03 - Nagash Immortal

by Mike Lee - (ebook by Undead)

  The liche turned on his heel and headed for his horse, thoughts of murder dancing in his head. If W’soran wanted to be in the thick of the fighting, he would be happy to oblige him. The battlefield could be a dangerous place for the unwary.

  The people of Khemri turned out in a vast, cheering throng to see their king and queen off to war. Down at the docks, the last few companies of Khemri’s army had been loaded onto the barges, along with the horsemen from Numas and the desert tribes. The barges from Zandri had arrived the day before; now the river was crowded with a fleet of brightly painted craft that stretched westwards as far as the eye could see.

  Outside the palace, the royal guard was drawn up in their chariots, awaiting the command to depart. The slaves of the royal household waited on the steps of the palace; each one had been given a gold coin to cast upon the ground at the feet of the king, as an offering to Ptra the Great Father, god of the sun.

  At the appointed hour, brass horns shook the air and outside the palace compound the people of Khemri roared in response. Moments later, the royal procession emerged into the bright sunlight. First came Inofre, the Grand Vizier, dressed in all his finery, leading the rest of the king’s viziers, followed by the king and queen.

  Alcadizzar wore the golden armour gifted to him by the mountain-lords, and shone with all the fury of the sun. The crook and the sceptre had been left upon Settra’s throne; in their place the king held his golden sword of war. Beside him, Khalida was the dark to the king’s light, clad in a gold-chased iron breastplate and a heavy skirt of iron scales over her flowing cotton robes. A desert headscarf hung loosely about her face; a horseman’s bow and quiver were slung over her shoulder.

  Behind the king and queen walked Prince Ubaid, their youngest son. The prince’s head was downcast as he followed them out onto the steps of the palace, his handsome face screwed up into a fierce scowl as his parents turned to face him.

  “Why must I stay behind?” he complained, as though the matter hadn’t already been explained to him a dozen times.

  “Because you’re too young,” Alcadizzar reminded him. “Your older brother Asar is sixteen and he’s not fighting, either.” The crown prince had left Ka-Sabar not long after the call to arms had been sounded and returned with his uncle to Bel Aliad, where he would remain until the war was over.

  “But Ophiria is going along,” Ubaid protested. “And she’s old.”

  Alcadizzar sighed. “If I could command Ophiria to stay, I would. But the Daughter of the Sands goes where she wishes.”

  The prince folded his arms. “I wish I was the Son of the Sands, then.”

  Khalida placed a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Someone must stay behind to reassure the people while the army is away,” she said solemnly. “You and Inofre will rule the empire until our return. Are you up to such a great task?”

  Ubaid’s head lifted proudly. “Of course,” he said, with all the solemnity a nine year-old could muster. “Does that mean I can stay up all night like father does—and eat my meals in the library?”

  Khalida gave Alcadizzar a sidelong look. “That’s the privilege of being a ruler, I suppose,” she said. The queen bent and kissed him gently on the forehead, causing the young prince to squirm. “We’ll be back as soon as we can, dearest,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Alcadizzar knelt beside his son and embraced him. “Be brave, and rule wisely,” he said. “And don’t empty the treasury while I’m gone.”

  “All right.”

  The king smiled and kissed his son farewell, and then took Khalida’s hand. Together they descended the stone steps. Gold flashed and chimed at their feet. The king and queen smiled broadly at the royal household and the waiting guards.

  “I heard a messenger came last night,” Khalida said under her breath.

  Alcadizzar nodded. “News from Heru. They encountered Nagash’s vanguard four days ago. The first battle happened yesterday.”

  “And?”

  The king drew a deep breath. “They lasted an hour,” he said through clenched teeth. “Between them and the Lybarans, they had close to a hundred thousand men, and Heru said they were outnumbered at least five to one.”

  “Great gods,” Khalida cursed. Her smile never faltered. “Where are they now?”

  “Retreating south, towards Lybaras.”

  “They were supposed to delay Nagash for weeks,” the queen hissed. “What now?”

  The couple reached the bottom of the steps and turned to wave one last farewell to Prince Ubaid. The boy broke into a wide grin and waved back.

  “We hold to the plan,” Alcadizzar replied. “And pray that Quatar can hold the Gates of the Dawn. Otherwise, there will be nothing to stop Nagash from seizing the west.”

  True to Arkhan’s word, the undead host moved like locusts down the western trade road, darkening the skies with their passage. While four of W’soran’s immortals pursued the eastern armies southwards, the liche raced for the Valley of Kings with all the speed his slow-moving force could manage.

  First, however, came Mahrak, seat of the Hieratic Council and once known as the City of the Gods, where Nagash had been defeated during the first war.

  What little that Arkhan knew of the city’s fate dated from Lamashizzar’s reign, centuries ago. In those days the city had largely fallen into ruin, following the end of the sacred covenant and the decimation of the ruling council. W’soran claimed that Neferata had supported the restoration of the city during her reign, but that Mahrak was still but a shadow of its former glory. At this point, however, Arkhan didn’t trust anything the necromancer told him, so he approached Mahrak expecting to find bristling fortifications and a determined army ready for battle.

  The truth, he discovered, was somewhere in-between. Two weeks after the battle with Rasetra and Lybaras, the undead host arrived at Mahrak just after sunset, and found a city much diminished in glory, but with its walls and gates fully intact. Thousands of white-robed warriors stood atop the battlements, ready to defend the city to the death.

  Arkhan made every effort to oblige them.

  Through the night, his warriors surrounded the city, cutting off every avenue of escape and forcing Mahrak’s defenders to spread themselves all along its perimeter. Catapults were dragged into place and smaller war engines assembled at strategic points around the city. Within hours, the first probing attacks were launched against the city walls, testing the strength of the defenders’ organisation and resolve. Arkhan kept them up all through the following day, keeping the mortals on edge and giving them no chance for rest.

  That evening, just after sunset, the attack began in earnest.

  Catapults hurled shrieking missiles high overhead, targeting the tops of the walls and the city’s gatehouses. Multi-legged war engines raced for the walls, followed by scores of skeletal companies equipped with crude ladders. Showers of arrows fell amid the ranks of the dead, striking down warriors by the dozens, and sporadic catapult fire from inside the city carved swathes of destruction through the oncoming companies. But the survivors pressed on, heedless of casualties and undaunted by the towering walls rising before them. War engines scuttled up the stone face like spiders, stabbing men with their forelegs and flinging their screaming bodies off the battlements. Bone ladders rattled against the walls under the covering fire of arrows; skeletons climbed for the battlements with daggers or hatchets clutched between their rotting teeth. The city defenders flung rocks down at the attackers, or waited along the walls with clubs or axes to fend them off. The undead snatched at them with their bony hands, seizing men by the arms and necks and pulling the defenders with them as they toppled off the wall.

  Once the assault began, it never let up. Arkhan gave the defenders not one moment of respite. Necromantic energies crackled in the night air, lashing the battlements with searing bolts of power, or animating the bodies of the fallen and turning them on their fellows.

  Arkhan expected to carry the walls in just a few hours and one of the
gates shortly after that, but the defenders of the once-holy city were made of sterner stuff than he imagined. They defended every foot of the walls with their blood; if the undead did not falter, then neither did they. Two hours passed, then four, and then six, and still the gates remained in the defenders’ hands.

  Slowly but surely, however, the sheer weight of numbers began to tell. By dawn of the following day, most of the city walls had been cleared and fighting was concentrated around both city gates. By noon, the east gate fell, only to be retaken minutes later by a furious counter-attack. Back and forth the fighting went, with both gatehouses changing hands as much as a dozen times throughout the bloody afternoon. By nightfall, however, the eastern gate fell again, and this time there was no mortal left alive to reclaim it.

  Arkhan’s troops poured into the city and for the next three days and nights they slaughtered every living thing within Mahrak’s walls. The temples were put to the torch, and the corpses of the slain were raised up and pressed into the ranks of the conquering army, restoring a portion of the warriors Arkhan had lost.

  Five days after the undead host reached Mahrak, the City of the Gods was no more. Nothing was left but heaps of broken bones and scorched rubble; a vast, bleak testament to the vengeance of Nagash.

  ——

  At the Gates of the Dawn

  The Valley of Kings, in the 110th year of Khsar the Faceless

  (-1162 Imperial Reckoning)

  A week after the fall of Mahrak, the undead army reached the eastern edge of the Valley of Kings. At the mouth of the valley stood the Gates of the Dusk: eight towering stone pillars, each a hundred feet tall and older than Nehekhara itself, arrayed to either side of the wide road that wound through the base of the broad valley floor. In Arkhan’s time, an unfinished wall had stretched across the valley up to the first pillars of the ancient gate. Since then, it had been replaced with something altogether more formidable—a towering bulwark of closely-fitted stone that rose more than thirty feet high, with hulking bastions rising every quarter mile to the north and south. A brooding gatehouse had been built across the road, just a hundred yards east of the obelisks, and the entrance sealed by twin slabs of solid basalt more than ten feet wide and fifteen feet high.

  Prepared for another bitter assault, Arkhan hurled a dozen companies of skeletons and ten war engines at the city walls. Shielded by layers of necromantic incantations, the companies crossed the open ground before the walls without challenge and climbed swiftly onto the battlements. The liche waited upon his horse just out of bowshot, listening for the sound of fighting that never came. There were no guards upon the battlements, or within the fearsome gatehouse. The huge and costly fortifications, no doubt built over many years to secure the eastern end of the valley, were completely deserted. The garrison—if in fact there had ever been one—had likely been withdrawn to Mahrak and died there in the city’s defence.

  There was no fathoming the ways of priests, Arkhan thought, as he led his wights past the Gates of the Dusk.

  At that same moment, more than a hundred leagues to the north, Alcadizzar and the armies of the west were emerging onto dry land once more.

  The trip upriver had gone without incident—other than a lengthy and brutal battle with seasickness among the desert tribesmen—and within a few weeks the first of the river barges reached their destination. After the first week of the journey the fleet had headed up the Golden River, a tributary of the Vitae, and into the depths of the Bitter Peaks. There, at the river’s end, they came to a small outpost that stood sentinel over a series of stone docks that would have been the envy of any major city. They had been built during Alcadizzar’s reign for a single purpose—to move an army as quickly and efficiently as possible to the eastern side of the mountains.

  Few men outside of Khemri knew of the existence of the docks; fewer still knew of the narrow road that had been carved a hundred and twenty leagues through the mountains to the south-east. Caches of food and water had already been put in place along the route, allowing Alcadizzar’s forces to travel light and move faster still. So long as the weather held, they would reach the Gates of the Dusk in just under two weeks.

  They had learned of the fall of Mahrak while en route up the river; Ophiria had seen it in a vision and spoke of the slaughter that Nagash’s troops had wrought. From Mahrak, Alcadizzar was certain that the army would continue into the Valley of Kings in an attempt to break out into western Nehekhara. With the armies of the east now trapped in Lybaras by a sizeable force of Nagash’s troops, the way seemed clear to proceed to Quatar, and then beyond to Khemri itself.

  What the enemy did not know was that the Gates of the Dawn had changed a great deal since the Usurper’s reign, and that the armies of Quatar and Ka-Sabar stood ready to repel them. When Alcadizzar and his armies reached the Gates of the Dusk, the trap would snap shut.

  They just had to reach the western end of the valley in time.

  The Valley of Kings had once been a vast burial ground, where the early Nehekharans had laid their people to rest prior to the creation of the great cities. Grand tombs had been dug into the valley’s steep slopes and the valley floor had been crowded with sandstone shrines and clustered mausoleums.

  Now there were only piles of broken stone and blackened rubble stretching for hundreds of miles—the remnants of a months-long running battle fought between the armies of the Usurper and the rebel kings of the east, some six hundred years before. Arkhan remembered the gruelling pursuit across the valley. The retreating easterners had toppled statues and broken apart the mausoleums to create improvised redoubts for their archers and spearmen, while Mahrak’s priests bedevilled his cavalry with cunning illusions and deadly magical traps. The rebels had made Nagash’s forces pay dearly for every foot of ground, forcing the immortals to break open the tombs along the valley slopes in search of more bodies to fill their thinning ranks. The pursuit had lasted for two gruelling weeks and was some of the hardest fighting of the war.

  This time, Nagash’s warriors were moving in the opposite direction, towards the Gates of the Dawn and the city of Quatar. During the days of Nagash’s reign, the western end of the valley had been sealed off by fortifications even greater than the ones that had been built at the Gates of the Dusk, but the Lybarans had found a way to demolish them in an attempt to slow Nagash’s advancing army. Given what he’d seen at the Gates of the Dusk, Arkhan had to assume that something similar had been built at the western end of the valley, and that it would be well defended. Quatar’s famous Tomb Guard had been charged with protecting the Gates of the Dawn for millennia; since the Valley of Kings was the only way to move an army across the Brittle Peaks, it was certain that they would be manning the battlements and watching for his approach.

  The Gates of the Dawn had to be taken by storm. Now that all Nehekhara was up in arms, Arkhan knew that he had to move quickly before the western kings could unite into a single, massive army. Every day he lost fighting in the valley allowed his enemies to grow stronger, which was something he could not permit.

  Arkhan bent all his power to speeding the march of his army. W’soran, not to be outdone, commanded his progeny to do the same. Shrouded in swirling darkness, the undead host raced westwards, past the shattered tombs of the ancients.

  Moving day and night, Nagash’s army crossed the Valley of Kings in a mere seven days, but the demands of the march and the broken terrain had spread the host over more than ten miles of ground. The cavalry was in the lead, the skeletal horses picking their way easily over the broken ground, followed by scores of clattering war engines and loose companies of loping axe-wielding skeletons. Farther back were the tighter formations of the spear companies and then finally the catapults and the rest of the large siege engines. Arkhan rode with the rest of the horsemen, his glowing eyes burning in the dark as he tried to catch a glimpse of the distant gates. When he reached them, there would be no pause for preparation—he would simply unleash his warriors on the wall in
a rising tide of metal and bone, until the Tomb Guard were swept aside. Whatever defences the enemy had in place, Arkhan was certain they could be swiftly overrun.

  He was wrong.

  The first thing Arkhan saw was sparks of fire blazing against the darkness, scores of watch fires, burning in the night. They were arranged in three lines, and at different heights, with the first row of fires some twenty feet above the valley floor, the next at forty feet, and the smallest at around sixty feet above the ground.

  Moments later, the liche vaulted his horse over a heap of broken sandstone and found himself galloping across a wide expanse of cleared ground, more than a hundred yards long. After days and nights of negotiating the rubble-strewn terrain of the rest of the valley, the transition was jarring.

  Then, he understood, just as the first blazing missiles flew from the enemy’s defences; they’d reached the killing ground at the edge of the fortifications.

  Crackling balls of pitch shot skywards on trails of fire, seeming to hang in the air for long moments before plunging like thunderbolts amidst the skeletal horsemen. The missiles exploded on impact, catching desiccated skin and dried bone alight and transforming riders and mounts into firebrands. Snarling, Arkhan redoubled the speed of the cavalry, racing his horse archers as close to the wall as he could manage.

  As the fires multiplied along the killing ground, Arkhan saw the wall—the first wall, made of slabs of granite that rose twenty feet above the valley floor. Archers along the wall and its squat, brooding gatehouse unleashed a torrent of arrows at the oncoming horsemen, their enchanted arrowheads wreaking havoc among the undead squadrons. A hundred yards behind the first wall, a second wall rose to a height of forty feet, reinforced with stone bastions every two hundred and fifty yards along its length. Then, another hundred yards further on, Arkhan could just make out the black bulk of the third and final wall; sixty feet of sheer basalt, sealing off the Gates of the Dawn.