‘Do you really think you stand a chance against me, dog?’ W’soran cackled, raising his hand. ‘And weaponless and alone at that?’
‘What made you think he was alone, old monster?’
W’soran whirled. Neferata crouched on the roof behind him, surrounded by her handmaidens. She extended the blade she held and smiled cruelly. ‘The Dowager Concubine has asked — monarch to monarch — that I remove you from her demesnes, W’soran. Being as you are still my subject, I could not, in good conscience, refuse her.’
‘I am no subject of yours,’ W’soran hissed. ‘Why do you persecute me?’
‘Why,’ Neferata said, her smile sliding from her marble features. ‘Why? Is the span of your memory so fragile a thing that it cannot bear the weight of what you have done, old monster?’ She slashed the air with her blade. ‘You killed our land! You destroyed everything, alongside Nagash! It is your fault Lahmia fell, it is your fault the Great Land is now nothing more than a sandy tomb, and I shall extract that blood-debt from your wrinkled hide.’
W’soran stood. Rage washed over him. How dare she blame him? How dare she put her failures at his feet? With a snarl, he said, ‘Then by all means… come and try your hand, oh queen of nothing!’
Crookback Mountain
(Year -279 Imperial Calendar)
The assassin managed to avoid W’soran’s search parties for six months. For half a year, the vampire hid in the depths or scaled the peak, avoiding hunters of every shape and description — from Strigoi to wights to the giant bats that lived in the vast caverns far below the mountain. In the end, it was the smallest thing that caused him to meet his end — a common slave.
Unlike W’soran’s brood, the assassin required regular nourishment. And in the mountain, the only nourishment to be had for one of their kind was the slave pens. Mostly, the slaves couldn’t tell one predator from another. Indeed, it wasn’t his identity that proved the assassin’s undoing, but simply that he was a vampire, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Red Eye orcs had been growing restive for months. As more and more guards were diverted to the hunt, the orcs, ever-surly and unfailingly aggressive, took advantage. Revolt in the pens was not unheard of. But it was usually squashed quickly and effectively. But on that day, at that moment, there simply weren’t enough dead men to contain the living. The orcs seized their moment well — as another troop of skeletal guards marched out of the cavern, bound for a search of the southern crags, leaving less than a hundred in place to guard three times that of greenskins.
Crude tools, intended for mining, smashed down on bone, battering the unfeeling sentries from their feet. The overseer, an acolyte named Hruga, sounded the alarm before launching himself into the fray. And the assassin, in the pens to assuage his thirst, was caught up in the green tide as the orcs, seeing only another vampire, attacked him as readily as they attacked everything else.
Such were W’soran’s conclusions after the fact. When he arrived, the pens were in complete disarray. Orcs battled the dead throughout the large cavern. He saw a half-dozen orcs bring down an armoured skeleton, dragging the dead warrior from his feet. The revolt was disorganised, chaotic. It had no centre — it was merely a tantrum of beasts, flinging themselves at their tormentors en masse. The orcs required no lightning rod to incite them to violence, only to organise them. In time, if they won free, a new warlord might arise to lead the Red Eyes to battle.
‘Kill as many of them as it takes to herd the rest back into their pens,’ W’soran growled, flinging the edge of his cloak back. ‘We stop this here, now. Go!’ Melkhior and the other acolytes moved quickly. They knew the danger that faced them as well as W’soran did. There were close to ten thousand orc slaves in the bowels of the mountain. Even a third of that number could threaten their control of the hard-won citadel.
A howling orc burst past the acolytes, swinging a mattock. It was a big brute, covered in scars and blue tattoos. W’soran drew his scimitar and bisected the beast in one smooth motion. His acolytes hesitated. W’soran gestured with the bloody blade. ‘What are you waiting for? Kill them!’
The battle that followed was no sort of battle at all. A dozen sorcerers unleashed the most devastating spells and incantations that they knew within a confined space. Orcs were incinerated, torn apart, shrunken to screaming mummies, or otherwise massacred in minutes. And through it all, W’soran stalked, killing the rebels with gestures and the edge of his blade.
In a way, it was a relief. For six months, frustration had piled upon frustration for him. The body of the assassin he had slain in the initial attack had revealed nothing. The killers were Strigoi, but again, that meant nothing. There were Strigoi scattered to the four cardinal directions, serving four different masters, including himself. Ushoran’s empire had splintered and fragmented like a stool bearing too much weight, just as W’soran had planned. There were no clues to those who had sent them, no subtle signs or indications of their loyalties. They could have even been freebooters — lone vampires looking to take territory for themselves.
But until he knew for certain, he could not plan his next action. Give me facts, I must have facts, he thought, beheading an orc with a casual blow. What if they had been sent by Vorag? What if the Bloodytooth had at last discovered that W’soran was responsible for the death of his woman? Then again, it might have been Neferata — an easy assumption to make, given her recent treacheries. But what had she hoped to gain? Even Neferata was not so arrogant to assume that a bevy of hired blades would be put to him.
But Ushoran might be. Yes, the Lord of Masks had ever assumed that his cunning was greater than that of his enemies. But to send assassins — unless, had they been assassins, or kidnappers? More possibilities crashed through his brain, even as he disembowelled a bellowing orc. Could his own allies have decided to dispense with him? Ullo might consider it, perhaps, or Arpad, certainly… perhaps even one of his own. Suspicion burned in his mind as he caught sight of Melkhior striding through the cavern, flinging death from his hands. Had he finally decided to serve his poor master as he had so many of his fellow acolytes?
As focused on these questions as he was, W’soran almost missed the assassin. The vampire, like all of the others, was engaged in fighting the orcs, but upon sighting W’soran, he moved to complete his mission. W’soran saw it out of the corner of his good eye — saw the assassin, recognised him easily as close as he was thanks to the smell of spoiled blood and bear-fat that seemed to cling to him, and recognised the blade in his hand as it drove for his brainpan. Even W’soran was not quick enough to block or dodge that blade.
Then, with a roar, an orc crashed into the assassin. The blade skidded off W’soran’s shoulder and cheek, drawing blood, and he screamed and spun about. The assassin was on the ground, the orc’s hands on his throat. W’soran, never one to bother with gratitude, beheaded the latter with a contemptuous slash and grabbed the assassin by his bottom jaw, hoisting him into the air.
‘Well, well, well,’ he hissed. The assassin grabbed for him, and W’soran drove his scimitar into the other vampire’s gut, slowly, a bit at a time. ‘Six months I’ve wasted on you, my friend,’ he said, as the cross-guard of the hilt struck the assassin’s belly. ‘Six months of effort and questions.’
Then, with a flick, he withdrew the blade and sent the wounded vampire to the ground. The Strigoi tried to push himself to his feet, but W’soran planted a foot between his shoulder blades and shoved him back down. ‘No, don’t get up. I insist.’ He looked around. The revolt had been put down, and sufficiently bloodily. Once his acolytes had entered the fray, it had only taken a matter of minutes to put things in order. Heaps of smouldering green carcasses covered the floor of the cavern. Only one of his acolytes had faltered, and been dispatched by the maddened orcs, or so Melkhior said. Hruga, as it turned out, which was just as well, as W’soran had intended to punish him severely.