only a twisted perversion of life, a horrible violation of the laws of death brought into being by the necromancer.
The pressure on Brunner’s foot increased until he thought the clutching fingers would crack his very bones. Clearly the strength of the already powerful dreg had been increased by this unnatural state of pseudo-life. Brunner brought the crossbow swinging low, firing into the monster at his feet. The first bolt exploded the zombie’s skull, spilling brains and dark blood across the floor. A second bolt burrowed into the monster’s back. The zombie grew tense as its unnatural life ebbed away, and its twice slain muscles tensed into the wooden rigidity of death. Brunner howled as the grip on his boot increased with the zombie’s destruction.
Brunner had no time to extract himself from the crushing grip. The sound of shuffling feet demanded his attention. The two bodies he had noted leaning against the wall had been stirred into motion by Carandini’s incantation. The zombies moved forward with stiff, awkward steps, rotting garments
and flesh hanging from their wretched forms in ragged strips. Lifeless eyes were trained upon the trapped bounty hunter as they ponderously advanced upon him. The necromancer gloated from behind the long table. He was peering above the embalmed hulk of the priest-king, using the ancient body for cover. Brunner considered loosing one of his remaining crossbow bolts at the fiend, but decided that the shot would be too uncertain.
Instead, he fired his last two bolts into the oncoming zombies. The first walking corpse staggered and fell as the steel bolt punched through its rotten skull and embedded itself in the wall behind the undead automaton. As it hit the floor, a greasy putrid fluid bubbled from its wound, yellow with corruption, black with the dried remnants of the corpse’s blood. Brunner fired his last bolt at the other zombie. The missile impacted in the corpse’s face, sticking from its cheek like a macabre growth of bone. The zombie staggered from the force of the impact, but uttered no sound of anguish or injury. It merely swung its body around and began to shuffle relentlessly towards the bounty hunter once more.
Brunner threw the spent skaven crossbow at the approaching zombie and drew Drakesmalice from its sheath. Gripping the sword tightly, Brunner swung it downward, severing the wrist that had closed upon his ankle. He stepped away, favouring his uninjured foot. The other zombie took another shambling step forward, its wasted limbs groping toward him. Brunner leaned his body away from the necrotic thing and swung Drakesmalice at its neck. The sword clove easily through the rotted flesh and the desiccated head flew from its shoulders, bounced from the near wall and rolled across the floor. The headless body stood for a moment, devoid of motion, before toppling sidewise to the floor, rigid in its second death.
Carandini gave a yelp of fright as he watched the last zombie expire. He bounded away from the long table, scrambling toward the doorway. Brunner hobbled towards the man, murderous eyes blazing from beneath his visor. Carandini had chosen his cover only too well, for by positioning himself behind the table, he had also placed the bounty hunter between himself and the door. The necromancer hissed like a serpent, spun around and dashed toward one of the shelves. The bounty hunter paused, pulling a throwing knife from the bandoleer across his chest.
‘Wait!’ pleaded Carandini. The necromancer held a small glass vial he had removed from the shelf in an upraised hand. Brunner pulled back his own hand to hurl the knife into the wizard’s body. ‘This contains bog fire!’ Carandini declared, his slippery voice at once threatening and pleading. ‘If I drop this, this entire room will go up!’
Brunner hesitated. If the vial did indeed contain bog fire, the eldritch vapour might react with the air just as the necromancer threatened. The room, and everything in it would be incinerated by the volatile explosive gas. The entire house with its rotting timbers would quickly go up in flames. He might escape the room if Carandini were to drop the glass, but with his injured foot, Brunner was not sure he would escape the fire that would follow. Slowly, and reluctantly, the bounty hunter replaced his knife.
‘That’s right,’ sneered the necromancer. ‘Now put away your sword.’
‘I can’t do that,’ commented Brunner, taking a few hopping steps forward.
‘Why?’ demanded Carandini, his eyes blazing with anger.
‘Because I need it to remove that ugly head of yours from its neck.’ Brunner took another series of shuffling steps, rounding the long table. Carandini cringed away from the killer’s approach, straining to lift the glass vial still higher.
‘I will drop it!’ he shrieked. ‘I’ll destroy us both! Stop right there!’
Brunner’s voice was as flat and icy as any grave-born horror. ‘I have a better idea. It involves you setting that thing down. Do that, and I’ll give you five minutes before I come after you.’ The bounty hunter took another menacing step around the long table. ‘Trust me, it’s the best deal you’re going to get.’
Whatever response the necromancer was going to voice died in his throat as a gasp of terror forced its way upward. Carandini’s eyes grew wide with fright, his sickly finger pointing accusingly at the bounty hunter. But he was looking at something else entirely. Brunner followed his gaze and found himself leaping back from the table, injured foot or no.
Carandini’s voice returned in a wheezy groan.
‘I told you not to touch the mummy!’
Light slowly intruded upon the perpetual darkness, awareness slowly returned to the mind of the ancient sleeper. A flicker of power had disturbed his dark dreams of dusty tombs and obelisk-lined necropolises. How long had he slept the sleep of the tomb? Seven centuries? Ten?
Memory stirred, recollections of a time as parched and empty as the sands of the desert. Of a great and powerful spell, a sorcerous apocalypse that had fallen upon Khareops, Numas and Khemri and all the great land of Nehekhara, which had in an instant robbed the most ancient kingdom of man of all life and vitality. It had stilled the heart and sucked the breath of every living thing in Khareops.
It had been the Great Ritual, cast by the Accursed One so that he might reclaim his throne and rule over an empire of the dead. Withered lids slid back from the dry hollows of the mummy’s face, flakes of crusty decomposed skin scattering like sandy tears. Nearby someone had drawn upon similar power, and he could feel the faintest echo of that tremendous act of evil.
More memories rose within the desiccated husk of Nehb-ka-menthu. The priest-king could recall the moment of his own death, and yet death had not been the end. His soul had not left his mortal frame. Like a spectator, he had watched as the liche-priests had prepared and embalmed his body, watched as the unliving priests, the only things in all Khareops that now walked the dead streets of the necropolis, bore his body in its golden sarcophagus to his pyramid tomb.
For some time he had remained within his tomb, detached from his body, detached from all thought, existing in the dark limbo of the dead. Was it months or aeons that he remained thus? But at last, the power had made itself felt across the Dead Lands once more. The Accursed One had awoken once more, and the power of his black resurrection made itself felt across the carrion realm of Nehekhara. The power had reached out and stirred other things from their ancient graves. So it was that Nehb-ka-menthu had emerged from his tomb, to contest with his own ancestors for the rule of Khareops.
The mummy’s right arm moved, falling from its chest to the side of the table. Slowly, so slowly that it did not seem to be moving. And yet how incredibly swift must such a motion seem to a body that had lain silent and still in the cool dark of its grave for hundreds of years?
When had Nehb-ka-menthu last walked the earth? Had it been when he had mustered the dead hosts of his city, when he had set out to find the phantom tower of Nagash’s disciple, the liche king Arkhan the Black, to ransack that place of darkest sorcery, to bear away its terrible secrets? Had it been when he returned in defeat from the dread city of Khemri and his attempt to force his way into the profane Black Pyramid of Nagash itself? As in life, so in death did Nehb-ka-menthu lust for the power of the dark magic. As in life, so too in death did that knowledge elude him, straying almost within his very reach then dancing away once more.
The mummy moved its other arm, letting it fall to its side. The sound of battle intruded upon the corpse’s thoughts and slowly, the lingering traces of the power began to wink out around him. The sense of fading dark energy snapped the mind of Nehb-ka-menthu from his memories, from recalling ancient battles and inglorious defeats. No, he was not the match for Arkhan, who guarded the secrets of his master in his spectral Black Tower. He could not contend with the might of Settra, king of Khemri, who watched the Black Pyramid for any sign of his immortal enemy’s return and prevented any from entering that place of timeless blasphemy and nameless horror. The secrets, the knowledge, the perversions that Nagash had discovered were not yet his. But they would be. The power would be his!
As Brunner disposed of the last of the zombies, the eyes of the mummy began to glow with a faint luminance, a ghostly green flame. Nehb-ka-me
nthu focused his will, his thoughts, his spirit back into its carriage of decayed flesh. The hands of the mummy turned over, the powerful talons within the grey-green wrappings splintering the wood of the table as they gripped it. The arms lifted and slowly the body of the mummy began to rise.
In the course of his travels, Brunner had encountered many strange and terrible things, but never had he stood before something like this. The hulking corpse of the long-dead priest-king had been unnerving enough at rest, exuding its aura of ancient decay and loss, the faint scent of lands forgotten and ruined. It was as bittersweet as the most tenderly recalled nostalgia and as hideous as the blood-howl of an enraged orc. It was a feeling of regret and despair that clutched at the soul. The bounty hunter would have breathed easier once the thing had been destroyed and the fear creeping into his stomach had been dispelled.
How much more horrible was that withered husk now that it had been endowed with motion, now that its strong sinews and supple limbs caused it to rise from the table, to set its cloth-wrapped feet upon the rotting wood on the floor? Brunner only realised that he had been backing away from the undead abomination when his back struck the rear wall of the room. Beside him, Carandini was also gripped by terror, and did not even notice that the bounty hunter was beside him, his eyes locked upon the supernatural figure of the mummy.
