‘Silence,’ Ushoran snarled.
‘What are you yammering about, old leech? What secret are you dancing around?’ Neferata said.
‘Have you ever wondered why our king wears no crown? The savages he rules so admire a fine crown.’ W’soran grinned.
‘Kadon’s crown…’ Neferata said, a number of things falling into place. Both W’soran and Ushoran started at that, but Neferata drove on before they could recover. ‘But that is not Kadon’s voice I hear, is it?’
‘In part perhaps,’ W’soran said with a shrug. ‘But as Ushoran said, there’s a reason you didn’t recognise it. Or maybe you did, but pretended you didn’t, even to yourself. You have heard it before, haven’t you, centuries ago? I know, because I was there when Nagash spoke to you.’ He looked at Ushoran. ‘We both were.’
Nagash. The name hammered into her brain like a nail. Nagash, the Great Necromancer. Nagash, whose name had been wiped from the historical records of the Great Land. Nagash, whose elixir of immortality even now pumped in altered form through her veins.
‘Nagash’s, not Kadon’s… It is Nagash’s crown,’ she whispered.
‘My crown,’ Ushoran countered, his hands twitching slightly. ‘And with it, I will rule even as he did. But my rule will extend unto eternity, as even his failed to do. I will not make his mistakes and I do not possess his flaws. But I will have all of his power…’
‘But you don’t. Not yet. Why?’ Neferata said. ‘Where is it?’
Ushoran hesitated, his smugness evaporating. He looked almost… afraid. W’soran answered her, and he sounded as hesitant as Ushoran looked. ‘Here. Right here and yet it is so far away.’
Ushoran went to the wall behind the throne, towards an empty niche where a statue might once have stood. He placed a hand against the stones and a hidden door slid open, revealing a set of winding steps. ‘There,’ Ushoran said softly.
‘Ushoran—’ W’soran began.
‘No. No, if she wants to see it, we shall let her.’ Ushoran looked speculative. ‘Perhaps… perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this was the answer all along.’ He looked at the dark passage. ‘Perhaps this is the price he demands.’
‘Neferata, don’t,’ Naaima said as Neferata stepped towards the passage. Neferata shook Naaima’s hand off. Her handmaiden’s voice was drowned out by the sudden roar of silence that spilled out of the darkness. It was an absence of sound which muffled everything. Ushoran stepped within and she followed, hesitant at first and then faster. Her instincts screamed warnings of treachery and deceit but not for the first time in her life, she ignored them. She had to see what lay beyond. She needed to confront that which had drawn her here, even if it endangered her very existence.
‘Come and see, it said, and I came unto Mourkain and saw,’ Ushoran whispered hoarsely as they walked. His words rustled in the narrow tunnel like bats and the stones of the corridor beyond the hidden entrance seemed to vibrate in tune to his voice. Gently, she brushed dust from the stones, revealing the crude pictograms which had been scratched into the walls by the ancient builders. Like the hieroglyphs of home, these told the story of the tomb. The body had been found in the river that curled through the mountains, a crown in one hand. The body of a mighty man, larger than any man of the Strigoi, though reduced to ruin by unknown enemies. His features had been obliterated by old marks, like those made by claws.
‘Who was he, Ushoran?’ she said.
‘Can you feel it, Neferata?’ he said, ignoring her question as they reached the end of the corridor.
‘What is it?’ she said, shivering. There was a vibration in her bones. It echoed from the floor and the walls and ceiling, and it was as if she were inside some great, living organism.
‘The echo of a heartbeat,’ Ushoran said, not looking at her.
Neferata listened, and knew he was right. The thudding boom-boom-boom, echoing up from untold depths and seeping through the stone, had the regular rhythms of a man’s heartbeat. Steady, strong… familiar. ‘No,’ she said as the sound caressed her ears.
Ushoran turned, his face twisted in a sneer. ‘Yes. Listen to it, Neferata. Do you hear it? Do you hear his heart? Does it beat faster?’ He made to grab her and she slithered back instinctively, out of his reach. ‘Do you hear him?’
The air became cold and sluggish and damp. Neferata swiped instinctively at it, as if it were full of cobwebs. A hand grabbed her wrist, but dissolved into curling wisps of mist as she spun. Words bled through the rock, snippets of past conversations.
‘Damn you, Ushoran, who is buried here?’ she snapped.
‘You did this,’ Ushoran said. ‘You made him this way!’
Neferata turned around and around as half-formed faces made to speak and dissolved in a silent storm surrounding her. All familiar, though they spanned swathes of time she had not been there to see. The faces were of a child, a boy, a man and — what? — a corpse or a wraith or wight? Regardless, he was a king.
Alcadizzar, the boy she had raised as her own. The man she had groomed to be king and the king who had died for Nehekhara. Neferata hissed and spat as the smoky fingers drifted across hers in a gesture at once familiar and abominable. ‘Away, wraith,’ she said, swiping her claws through the wisps.
‘Mourkain is built on his bones,’ Ushoran snarled, lunging through the mist. He grabbed her wrists and his human façade rippled and tore like wet papyrus, revealing the horror beneath. Grey dead flesh over an ape’s skull, with a thicket of fangs spilling from a lipless mouth. Eyes like the embers of a dying fire glared at her as he tried to pull her close.
‘W’soran cannot break his hold over the crown! And without the crown I cannot truly be king! But you — maybe you…’
Neferata bent and brought the soles of her feet sliding up between them. Catching Ushoran in the belly, she tore him loose and sent him flying back. He hit the rock and screamed, as if it burned him. She rose. The floor felt warm beneath her feet. She smelled the hiss of cooking meat and, a moment later, felt the pain.
She was burning, even as Lahmia had burned, as Khemri and Zandri had burned, at Nagash’s command. Alcadizzar whipped her with a lash of fire and regret and she screamed in agony. Ushoran, driven berserk by pain, roared and charged and his massive talons nearly took her head off. She ducked and he cut a gouge in the rock face. She cut through his belly and chest and his growls became screams as she opened him to the spine. He fell and writhed on the ground, his skin bubbling and rupturing. Turning, she began to run even as the heat ate into her own limbs. She had to escape this place. Her feet were burned raw and an agony she hadn’t felt since that first night of her new existence raced over her nerves, eating at them like acid. Still, she stumbled on, trying to escape the embrace of the tunnel. If she could get to the main chamber, perhaps the pain would stop. That was all she could think about.
She could hear Ushoran following her, his claws scraping stone. The corridor felt as if it was closing like a fist around her and the needle-on-bone voice of the crown was drowned out by the grim rumble of stone and the echoes of Alcadizzar’s voice as it thrummed through her mind, evoking ancient memories and ancient pain.
She burst out of the tunnel like a bat from the depths, flames wreathing her slender shape. She screamed, and there was nothing human in her voice. Ushoran caught her in mid-air, his grotesque gargoyle shape having sprouted wings. He too was on fire and the flames congealed greedily as his talons sought her throat. Maddened by pain and need, the two vampires crashed down onto the floor.