The Lord of Masks counted slowly to five and then twisted the needle once more. The man sagged back against the wooden frame with a ragged groan, his arms and legs trembling. He was a leather worker, according to his agents; by his lean, vulpine features and the dark, weathered cast to his skin, Ushoran reckoned he was from the desert tribes of the far west. A great many of them had turned up in the city over the last few years, seeking whatever work they could find in the Traders’ Quarter. Most turned to thievery—something the desert nomads knew well—but this one had been carrying a leather satchel and proper tools when he’d been snatched from the street by Ushoran’s men. Perhaps he’d lingered too long in his shop, finishing a belt or a set of fine boots for a caravan master or a ship’s captain, or had decided to stop by one of the local wine shops and lost track of the time. Or perhaps he was new to the city, and ignorant of the risk of being caught out on the streets after dark. These days, most people knew that you didn’t tarry in the Traders’ Quarter or down by the docks after nightfall—not if you valued your life.
Ushoran paused for a few moments, listening carefully to the man’s laboured breathing. There was an art to gauging how much real pain another person was suffering and how lucid they were from one moment to the next. When he judged that the time was right, he circled around to the front of the wooden frame and took the man’s narrow chin in his hand. Ushoran was pleased to see the man flinch at his touch. He raised the leather worker’s chin until he could gaze into the man’s eyes.
“How long this lasts is entirely up to you,” Ushoran said. “You understand? Answer my questions and the pain will end.”
The man on the frame drew a hitching breath. A thin whine escaped his lips. “Don’t—please… I don’t know,” he whispered, the words almost too faint to hear.
Ushoran’s fingers tightened on the man’s jaw. “No, no,” he said slowly, as though he were a tutor with an exceptionally slow pupil. “You’re a clever fellow. Think. This man has been seen in the Traders’ Quarter before; he is tall and broad of shoulder, and has a grip like a blacksmith. Likely he was dressed like a commoner—even, perhaps, like a beggar—but he would have been handsome and well spoken, like a noble. Such a one would stand out from the crowd, yes? You may have only glimpsed him in passing. Just tell us where and when. That is all.”
The leather worker blinked at Ushoran, his dark eyes wide and unfocussed. He groaned, a sound torn from the depths of his soul. Tears of frustration trickled from the corners of his eyes. “Please,” he begged. “I don’t know. I… I swear it! Why… why won’t you believe m-me?”
Ushoran sighed in mock disappointment. The fool was too proud to lie, even to spare himself further suffering. He would provide hours more entertainment before his young heart gave out. Careful to conceal any trace of pleasure, the Lord of Masks turned to glance at the dais.
“He is stubborn, great one,” Ushoran said to the apparition seated upon the ancient wooden throne. The Lord of Masks shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s possible that he is telling the truth. Shall we release him?”
Neferata studied the weeping man with the eerie, serpent-like stillness of an immortal. She had not worn her golden mask since the night of Alcadizzar’s betrayal and her pale, otherworldly face was as cold and pitiless as the desert night. Likewise, the eternal queen disdained the gleaming finery of the temple; her white silken robe was dingy and tattered, stained at sleeve and hem with layers of grime and spots of old blood. In truth, she looked like a corpse freshly dug from its tomb, her unblinking eyes brimming with hate for the cursed world of men.
Ushoran watched her fingers slowly tense upon the arms of the throne. Long, curved claws scraped faintly over the priceless wood. A slender figure in a ragged priestess’ robe stirred at the queen’s feet. Like Neferata, the woman was as pale as alabaster, her cheeks smeared with dirt and dried blood. Sensing the change in her mistress’ mood, the young immortal fixed Ushoran with a feral, catlike gaze and bared her fangs in a silent hiss. The Lord of Masks stiffened at the challenge, only just managing to refrain from baring his own teeth at the whelp in response. As Neferata’s hatred of the mortal world had grown since the betrayal, so too had her distrust of her fellow immortals. Now she surrounded herself only with creatures of her own creation—women who had come as orphans to the temple and had risen through the ranks to become its first high priestesses. Their will and self-determination crushed long ago by Neferata’s ruthless mental control, they were little better than animals, but their loyalty to the queen was absolute.
Lost in her dreams of vengeance, Neferata had withdrawn almost entirely from the affairs of the kingdom. In the wake of Alcadizzar’s escape she had gone out into the streets herself in search of him; screams would echo from the Travellers’ Quarter or the refugee slums in the dead of night and in the morning there would be another gruesome spectacle for the City Guard to find.
Wild tales of a savage, flesh-eating spirit gripped the populace. For the first time in centuries, terrified citizens flocked to the decrepit temples of Neru and Ptra, begging the startled priests for deliverance. When they proved powerless to halt the slaughter, the city nobles decided to take matters into their own hands. They pointed to the squalid population of immigrants in the western part of the city, accusing the former desert dwellers of unleashing a curse upon them all. Lost in the hysteria was the simple fact that the victims of Neferata’s reign of terror had almost exclusively been immigrants themselves; the citizens had rioted, and the slums had burned for three straight days. It was only thanks to the sea breeze and the spine of hills that cut across Lahmia from north to south that the fire was kept from consuming the entire city. The air in the palace had reeked of smoke and burning flesh for a week. Afterwards, Lord Ankhat managed to persuade Neferata to restrain herself, but only after assuring her that the search for the prince would continue without pause. As a result, Ushoran had been allowed—nay encouraged—to indulge his secret appetites to a degree he had never before imagined possible. For every victim snatched from the street to answer the queen’s relentless questions, three more found their way into his private houses of amusement.
At the foot of the gore-spattered dais, Lord Ankhat watched the spectacle with sour disapproval. He was the only principal of the Deathless Court who still paid any attention to affairs of state, managing the city and its affairs through a complex web of ministers and noblemen. Neferata’s obsession with the young prince had badly strained her relationship with Ankhat, once her staunchest ally in the court. He kept his own counsel for the most part these days, making state decisions by fiat and abandoning all pretence of consulting with the queen. The once affable aristocrat had grown cold and aloof, eyeing everyone around him with a mix of suspicion and arrogant disdain.
Perhaps it was just the passage of time, Ushoran mused. With every year our powers increase, he thought, as do our appetites. We grow ever more territorial, ever more jealous of our prerogatives. Before long we will have grown too hungry and too paranoid to share the city between ourselves, and what then?
Ankhat folded his arms and glared at the luckless fool on the rack. “This is ridiculous,” he spat. “Doesn’t anyone mark the passage of time anymore? It’s not been five weeks since he’s been gone, or even five months. It’s been five years. No one’s seen or heard from him since. For all we know, his bones are lying in a shallow grave somewhere on the Golden Plain.”
Neferata fixed Ankhat with a smouldering glare. Ushoran cleared his throat. “The facts do not support this,” he interjected. “Rasetra has made no inquiries about the prince’s wellbeing since his disappearance. Clearly, he has been in contact with them somehow—”
“Then where is he, spymaster?” Ankhat shot back. “Khemri still lacks a king. You think he’s taken up work serving tables in the Travellers’ Quarter?” He turned and glared back at Neferata. “What in all the world could be more important to him than the crown of the Living City?”
Ushoran turned his att
ention to his victim in an attempt to conceal his unease. Ankhat was right—Alcadizzar ought to be in Khemri now, well on his way to restoring the city’s wealth and power. The fact that he hadn’t claimed the throne filled the immortal with a growing sense of dread.
“Alcadizzar is here,” Neferata declared, in a voice as cold and hard as stone. “I know it.” She leaned forwards, hands gripping the arms of the throne. “Ask him again,” she hissed at Ushoran. “Strip away his flesh until he speaks the truth. He will give up his secrets soon enough. They always do.”
Ushoran bowed to the queen and turned his attention to a table lined with gleaming tools. Behind him, he heard Ankhat snarl in disgust; there was a gust of icy wind as the immortal took his leave.
The Lord of Masks selected a long, serrated blade from the table and inspected its edge. The man on the rack started to thrash weakly against his restraints.
Neferata was right. Eventually the miserable wretch would talk. He would say whatever it took to make the agony stop, and leave the queen with yet another wild rumour to pursue. The orgy of blood and pain would continue.
As Ushoran returned to his labours, he silently prayed that the lost prince would never be heard from again.
The slow-moving caravan raised a pall of churning dust that stretched for half a mile down the arrow-straight course of the great trade road that travelled westwards along the Golden Plain. It glowed reddish-ochre in the sullen light of the setting sun, visible for leagues to the north and south.
Any bandit worth his salt quickly learned how to gauge the size and speed of a caravan based upon the trail of dust it left behind. This one was plodding along at barely more than a mile per hour; that meant laden wagons and slow, stolid oxen. Half a mile of dust wasn’t much—the huge spice caravans that left the city every three months raised a trail that could stretch for up to a league or more, depending on the strength of the wind. Alcadizzar reckoned there were perhaps a dozen wagons, all told, plus outriders ahead and to the flanks. They’d left the city late in the day—far later than was wise—so by the time night fell they would be well beyond the reach of the Lahmian forts on the eastern edge of the plain. Easy pickings for a bandit gang that knew its trade; either the caravan master had taken leave of his senses, or there was more going on here than met the eye.
Nawat ben Hazar did not share in Alcadizzar’s concern. The bandit leader fairly rocked in the saddle with anticipation, a gap-toothed grin stretching from ear to ear. “Not long now,” he said, breaking into a wheezing chuckle. “They’ll hit the caravan just before sunset, when the fools are thinking of nothing but making camp and drinking a little wine.” He shifted his lanky body and glanced at Alcadizzar, who walked his horse just a pace or two behind Nawat and to his right. The bandit leader’s dark eyes glittered beneath shaggy grey eyebrows. He tapped the side of his narrow nose with a grimy fingertip. “Mark my words, khutuf. We’ll have a bit of gold and meat for our bellies tonight.”
The prince nodded absently, his eyes still fixed on the drifting ribbon of dust along the northern horizon. The bandits knew him as Ubaid, a former soldier and exile from Rasetra, but Nawat called him—and any other man not descended from the tribes of the Great Desert—simply khutuf. In the dialect of the tribes, the name meant “house dog”, and referred to the pampered pets of merchants and other fat, indolent city dwellers. Nawat never let his men forget that he was of a different breed than the rest of them. He was a nazir, a desert lion, who could trace his lineage back to the great chieftains of the bani-al-Akhtar, the fiercest of the desert clans. He was as lean and as tough as a strip of rawhide, his dark skin weathered and wrinkled by years of exposure to the unforgiving sun. Though he wore simple cotton robes of Lahmian cut—plundered from a spice trader’s chest and now stained a uniform brown by the dust of the road—the wide leather belt of a desert horseman circled his waist. Its cracked surface was tooled with precise notches that signified the battles he’d fought as a tribal warrior, and the scores of men he’d killed.
Alcadizzar had no reason to doubt Nawat’s claims. The bandit leader wore a fine pair of ivory-hilted daggers tucked into his belt and carried a sleek, curved sword of the type favoured by the tribes. The old bandit sat his stolen horse with the ease of a man born to the saddle, which was more than Alcadizzar could say for himself. But he doubted that Nawat had been exiled from his tribe for loving the chieftain’s daughter, as the man so often boasted. He suspected it had more to do with the telltale black stain of lotus root on the bandit’s few remaining teeth.
For certain, Nawat’s days of glory were far behind him. His gang, such as it was, consisted of barely a score of hungry-looking men and women, clad in a motley assortment of grimy rags and bits of finer, recently stolen garb. Most of the band struggled along on foot, while Nawat and the best-armed men of the gang sat upon lean, dispirited horses stolen from the scenes of previous raids. Most of the bandits carried little more than short clubs of knotty wood or dull-edged bronze knives; none wore anything resembling useful armour. The gang had no bows or spears—not even so much as a shepherd’s simple leather sling. They were far and away the most pathetic bunch of would-be raiders that Alcadizzar had ever seen, surviving off the leavings that larger, stronger gangs left behind, but they were also the only outlaws on the Golden Plain desperate enough to take him in.
Five years ago, Alcadizzar’s only thought had been to escape from the City of the Dawn and warn Nehekhara of the evil that lurked in the depths of the Temple of Blood. Ironically, it was only by virtue of Neferata’s terrible elixir that he had managed to survive the long drop to the palace courtyard; from there, his knowledge of the royal compound had allowed him to evade the guards and slip quietly into the city proper. By then, alarm gongs were clashing stridently within the palace, and startled City Guardsmen were prowling the early morning streets with cudgels in hand. The prince had spent his first day of freedom huddled inside an enormous ceremonial urn at the back of a potter’s storage shed, his body trembling and his mind numb with shock as he struggled to make sense of everything he’d learned.
Neferata had responded swiftly and decisively to Alcadizzar’s escape. Over the course of the day the search for him had intensified, and on several occasions he could hear the potter and his son arguing bitterly with City Guardsmen who came prowling through his shop. The prince tried to treat it as just another of the countless exercises that Haptshur, his battlefield tutor, had subjected him to. You’ve been trapped deep in enemy territory with nothing but the robes on your back and your foes are hunting you. You must find a way to escape and return to your people.
That was far easier said than done, of course. Alcadizzar had no weapons, no gold—not even sandals for his feet. Though his robes were now as filthy and torn as a beggar’s, the rich, white silk would attract the attention of every watchman in the city. And it was safe to assume that his description was being circulated around the docks and at the city gates; there might even be a reward offered for his capture. To make matters worse, his nearest allies were in Rasetra, hundreds of leagues away. Even if he made it out of the city, he would still have a long and gruelling journey to reach the city of his people.
By the end of the first day, Alcadizzar had come to the conclusion that he would not be getting out of Lahmia any time soon. He would have to bide his time and gather resources while he waited for the search to eventually subside. That night, he slipped from the potter’s shed and climbed silently onto the artisan’s roof where freshly cleaned robes had been laid out to dry. Alcadizzar took a set of the son’s robes, silently vowing to repay the family later, and then slipped into the crowded streets. The stained white robes were left in an alley deep inside the Travellers’ Quarter, where he hoped they would convince the City Guard that he was trying to slip out of Lahmia with one of the many outbound merchant caravans. Instead, the prince made his way down to the teeming districts around the docks and looked for ways to earn some coin.
For nearly eight months,
Alcadizzar, prince of Rasetra and would-be King of Khemri, lived like a harbour rat among Lahmia’s busy docks. He looted and he stole; he gambled on games of dice and drank sour beer in reeking alehouses no City Guardsman dared enter. He killed his first man in a vicious, back-alley brawl, when a gang of sailors tried to pressgang him onto their ship. For a time he worked as hired muscle for one of the most notorious brothels in the Red Silk District, and there fell into the company of a gang of jewel thieves who preyed upon the old noble families who lived in the shadow of the royal palace. That association had ended in blood and betrayal on a moonless night in early spring; Alcadizzar had escaped with nothing more than a handful of copper coins and a dying woman’s kiss. She’d been his first love, and she’d nearly been the death of him.
Finally, the prince judged that his time had come. He was certain that Neferata was still looking for him, but her attention was still fixed on the caravans and the Travellers’ Quarter. The guards at the city gates had slipped back into their daily routine, and his description was changed from the night of his escape. He was much thinner now and his features were hidden beneath a full, black beard. Dressed in faded desert robes and laden with a leather pack filled with food, spare clothing and other supplies, he passed through the eastern gate in the middle of a torrential afternoon rainstorm. The guardsmen, scowling from the doorway of the gatehouse, waved him through without so much as a second glance.
But the prince soon learned that escaping the city was only the first of many challenges that lay between him and distant Rasetra. Beyond the watch-forts at the eastern end of the plain the land was wild and lawless, infested with roving gangs of outlaws that preyed on unwary travellers. His hopes of falling in with an eastbound caravan were quickly dashed, as the paranoid merchants and their hired guards feared that he might be a spy for the caravan raiders. Alone and on foot, Alcadizzar’s skills were tested to the utmost over the next few months as he struggled his way across the plain. He was forced to fight for his life on more than one occasion, but his training and the lasting potency of Neferata’s elixir saw him through.
[Nagash 03] - Nagash Immortal Page 20
