Despite this, the skaven looked stronger than it had in a decade. No longer was it a withered thing, but instead muscled and sleek. W’soran leaned close to the cage and made satisfied noises. He looked at Melkhior. ‘I see the improvement in its diet has had gratifying results,’ he said.
‘I still don’t understand why it’s still alive. What use is it now — especially if you’re not intending to use those weapons?’ Melkhior asked. He stepped aside quickly as a severed hand, a coiled, sharpened spinal column grafted to its wrist stump, skittered past like a fleshy scorpion.
‘Knowledge is sometimes its own reward, and I am loath to dispense with a potentially useful tool,’ W’soran said. ‘At the moment, I’m merely curious as to how long this beast will live. I’d wager it’s already survived well past its allotted span.’ He sniffed and turned.
Half-dead, half-living things hung from the great chains that draped the open spaces of the cavern like a massive web of iron. He had begun experiments in grafting living flesh to dead, to see what effect the one had on the other. A thing that had the heads of an orc and a skaven on its malformed shoulders squealed and thrashed as he drew close to it and traced the suture marks that marked where green flesh had joined hairy. ‘Wonderful,’ he chuckled, ‘so persistent.’ He looked at Melkhior. ‘I do so miss this place, when on campaign.’
‘Then perhaps it is time for you to leave the dirty business of war to me, my lord,’ Melkhior said. ‘I am ready to serve you, in any capacity you desire, and I would be happy to lead our legions to war.’
‘Are you deaf, or simply forgetful?’ W’soran asked. ‘My decision is final, no matter how much you whine.’ He stretched out a hand and whistled. Slack-jawed human heads bobbed obscenely through the air of the laboratory at his call, fluttering on bat wings that had been grafted to their skulls. A cephalopod-like mass of spinal columns and squirming intestines, protected by sheaths of crusty blood and bile, flopped towards W’soran like a dog welcoming its master home. He clucked welcomingly and bent to stroke the quivering, bulbous face that briefly surfaced from the writhing morass, its tongue lashing across his fingers. He moved on, and it squirmed into the shadows after giving Melkhior a wet growl.
Rank upon rank of heavy sarcophagi, plundered from Nagashizzar by Vorag in earlier years, lined the walls of the cavern, and W’soran’s servants inspected, measured and tested the dead things within. Ancient experiments he’d long thought lost, now returned to him again — old kings of the long-extinct Yaghur now mummified and wrapped in sorcerous linens. W’soran paused to examine them and nodded as one of his cowled scribes croaked a reply to a brief question. He patted the squatting creature affectionately and turned to a heavy half-sphere, constructed from thick shards of amber set into a bronze frame that occupied a space nearby.
Over it hung the limp, bloodless corpses of a dozen orcs, the bodies hung head-down, so that their foul fluids might plop into the sphere. More of the crooked scribe-things scuttled about the place, stirring its steaming contents and striking the bodies above with long poles in order to free the last drips of blood.
‘And is this a matter of curiosity as well?’ Melkhior grunted.
W’soran sank to his haunches and peered through the thick amber. A dull form floated within, barely discernible in the opaque stew of blood. Layla of Lahmia yet lived, albeit after a vastly diminished fashion. ‘In part… more, I wish to know at what point our kind finally give out. Removing the head or the heart will drop even a being of my age and potency, but if they could be reattached or healed somehow… would these old bones still live?’
He gestured to himself. ‘We are not true immortals, Melkhior. We are merely more persistent than the run of the mill beast. Even the resurrected dead are not immortal. They suffer cessation, if not true death. I believe we do the same. Both Neferata and I were pinned through the heart, and left for dead, and we both walk now among the living. Abhorash, I’m told, was devoured by a great beast in the Southlands during his exile, and yet even now bestrides the earth like an infuriating colossus. And Ushoran was set on fire and eaten by jackals. I wish to know why our flesh resists the corruption of death. Rather, say, I wish to know why it does it in some cases and not others…’
He placed a hand against the glass. ‘I wish to know the secrets of life and death. I wish to know where the dividing line is, and how it might be erased entirely. There is a saying, in Araby… what is not dead can eternal lie and over strange eons, even death may die. It is as true as it is trite.’ W’soran stood. ‘Nagash is both dead and yet not. Something of him, of his black will, persists, like a flea in the fold of a jackal’s skin. True immortality…’
‘Is it?’ Melkhior asked. ‘It seems like no kind of immortality to me.’
‘You place too much importance on the body, my son. That has ever been your main failing,’ W’soran chided. He strode towards the cages where a number of orcs crouched snarling, fresh from the mountains. They were survivors from the Red Eye tribe, given the pernicious pink tint that afflicted their piggy orbs. W’soran strode close to the cages and the orcs howled and lunged at the bars, grasping at him wildly. ‘These husks are like anchors, holding our minds in bondage. Nagash was a fool — clutching at the physical, when he should have concentrated on the spiritual. The raw stuff of magic flows in us, pumping our blood and allowing us to wield it as a weapon, or to embrace it to transform, moulding our shapes as we see fit. Not without good reason do the Cathayans call our kind Yiangshi, or “corpse-ghost”.’ He held up his hand, as if to examine it in the light of the braziers that lined the cavern. ‘We are ghosts possessing our own bodies. In time, I will know the secret that Nagash stumbled upon, like a cave-dweller learning of fire.’
‘That’s why you want Ushoran to unlock the secrets of the crown,’ Melkhior said, quietly. ‘That is the debt you wish to collect.’
W’soran looked at his apprentice. ‘Among others, yes.’
Melkhior shook his head. ‘Plans within plans,’ he muttered.
W’soran snorted. ‘Where you see complexity, I see subtlety. Birds and stones, boy — the only lesson Neferata ever took from me was that of the subtle plan. Plans are like layers of armour, insulating you from failure. You would do well to remember that,’ he said pointedly.
Melkhior frowned. ‘I have taken your every lesson to heart, my master.’
‘A beautifully parsed sentence, my boy,’ W’soran said. ‘I have long feared that the art of rhetoric and grammar died with the Great Land.’
‘You are a good teacher,’ Melkhior said.
W’soran smiled. ‘Another beautiful sentence. Now, I dislike having these Strigoi hanging about, getting up to mischief. We’ll need to organise a new campaign for them. Something that takes them far enough away to not trouble me with their incessant complaining, but close enough that — eh?’ He stiffened. ‘I smell something.’
Melkhior tensed, and his hand flew to the hilt of the sword on his hip. The other acolytes reacted more slowly, but reacted all the same, clutching at their knives or scrolls. It had been years since the last skaven incursion, but there were more tunnels than even W’soran’s diligent vermin-hunters had been able to ferret out.
W’soran turned in place, head cocked. The only sounds he heard were the bubbling of the alembics and the screeching of his captives. But he smelled something out of place. As he looked about, the great web of chains suddenly rattled. W’soran spun around, raising a hand.
A dark shape launched itself from the chains. A blade flashed. W’soran staggered back as the flesh of his palm parted and he howled. He slammed back against the cage of orcs and they grabbed at him, pinioning him. Tusks sank into his flesh and bellicose roars deafened him. The dark shape seemed to skate towards him, blade angling for his heart.