Balthas’ heartbeat thundered in his ears. He felt heat, such as he had never known. It ate away at him, burning him from the inside out. He tried to pull back from it, to remind himself of who he was, where he was, but the heat and the pain held him. It tore at him, and he thought he screamed – and then, in a flash, he was elsewhere, falling away from the light, the heat, into a yawning chasm of cold that reached up from below to claim him.
Stars spun, bleeding away into scars of light. Coloured hazes, the stuff of the realms, surrounded and suffused him, before being ripped away as he fell. Then, there was no light, no radiance save a pale amethyst glow that leeched his strength from him.
Balthas twisted and turned, trying to free himself, but it was like tar. It weighed him down – no, he reminded himself, not him. He tried to focus. This was no longer a memory. He had followed the thread back, and down, to its source. He could taste the iron bitterness of fear on his tongue, and his limbs ached. His lungs strained, as if filled with smoke. Something in him was burning. He was burning.
And through the smoke, through the flames, death looked down at him and smiled.
‘Balthas!’
Miska’s shout brought him back to himself. He staggered back, lightning crawling up his arms and playing across his chest and shoulders. It was not the clean azure radiance it ought to have been. Instead, it was a deep, angry violet. The colour of death. The lightning swelled, expanding, sprouting bestial jaws and something that might have been a face. Crackling teeth snapped shut, barely missing him. He fell backwards, trying to control what he had inadvertently unleashed.
‘Balthas, hold still. I will–’ Miska began, moving to aid him.
‘No. Stay back!’ Balthas dug his fingers into the crackling brambles of energy, seeking the nucleus. ‘I have it under control.’ He twisted his fingers into it, piercing its essence. Savage as it was, it was nothing more than a remnant – the echo of a dying scream, given life by some fell power and left as a trap.
He clambered to his feet, still holding the struggling essence. It twisted in his grip like a serpent, hissing and striking weakly at him. A lesser aether-mage, or one not so well-versed in the art of spirit-control, might have been overwhelmed. ‘I require a spirit-bottle, Miska,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘Do you have one about your person?’
‘Yes, here.’ She unstopped one of the crystalline vials and extended its mouth towards the struggling energies. There was a sound like a strong wind, blowing through the crags, and the energies were drawn swiftly into the bottle, with a despairing shriek. Miska quickly sealed it. ‘I’ve never seen a spirit like that. What was it?’
‘A warning,’ Balthas said, after a moment. ‘But what it means for us, I do not know.’
Chapter ten
The Undying King
Pharus Thaum passed beneath a broken archway of black stone, encrusted with skull-like barnacles. Will o’ the wisps danced across the barnacles, casting a pallid glow over the path ahead. As he walked, Nagashizzar twisted and bent around him, like a shroud caught in a fierce wind. Every street and boulevard was a ripple, an undulation, rising or sinking to reveal new mustering grounds, new tombs, new citadels of necessity.
‘Nagashizzar is vast,’ Arkhan said, as if reading his thoughts. The liche strode easily alongside him. Despite everything, Pharus was beginning to find Arkhan strangely companionable. ‘It swells like the night ocean, receding as the dawn breaks. Our gates spill forth upon every land, our towers spy every border. The desert around us is every desert in the realm. We are a single moment, a last breath, held and stretched into infinity.’
‘Sigmaron is much the same.’
‘Do you remember Sigmaron then?’ Arkhan looked at him.
Pharus scraped the flat planes of his memory. ‘I remember golden towers and the light – so much light. Starlight, moonlight, sunlight.’ He shook his head. ‘It is as if those memories belong to another man.’
‘What else do you recall?’
Pharus was silent for a moment. ‘The taste of apples.’
Arkhan turned away with a rattling sigh. ‘Ah. A good memory. I have not tasted food or drink in time out of mind. I have lost even the memory of such memories. Hold fast to it, Pharus Thaum. And remember who deprived you of such simple, impossible pleasures.’
Pharus did not reply. Around them, ancient vaults creaked open, disgorging deathrattle legions to march in silent lockstep to mustering fields scattered across the city. Primeval cisterns were uncapped, unleashing wailing tempests of nighthaunt spirits, long bound in darkness, but free now to take their vengeance on the living. These spirits swirled up into the air over the city, joining the storm of souls that was ever-growing there.
As the dead spilled into the sky, the winds picked up, casting sand and shards of shadeglass everywhere. A living mortal would have been blinded in moments, and flayed to the bone a few seconds later. For Pharus, clad in his new war-plate, it was no more disconcerting than a summer rain. He looked down at himself. Rather than the hammer-and-lightning sigils of Azyr that he kept half expecting, the war-plate bore the morbid heraldry of some long-vanished city-state of Shyish.
A stylised hourglass occupied the centre of his chest-plate. Crossed scythes marked the backs of his gauntlets, and heavy chains draped his shoulders and torso like a sash. His helm was a skull, topped by great, curving antlers of bone, and the cheek-guards swept back into bat-wing shapes. Thick robes, stained with grave matter, draped his limbs and lower body. Though when his concentration lapsed, both seemed no more substantial than smoke. ‘This armour… It does something to me.’
‘It suits you,’ Arkhan said. ‘Then, it was made for one of your kind. A cage and crown both.’ He paused. ‘Your head is clearer now, I trust. You have control over yourself. That is good. Otherwise you would be little more use than these broken things.’
He gestured to a flood of spirits swirling upwards nearby, howling their fury. The chainrasps were spiteful things, broken by Nagash’s will, their forms dictated by the circumstances of their death – and they surrounded him and Arkhan in a dolorous tempest, whispering and wailing.
They struck the walls like water, spreading and spilling to the ground. They crawled towards him in jerky fashion, begging for absolution or demanding vengeance. A part of him felt revulsion at the sight of them. But another part felt a strange sort of kinship with the tormented souls. ‘So many,’ he said.
‘There are more dead in Shyish than the living can comprehend,’ Arkhan said, as they paused to allow a ghostly black coach to thunder past. The fleshless steeds that drew it snorted amethyst fire, and the driver was a shapeless thing, clad in rags and laughing wildly. ‘Even the stones here have their ghosts. Even the trees.’ He gestured, and Pharus saw what he at first took to be a grove of skeletal trees, rising from among the crumbled temples. When one of them turned to look at him, he realised his mistake.
‘Sylvaneth,’ he said, drawing the word from memory.
‘Of sorts. The Everqueen has first claim on what passes for their souls, but some sought a different lord, in the days when she turned her face from the realms. As her song faded, they heard a different, more pleasing melody.’
The ghostly tree-spirits lurched silently past them, lumbering through the ruins, their bare branches shaking in the wind. Their features were jagged masks of ravaged bark, and their eyes burned with a terrible light. As they drew close, Pharus thought he heard a shrill keening on the wind. The sound was at once joyful and despairing.
That sound – or something like it – echoed throughout Nagashizzar. Every laugh was tinged with sorrow, every sigh with melancholy. Great funerary bells rang in the depths, and the dead shuffled from their centuried slumber and once more took up the devices of war. Chariots, coaches and hooves rattled along the avenues, as the kings and queens of forgotten bloodlines arrived to make their obeisance before Nagash. Flocks of carrion birds swirled through the storm of souls, or else perched on the high towers, croaking out Nagash’s name. Jackals prowled the alleys, their eyes glowing amethyst.