‘Can’t you smell it?’ W’soran asked, spreading his arms and tilting his head. Overhead, lightning flashed in the bellies of the clouds. ‘We are in at the death, Ullo. Strigos lies panting in the mud, our arrows and spears jutting from its hide.’ He inhaled the stink of the battlefield, inflating his narrow chest. ‘Why else would I have stripped my — Vorag’s — territories of troops? Why else would my agents spread the gospel of fire and sword through these black hills as openly as they do? Mourkain will be ours before the first snows of the season fall.’
‘If your acolytes at Crookback Mountain send us reinforcements, aye,’ Ullo rumbled. He scratched a flat cheek with a bloody talon. ‘Have you had word from Melkhior these past weeks?’
W’soran looked at him. ‘What are you implying?’
‘We are far from our territories, sorcerer. We might not have supply lines, as such, but neither do we have an easy route ahead of us. We might be able to raise the dead with every battle, but even they don’t last forever. Our enemies know how to fight them, and how to fight us. We lost Orcuk and Scabeg of Illios in this battle, both of them pinned like flies to the ground by men — mortal soldiers. And half of my spearmen, dead though they were, are no more — burnt by sorcery and blasted to ashes. And Ushoran has been sending smaller and smaller forces against us. There’s not enough dead to replace our losses. We’re fighting for every stretch of ground and our armies are being ground down, slowly but surely.’ Ullo said it all flatly, and without accusation. Nonetheless, W’soran was stung by his words.
‘What would you have us do then, Ullo? Retreat, perhaps?’ he snapped.
‘I speak of caution, not retreat,’ Ullo growled back. ‘Perhaps we should wait until Lukas and Vaal the Thirst have rejoined us,’ he added, naming two of the other renegade Strigoi, both of whom who had taken smaller forces to the west and the north-east, respectively, in an attempt to lead off any reinforcements for Gashnag’s now-destroyed force. ‘With their forces added to ours, we could punch through the ring of fortifications that line the Plain of Dust and reach Mourkain within a fortnight. But if Melkhior doesn’t supply us with reinforcements soon, it’s going to be a slog. We’ll be lucky if we’ve got enough cold bodies to throw at Abhorash when the Great Dragon inevitably unfurls his wings and moves to stop us.’
‘Not to mention that they’ve got their own sorcerers,’ Arpad interjected, gesturing hesitantly to the floating, black spectres that W’soran had wrought from the remains of Morath’s acolytes. Even creatures as brutal as the Strigoi feared the wraiths on an instinctive level, like wolves faced with a maddened bear. ‘Three less now, I admit, but who knows how many he’s got…’
‘One or a hundred, it matters not,’ Chown said. ‘For we have our Lord W’soran, whose might is unparalleled.’ The Draesca flashed his blackened teeth in a grin. W’soran glanced at the savage necromancer and felt a twinge of something that might have been affection, as a parent for an extremely stupid, yet loving, child. The Draesca had always held him in some reverence, a fact that often slipped his mind. The brutal tribesmen viewed him with less fear than the Yaghur had felt for Nagash, for his touch had ever been light. Strangely, they were more than willing to fight and die for him, despite that.
‘Be that as it may, you might be right,’ W’soran demurred. Ullo wasn’t; he was a fool, and over-cautious, frightened as he was of Abhorash. Nonetheless, Ullo was too valuable to ignore or supersede. W’soran knew that the shark-faced Strigoi’s loyalty was held only by that thinnest of threads — a debt of honour. He had saved Ullo at the Battle of the Black Water, and the Strigoi seemed to feel that he owed W’soran his grudging service in return. And Ullo was the only reason that the other renegade Strigoi remained loyal.
W’soran was not deaf to the mutinous whispers of his bloodthirsty servants. Some Strigoi thought he had done away with Vorag, since his disappearance into the eastern mountains. That W’soran was only using the name of the Bloodytooth as a mask for his own desires. That was true as far as it went, though he’d done nothing to Vorag. Indeed, the Bloodytooth’s fate was as much a mystery to him as it was to the others. He’d been too busy, and disinclined besides, to find out what had happened to the would-be emperor of Strigos.
Perhaps Vorag had run afoul of the unbound dead of Nehekhara, or some other enemy, and been destroyed. Perhaps Neferata had gotten her vengeance for Vorag’s abandonment at last, and his brute head decorated a spear in the Silver Pinnacle.
Perhaps he had simply decided not to return.
That last thought was the most disturbing. He had expected Vorag’s army, whatever was left of it at any rate, to slink back to Crookback Mountain sooner or later. Though he had convinced Vorag of the victories that awaited him in the southern reaches, he knew that there was little way that such a brute could take Nagashizzar, let alone conquer the risen kings of the Great Land. He had simply wanted his figurehead safely out of the way while he drew Ushoran — Nagash — out of hiding and into the open. If Vorag returned triumphant, fine, and if he returned beaten, even better, so long as he returned. With W’soran as his vizier, Vorag could rule, and rule well and long. And W’soran would have the order he needed to make a true and uninterrupted study of Nagash’s crown and the secrets therein.
And then, once he had those secrets…
But none of that mattered now. Carts before horses, he thought. For now, it was Ullo who was the key to his victory. It was Ullo who held the loyalties, or at least the respect, of his Strigoi generals. Not poor W’soran, who was regarded, at best, as a necessary evil by his followers, despite everything he had done for them. And while Ullo did not require as much placation as Vorag, it was best not to press him too far. The vampire had a ruthless sort of practicality, and would, if push came to shove, easily forget his debt to serve his own ends.
W’soran sniffed and looked around, meeting the gazes of his commanders. Then, his gaze travelled to the horizon, where blackness seemed to spread across the sky like spilled ink on paper. Nagash was waiting, he knew, crouching like a beast in a cave. He grasped his amulets, succumbing to a sudden nervous impulse. He felt as if he were standing in a storm wrapped in iron and waiting for the lightning to fall. ‘We will make camp and await our allies. I will send messages to Melkhior, inquiring as to his tardiness. And then we will march to Mourkain, and lay claim to an empire!’
Chapter Fourteen
The Worlds Edge Mountains
(Year -950 Imperial Calendar)
The beastmen died swiftly, their crooked bodies blasted to bloody chunks by W’soran’s destructive magics, and the mountains echoed with their screams. He swept aside his tattered cloak and thrust out his talons, gesturing. Dark magic coursed from his hands, washing over a charging bull-headed giant. The beast screamed in agony as its flesh was flayed from its thick bones. Its remains toppled into the snow at his feet, still smoking. The survivors of the first attack turned to flee back into the snow-capped trees, squalling and bleating like the herd animals they resembled.
‘Do not pursue them,’ he snarled to his acolytes. Zoar made as if to protest, but a glare from his master caused his mouth to snap shut. ‘Let them run, boy. I want to study that stone of theirs uninterrupted,’ W’soran continued, lowering his arms.
The stone in question occupied the centre of the clearing. It was a massive fang of rock, covered in sigils daubed in blood and filth, and hung with thick chains that were heavy with skulls, skin-sacks and other, even more grisly trophies. It radiated a strange magic, one that W’soran was only familiar with in passing. He stepped over the corpses of its defenders and approached it. He was careful not to touch it.