The chains rattled as the vampire thrashed. His arms were pinned to his sides and the bonds had been looped about him multiple times. Even so, Ushoran managed to yank one of his captors from his feet. The wight slid across the forecourt, armour rattling. Ushoran pounced like a desert-fox, jumping straight up and bringing both feet down on the wight’s chest like the talons of a raptor. Armour crumpled and burst and the wight flailed as Ushoran crouched and fastened his jaws on the front of the dead man’s skull. Bone crunched and Ushoran jerked back, spitting fragments.
‘Impressive,’ Arkhan murmured. They stood on a balcony overlooking the forecourt, watching Ushoran’s struggles as they debated his fate. Arkhan wanted to leave him out for the sun. W’soran, however, thought Ushoran might prove useful, after a fashion.
Arkhan flexed his hand. After they’d cornered Ushoran in the ghoul-warrens beneath Nagashizzar, the vampire had attempted to bite off Arkhan’s hand. He would’ve succeeded, had W’soran not intervened. ‘He is far stronger than I was led to believe your kind could be.’
‘He is nothing. A cur, to Neferata’s lioness,’ W’soran said. He had been surprised to see the other vampire in the depths. He’d thought Ushoran dead and good riddance. Somehow, however, the Lord of Masks had managed to survive and find his way to Nagashizzar. He had changed much in his time in the wilderness. W’soran had always suspected that something unpleasant lurked beneath Ushoran’s bland exterior. He was a monster now, slab-muscled and animal-faced, with eyes like lanterns and fangs like daggers. He was mad as well, driven insane by the wounds he sustained so many years before at the final battle of Lahmia. In time, with the proper nourishment, he might come out of it — or perhaps not.
Ushoran had led them a merry chase for many months in the depths. The ghouls had swarmed at his command, attacking their forces with a surprising ferocity. There were thousands of the corpse-eaters in the warrens below the fortress, and somehow Ushoran had roused them all to war. What he had been planning for his army, he had yet to share. They had captured him in the mines, ambushing him in a battle that had taken hours. In the end, the ghouls had been put to flight, and Ushoran captured.
‘Neferata,’ Arkhan said, and looked at him. W’soran wondered whether it was only his imagination that made it seem as if the liche’s eye-sockets blazed more brightly at the thought of the queen of Lahmia. ‘Yes, she is a lioness. And you, W’soran, what are you?’
‘I am true to myself,’ W’soran said, with a shrug.
‘AND WHAT IS THAT, W’SORAN?’ The voice was as cold as the grave and as deep as an ocean trench. Both Arkhan and W’soran froze at the sound of it. A heavy hand, more metal than bone, settled on W’soran’s shoulder, its talons not quite piercing the flesh beneath his robes. ‘WHAT IS W’SORAN OF LAHMIA?’
‘Your servant, my master,’ W’soran whispered.
‘AHHHH,’ Nagash breathed. Metal squealed as he moved past them to the edge of the balcony. Flames crackled silently around his grinning skull. The Undying King loomed over his servants. In death, he had become a giant. He grasped the balcony and the stone cracked beneath his weight. ‘AND WHAT IS THIS?’ he asked.
‘A beast,’ Arkhan said.
‘A tool,’ W’soran interjected. He glared at the liche.
‘WHAT NEED HAVE I OF ANOTHER TOOL?’ Nagash rasped. The sound of it scraped across W’soran’s nerves. Nagash turned. ‘I HAVE ALL THE TOOLS I REQUIRE.’
‘Ushoran is… he is another of my kind, master. And cunning,’ W’soran said quickly. ‘He could be useful in your coming campaign to take that which is yours. They all could, master…’
‘ALL?’
‘Neferata, Abhorash, Ankhat, the others; imagine what sort of champions they would make, master,’ W’soran said. ‘Imagine the horror they could wreak in the Great Land, at your behest. They — we — are walking plagues, master. Our numbers can swell and grow with ease, and we can hunt the treacherous men of Nehekhara like dogs.’
‘A PLAGUE,’ Nagash said slowly. The fires around his skull seemed to curl higher and brighter as he turned back to gaze down at Ushoran once more. ‘YES…’
Crookback Mountain
(Year -323 Imperial Calendar)
The orc howled in brute agony as W’soran carefully peeled back the flesh of its barrel torso and pinned it to the wooden table. Even with its vitals exposed, the creature refused to either give in to shock or, as was more common, die. W’soran stepped back and gestured sharply. The ghouls squatting to either side of the table lunged up, grabbing the chains that dangled above the table and hauled on them. With a grinding squeal, the table was cranked up from a horizontal position to a vertical one.
W’soran had taken the skaven workshop for his own after the final battle and where it had once been full of squirming brown-furred bodies and strange machines, now only the latter remained, carefully disassembled and placed so that he might examine each cog and pulley. Great cages crafted from bone and wood now occupied a large portion of the space, crammed full of bellicose orcs and screaming goblins, taken captive in raids. Piecemeal zombies, crafted from the limbs of skaven, men and orcs, crawled, lumbered and scuttled about the cavern on various tasks.
Great alembics bubbled and hissed atop the heavy workbench W’soran had installed, as strange fluids sluiced through them. It had taken him months to craft the alembics, teasing the glass out of black sands brought from the shores of the Sour Sea. Bellows constructed from the vertebral plates of the monstrous beasts that roamed the deep caverns and the tanned and stretched hide of a rat ogre wheezed and whispered as zombies unceasingly pressed on them, circulating the fluid in the alembics. Other pathetic patchwork corpses saw to the grinding and sifting of W’soran’s ever-dwindling supply of abn-i-khat, or the cleansing and arrangement of gathered bones for future purposes. Generations of skaven, and before them goblins, had lived and died in and on the mountain and W’soran’s mindless servants scoured every crevasse and crag, hunting for remains. Vorag required an army, and W’soran knew of no better way to provide him one than to use what was at hand.
In the months following the capture of the mountain from its previous owners, W’soran had again begun his interrupted experiments in bone-craft and flesh-weaving. Even as he had created the crypt horrors, he had devised more warrior creations, based on ancient theories passed down to the priests of the Great Land. Giant scorpion-engines crafted from bone or slithering serpent-things made from stitched flesh and stretched muscle patrolled the lower depths ceaselessly for any new incursion from the skaven. It only took a bit of magic to give a semblance of life to the conglomerate horrors.
The table settled at a steep angle and the orc bellowed in pain as his centre of gravity descended, and his weight pulled on the heavy iron spikes that had been driven through his meaty wrists and ankles to hold him in place. Another chain had been looped beneath the orc’s neck and as the beast slumped, the chain caught tight around its neck. It gagged and its piggy eyes bulged in mingled pain and hatred as it glared at its tormentor. Fresh, brackish blood oozed from around the spikes and the creature shuddered.
W’soran watched it twitch and writhe. Then, with the air of a gourmand, he reached below the orc’s ribcage and pulled something out. ‘Redundancies of redundancies,’ he murmured. He glanced over at the crouched shape of one of his apprentices. The vampire was robed and cowled, and only its clawed digits were visible as it scratched out notes on a roll of parchment with a pen made from a fingerbone. ‘Its heart and lungs show variation from human or skaven organs. Rudimentary, but still significant,’ W’soran said, more loudly. Dutifully, the apprentice scratched out his master’s observations.