The ghouls had drawn together in a huddle, their yellow eyes darting around. They grimaced and whimpered. Morath looked at them pityingly. He flicked his fingers and the beasts suddenly loped away, back the way they had come, running as if their lives depended on it.
‘That was foolish, necromancer,’ Neferata said. ‘We need guides.’
‘And blood,’ Layla said.
‘You would not want to drink the blood of anything which lurks in this place,’ Morath said. ‘And we need no guides, not now. Like calls to like, in the sour places.’ Morath dropped to his haunches and dug through the closest pile of bones, extracting a nearly mummified hand. A thin shroud of flesh clung to the age-browned bones and Morath hissed in satisfaction.
He held up the hand and blew a soft breath across it. The fingers stiffened and straightened with an ugly clicking sound. Morath held his hand flat over the fingertips and a burst of puffball light emerged from his palm like poison being drawn from a wound. He winced as the light split and settled on the fingertips, as if the bones were candles. He held it up by its wrist stump and the light slid greasily across the rocks of the tunnel walls.
‘What is that?’ Neferata said.
‘A light to guide us in the darkness,’ Morath said. ‘Normally, we use them to find hidden barrows and tombs. The hand is drawn towards the largest concentration of the dark energies which we weave together to raise the dead and in this place, it will find Nagash’s throne room much quicker than the shoddy ancestral memories of our ghoulish hosts.’ He raised the corpse-light, his face pinched with strain. Neferata and the others followed. The faint skittering sounds followed them, though at a distance. It was as if their mysterious pursuers were travelling in a roundabout fashion.
The mines of Nagashizzar proved to be as vast as Morath had warned. Though the necromancer swore that they were travelling in the correct direction, Neferata found herself wondering whether they were going up or down. Time seemed to have little meaning in the ageless, suffocating confines of the mines and days blended into weeks. For Neferata and the other vampires, this was no hardship. They could go months without nourishment, though they preferred to feed as often as possible. Morath, however, was another story.
The necromancer had the lean form of a man on the edge of starvation, and he only grew thinner during their time in the dark. Part of that, Neferata knew, was due to the spell. Keeping his grisly candelabrum lit for so long seemed to take most of his strength, and they were forced to help him keep up more than once. He had brought supplies, but those were exhausted soon enough. Soon, the three vampires were forced to catch the fat black rats that scurried through the dark tunnels for Morath to feast on. A number of the vermin had mutations — extra limbs, scales or bone spurs — but the necromancer devoured them regardless, chewing the foul meat as if it were the greatest delicacy.
Every rock and tunnel seemed to pull at Neferata’s very core as they travelled, sucking her down into a maelstrom of darkness that only intensified the longer they walked. It was like a trap, and she was the rat who had walked blindly into it. To distract herself, she wondered what was occurring in her absence in Mourkain. Everything now balanced on the sharp end. An action taken in haste might tip the whole affair one way or another and unravel every strand of her carefully crafted web. She should not have left. But the crown, and what it implied, was too great an opportunity to pass up.
She needed it. It had called her to Mourkain to claim it. She was a queen, was she not? And queens had more need of crowns than grovelling schemers like Ushoran. She saw it so clearly now, down in these dark tunnels. It had used Kadon to draw Ushoran, and it had used Ushoran to draw her and now, now was the time for it to be claimed by its true mistress. After all, was she not Nagash’s rightful heir? Was she not a daughter of his blood, at least in the ways that mattered? Was she not a queen of the Great Land?
Yes, yes, you are all of this and more, it murmured, caressing her thoughts. You will be a queen again and you will rule over silent, perfect cities. You will rule over a world of unchanging tides and unfailing devotion. All will love you. All will serve you.
Even him, it hissed, even Alcadizzar.
She shuddered slightly, thinking again of Alcadizzar’s face. He would be a ghost-king for a vampire-queen; what could be more appropriate? He would love her in death as he had not in life. Everything would be–
The blade stabbed down from out of the darkness above as the roof of the tunnel seemed to unfold like the membranous wing of a bat. Morath, caught unawares, could only stare upwards in stupefaction. Neferata’s palms slammed together on the oily blade, trapping it inches from Morath’s head. With a roar, she jerked the blade’s wielder from its hiding place and dashed it to the ground. The cloak the small figure wore was the colour of the rock, and its hairy limbs were bound in leather and rags. It jerked its blade free of Neferata’s grip and flipped up, lashing out at her as it chattered curses. It wielded two blades and they hummed as they cut the air. She had little room to manoeuvre in the cramped tunnel, but the creature seemed to have no such difficulty. It sprang into the air and bounced from wall to floor to ceiling, always stabbing and cutting at her.
Losing her temper, she shot a hand out, wincing as the blades chopped into her arm. She swung her arm, pulling the weapons out of her attacker’s hands, and grabbed a hairy throat with her unwounded hand. The hood fell back, revealing the frothing, snarling snout of a great rat. With a cry of disgust, Neferata bashed the creature’s brains out on the side of the tunnel, leaving a dark trail across the rock.
‘What in the name of Settra was that thing?’ Layla yelped, looking around. The scuttling sounds they had been hearing since they entered the mines were louder now, as if whatever was making them was no longer concerned with stealth.
Rasha spat a word in Arabyan. Neferata nodded as she pulled the blades from her arm. ‘Ratkin, even as Morath warned us,’ she said. ‘Foul little beasts. Where there’s one, there’s a thousand. We should hurry,’ she added.
‘It might be too late,’ Rasha said, pointing back the way they had come. Strange lights flickered in the darkness. Weapons rattled and a wave of chittering voices rolled down the tunnel.
‘The throne room is near, it must be,’ Morath said, rubbing his throat and looking down at the body of his would-be assassin. He sounded more hopeful than confident. ‘If we hurry—’
‘Hold them for as long as you can,’ Neferata said to her handmaidens. Rasha grimaced and nodded. Layla hissed eagerly.
‘I’ve killed rats before. It should be easy.’
Neferata didn’t reply. She grabbed Morath and slung him over her shoulder. He squawked at the treatment, but fell silent as she broke into a sprint. She ran easily, despite the encumbrance. ‘You said it was nearby,’ she growled to Morath.
‘I can feel it, like a weight on my heart,’ he gasped. The skeletal hand flexed and the light that clung to the fingertips began to glow more brightly. She took that as a good sign. Behind her she heard the clash of weapons and smelled the musk-stink of the ratkin’s blood as it was spilled. She sped up, moving like quicksilver. Anyone watching would have seen little more than a pale blur. The rough mine tunnels gave way to shaped corridors as she ran. The corpse-light was burning as brightly as a torch as she raced onwards.
She passed through vast, dark, deserted halls and echoing vaults. She loped through great, now-empty storehouses and silent, shuttered rooms that had once been the sites of Nagash’s blasphemous rites. Morath gasped as she ran through the immense mountain crypt, barely able to breathe so swiftly did she move.