‘My experiments are of no concern. I can recreate them, in time. What of our other guest?’
‘Other…?’
‘The Lahmian witch, Melkhior,’ W’soran said, pressing one hand to the doors. The amulets around his neck grew warm and they caused his flesh to tingle where they touched it. He could smell the essence of abn-i-khat beyond the doors. The scent was almost overpowering, and the old need rippled through him, making it hard to think. ‘Or was she destroyed as well?’ he continued.
His curiosity was almost impossible to ignore — what sort of weapon had the skaven used to destroy his labs? More — how had they gotten in? His labs had been warded both inside and out, the very stones wrapped in layers of sorcery. The doors bulged slightly, though they had been chained shut. The thick wood was scorched and the metal warped by a great heat, a heat which was still present. W’soran drew his hand back and examined the raised blisters on his palm with some interest. Through the cracks in the door, he could see a strange flickering light, and there was an eerie tang to the air. Everything seemed greasy, as if it were covered in a thin film of… something.
‘I… don’t know,’ Melkhior said. ‘There were fires — fires that still burn! Not even we could stand it for long. The wyrdstone fires burn without consuming, master, and I can find no way to extinguish those flames. I have had to seal it off.’
W’soran stepped back from the doors. He turned to Melkhior. ‘You disappoint me. The vaults,’ he snapped. Melkhior scuttled away, and W’soran followed. ‘What of the mines?’ he asked.
‘The orcs grow rebellious,’ Melkhior grunted. ‘There is a band of them loose in the bowels of the mine, led by a creature called Dork.’ Melkhior shuddered. ‘It broke free of the work gangs in the last revolt. It was whelped here, I think. Grown in the dark like a mushroom, and raised in the mines. It — it is not like the others.’
‘What do you mean?’ W’soran asked. ‘And how much trouble can one band of orcs be?’
‘More than I expected,’ Melkhior said hesitantly. He twitched. ‘The creature employs sorcery.’
‘Impossible,’ W’soran said. The orcs had shamans, but their magics were primitive, and more likely to kill the caster than an enemy.
‘He is smart. It is as if he has learned,’ Melkhior continued, as if W’soran hadn’t spoken. He shook his head. ‘I thought it was impossible for the greenskins to learn, but this beast has. It employs cunning, avoiding my patrols. Every day, more orcs vanish in the mines, freed or killed by this creature, and I do not have the resources to both find him and guard against the skaven.’ He looked at W’soran, and his expression was sour as he added, ‘Or to send you reinforcements, master.’
W’soran didn’t reply. He fingered his amulets thoughtfully, studying his acolyte. ‘Show me the vaults,’ he said.
The vault was set into a hollowed-out crag, with only one entrance, and only one purpose. The entrance was normally guarded by a coterie of wights raised specifically for that task, but they were not in evidence now. The door was crafted from stone, with a great iron pull-ring set in its centre. Melkhior moved to open it, but W’soran shoved him aside and grabbed the ring himself. He grunted as he shifted it, eliciting a grinding groan from the stones of the portal. He could feel the spells he had worked into the vault washing over him, determining his identity. Only he and his most senior acolytes were allowed within. At this point, of course, Melkhior was the only one of the latter remaining.
But with a word, he could render the vault impenetrable save by himself, or transport its contents to a pre-arranged location, set up years before and in secret. One of Zoar’s final services before he’d met his sad fate. Not even Melkhior knew of that place, nor did he know of the simple spell that would remove W’soran’s most prized possessions from the vault. W’soran stepped past the door. He ignored Melkhior’s cry of warning.
His library was as he’d left it. Dozens of tomes sat on an equal number of stone podiums, and more books and rolls of papyri and scrolls sat piled around the bases of the latter. The vault was featureless save for the podiums, which were themselves little more than fangs of melted and re-shaped rock, drawn upwards to serve as book rests. The pages of the grimoires rustled as he stepped into the vault, as if in greeting. The scent of age and dark magic washed over him. He stroked the cover of a hairy book and flipped through the thick, slightly damp pages of another.
There was no light in the vault, save for that which he’d brought in with him. In the darkness, something rustled and W’soran froze. He looked up and saw fangs. Each was the length of a sword and equally sharp, and that thicket of death descended at speed.
W’soran raised a hand and the fangs halted, their curves kissing his palm. Two eyes like balls of balefire bobbed beyond the grisly maw and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a miasmic cloud. The odour of rot and age filled his nostrils, and he could just make out the shadowy shapes of two great wings and the vaguely serpentine bulk they were attached to, filling the vault from ceiling to floor. He felt a monstrous pressure from the gaze of thing, and was, for a moment, reminded of Nagash at his most terrible.
But even Nagash’s fury paled before the sheer unadulterated rage in those glowing orbs. It was the rage of something at once divine and bestial that was now trapped in a cage of sagging muscle and rotting meat. He knew that the dead were, on some level, aware of their fate, but never to this extent, and never before had he felt such hatred from a corpse.
‘My minions found it on the Plain of Bones, to the south-east of here while scouring for raw materials,’ Melkhior said from outside the vault. ‘It was too big to use in battle, save in the deepest bowels of the mountain, and I thought it better utilised here, as a watchdog. I took it apart carefully and reassembled it in here, bit by bit, piece by piece. ’
The fangs, and the maw they occupied, rose away into the darkness, as if the thing were assured that W’soran was no threat. He cautiously sent his ball of witch fire bobbing upwards to reveal the monstrous enormity that now called his vault home.
He had seen dragons before, though only once or twice, and at a distance. The thing he saw had perhaps, once upon a time, been such. Now it was a rotting horror, all exposed bone and gangrenous muscle, lumpen and lurking beneath a ruptured and peeling hide of armoured plates. Great curving horns surmounted its thick, fleshless skull and chains of mystical binding dangled from its gaping torso. It shifted its weight, and the vault seemed to shudder. A cloud of flies was dislodged from somewhere within it, and they filled the air, humming angrily. Its wings were tattered sails, shredded and flapping as it leaned forward on them, and its claws, still cruel looking despite their cracked and splintered state, carved gouges in the stone floor.
W’soran felt a burst of avarice as he gazed up at the abomination. ‘It is… beautiful,’ he said.
‘I thought so,’ Melkhior said.
‘I will take it,’ W’soran said as he turned to face his acolyte.
‘What?’
‘In recompense for your tardiness in supplying reinforcements,’ W’soran said, rubbing his hands together in pleasure. ‘Such a creature will more than make up for any military shortfall, I think, and quite nicely.’
‘But master…’
‘Think carefully before you reply, Melkhior,’ W’soran said gently.
Before Melkhior could answer, a cloud of chittering bats suddenly swooped into the vault and circled him like a tornado of leather and teeth. The creatures swirled around him for a moment and then shot out back the way they had come. Melkhior snarled and turned. ‘The orcs are back!’
W’soran hurried after his acolyte. ‘This… Dork-creature you mentioned?’