The Serpent Queen Read online

  Octavia stiffened and stepped back. She looked at him, and saw that he was acting the vampire now, arrogant and brutal and thirsty. It was like a shroud over his personality, and she could sense it vibrating darkly. There was a predatory quiver to vampires, a subtle and sinister formula that rose through the Corpse Geometries to dominate and twist the pattern.

  Fiducci had warned her about that as well. Vampires strove to dominate in all facets of existence. It was in their nature, and in their blood. A drop of the latter in a wound conquered even the strongest warrior, and made them over into what they fought. The iron will of the Mother of All Vampires was recreated in all who were descended from her. ‘And then all three of you would have died, rather than just two,’ she said. ‘And then where would I be?’

  ‘Unencumbered,’ he said. A trace of old hurts was evident in the way he said it. He turned from her and looked out over the ruin, his hands clasped behind his back.

  She placed a hand against his back. Her eyes were drawn to the largest of the healing wounds he bore. Idly, she poked it, and he hissed and spun, grabbing her hand. ‘That still hurts,’ he snapped.

  ‘The pain is in your mind. You can’t actually feel it,’ she said, extracting her hand from his grip. ‘No Nehekharan weapon made that wound.’

  ‘That’s not surprising. It wasn’t a dead man who nearly killed me, now was it?’ he said.

  ‘You lied to her,’ Octavia murmured, somewhat surprised. Vampires always lie, she thought. Even when the vampire in question was your brother, it seemed. ‘The Nehekharans weren’t the ones who attacked you?’

  ‘Oh they did, and quite thoroughly mauled us too, but they had some help,’ he said. He began to pluck out the arrows that still jutted from him. ‘It was a dwarf.’

  ‘Dwarfs,’ she said, surprised. There were rumours of a dwarf hold, somewhere in the talon of mountains that hooked the western edge of the jungle, but she knew of no one, alive or dead, who’d seen it.

  ‘Clean the grave mould out of your ears, Octavia. I said dwarf, singular, and a man.’ He sniffed. ‘A fine fellow, you’d have liked him. I so hoped that we were going to be friends.’

  She touched the wound again, despite his protestations. Every wound bore the signature of the blade that made it, and every blade left something of itself behind, whether fragments or shavings – and sometimes, just sometimes, something even finer. She could feel the raw, ugly power of the blade that had bitten into her brother. It was a thing of discomfiting solidity, and it had left its mark on her brother’s essence. Octavia knew little of the dwarfs, but what she did know was that the weapons they crafted were heavy things, heavier than the world around them, and somehow more real than reality. They ate at magic the way acid ate at flesh.

  The magics within her recoiled at the hint of such a thing, and she lowered her hand. It was no wonder it was taking so long for her brother to heal. ‘What happened to them,’ she said, ‘the dwarf and your fine fellow?’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I wasn’t in the mood to be observant. For all I know, the bone-bags killed them after they finished with us,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Why did she spare me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. She smiled at the sight of the expression on his face. She reached up and stroked his cheek. ‘I’m glad she did.’ Her smile faded. ‘How did they die?’ she asked, quietly. Their faces swam before her eyes – laughing Pieter and frowning Gregory. She felt a stirring, down deep in the ashes of her soul. She still loved her brothers, but part of her was glad that their souls were free of meat now, and away from this harsh realm.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ Steyr said, taking her hand. He kissed her knuckles. ‘We knew when we followed you to this cursed place that it would likely mean our deaths, sister. And it did. It’s simply taking a bit longer than normal for us to lie down.’

  She took his hand and led him down the ziggurat. ‘You need blood, to speed your healing,’ she said, as they descended. ‘I think our beloved queen can spare a few slaves, don’t you?’ She raised her free hand, catching the attention of the spectres and ghosts that floated above them. They began to drift down towards her, and their moans filled her ears like friendly greetings.

  ‘I don’t know, they all look exceedingly busy,’ he said, allowing her to lead him. ‘I’m beginning to think you were right, sister. This place looks as ready for war as any place I’ve ever seen. What is she up to?’

  ‘Much the same as you were planning, I imagine,’ she said, glancing at him. He smirked and shrugged, and for a moment he was the brother she recalled from her childhood, all bravado and instinct. It was Sigmund who kept them fed, and Sigmund who kept her safe from the watch and the assorted predators of the slums, until she had grown strong enough to protect herself. Sigmund the sneak thief, Sigmund who’d been named for a hero, and who’d lived up to that name, at least in her eyes.

  Then his smirk became a hard, cruel smile, and she knew that he was already scheming and plotting to take advantage of his current situation. She felt a weight settle on her heart. Vampires were not truly dead. They lacked the grace of the grave, instead clinging to the rags and tatters of life. Only the living sought to rule. What use had the dead for kingdoms? For a second, she wished her brother had been killed.

  The thought of his death, and hers, warmed her. They would be together in damnation then. She pushed the thought aside as the chill fingers of ghosts brushed across her scalp. Her hand caught up the amulet in the shape of a woman’s mouth, and again she kissed it. Steyr saw the gesture and grimaced.

  ‘You still have that detestable phylactery, I see. I’ll never forgive that blasted Tilean for teaching you about that.’ He reached for her. ‘There are better ways to anchor your spirit to this world, sister. That… thing is not one of them.’

  ‘What it is, or is not, is no concern of yours, brother. Come,’ she said, and stepped off the ziggurat and onto the buoyant cloud of spirits that rose beneath her. Their ethereal fingers plucked at her legs and they coiled about her like a morning mist. They whispered to her, speaking of secrets, curses and pleas, but she ignored them. They wouldn’t acknowledge her, should she reply. She’d learned as much as a child. There wasn’t enough left of their personalities for them to do anything more than repeat their dying thoughts incessantly.

  Steyr hesitated. ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

  ‘Don’t you think we’re a little past the point of worrying about safety?’ she said teasingly. She held out her hand, and he took it. She pulled him onto the roiling host of spirits and they descended, walking across the backs and palms of the ghosts until they reached the ground. Steyr watched the spirits return to their slow orbit of the ziggurat and frowned.

  ‘Damn things are worse than those bloated corpses she made you fish from the sea,’ he muttered. She laughed.

  ‘You have never been able to see what I see, have you, Sigmund?’

  ‘No one sees what you see, Octavia,’ Steyr grunted. They made their way through the ruins, past stumbling lines of newly arrived zombies and filth-encrusted skeletons. Entire armies had died in the jungles for thousands of years – Arabayan, Cathayan, and Nehekharan, to name but three. Expeditions from Tilea, the Empire and Estalia had also been swallowed by the foetid shadows of the Southlands, and their remains now staggered and slouched into the moonlight, shoving through the gaping holes in the ancient and crumbling walls of the temple city.

  ‘They are beautiful,’ she said, stretching out a hand to caress the rusted and dangling pauldron of a lurching corpse. It was clad in the filthy remnants of the uniform of an Averland militiaman, and dragged a broken halberd behind it. A snake slithered up from within its uniform and into its sagging mouth, before poking its wedge-shaped head through an empty eye socket. Octavia held up her hand, and the snake slithered across her palm and coiled about her forearm. She pulled the serpent close to her and stroked its skull as t
hey walked. ‘There are colours unknown to poets and artists alike visible upon their tattered flesh, and smells more intricate than can be conceived of by even the greatest perfumers of Bretonnia waft from them.’

  ‘I will admit, they have quite the heady bouquet,’ Steyr grunted, waving a hand in front of his face. ‘But beautiful? There we agree to disagree, my sister.’

  He made a face. ‘She’s had you rouse every corpse in the jungle.’

  ‘We’ll need them,’ she said.

  ‘I take it she’s still intent on tearing Lybaras apart stone by stone?’ he said.

  ‘And more besides – Mahrak, as well, at least, and Rasetra – everything south of the Charnel Valley,’ she said. She smiled and added, ‘And Lahmia, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said sourly. He hopped over a crawling corpse, missing its lower half. He watched it follow after the others for a moment, before continuing after her. ‘You still think she’ll let you get within a hundred yards of that library you dream of?’

  ‘If she’s as smart as I think, she’ll know she has no choice. In Lahmia lie the secrets of controlling the dead of Nehekhara – the great tomes and papyri of the masters of the art, which contain everything I’ll need to bring the tomb-kingdoms to heel, and free them from the tyranny of their dreams of lives once lived.’ She petted the snake and it slithered up her arm and coiled about her neck, its tongue flickering in and out of its mouth. ‘She needs me to make use of those secrets, for her sake if for no other reason. Otherwise, all the dead in these jungles won’t be enough to hold back the tomb-legions that will come pouring through the Charnel Valley, once they realise what she’s done to Khalida and Lybaras.’

  Chapter 8

  The Lybaran galley sped across the heaving sea with preternatural speed. Or so it seemed to Felix, who sat on the rail of the high deck, one hand on the hilt of his sword. He examined his hand. It had been bandaged so expertly that he would not have known he was wearing it, had he not seen it put on. Zabbai’s handmaidens were better surgeons than any he had had the misfortune to encounter in his own lands.

  He’d been somewhat worried about infection, and not just from the muck and filth that had crusted his wounds. It was common enough knowledge that ghouls carried a hundred and one vile diseases on their fangs and talons, scraped from the bones of dead men. It was a ghoul who had carried the Blue Pox into Stirland, and a ghoul who had inflicted the first case of the Red Rot in Bretonnia. Or so folk had it. Then, folk also had it that the dead of the deserts were as foul as any corpse that had ever clawed its way out of the sour ground of Sylvania.

  Felix lowered his hand and watched the crew of the galley. They acted much as they had in life, he suspected. He wondered if Gotrek was correct – did they even know that they no longer possessed flesh, or were they lost in dreams and heedless of the salty sea winds that scratched at their bones?

  ‘They do not see the world as it is, but as it was,’ Zabbai said, from beside him. Startled, he nearly slipped from his perch. Her hand shot out, steadying him. She was far stronger, he knew, than himself. Idly, he wondered if that had been the case when she’d been alive, as well. Judging by her size, he thought it likely. He’d never met a woman, alive or otherwise, who was both taller and stronger than himself.

  ‘And how do you see it?’ he said, steadying himself on the rail.

  ‘I am speaking to you, am I not?’ She tilted her head. She leaned on the haft of her war-axe, at ease. Up close, the Herald of Lybaras smelt of strange spices and preservative oils. It wasn’t a foul smell, he decided. But it was different.

  ‘I’m surprised you speak our language,’ he said, ‘but gratified. My own facility with languages is diverse, but limited.’

  ‘I speak all of the languages of the empire,’ she said, looking out over the deck. It took him a moment to realise that she wasn’t referring to the Empire of Karl Franz, but some other, more ancient kingdom. He hesitated, wondering how to respond. She looked at him, and made a soft, rattling sound he thought might be a chuckle. ‘Though it has been some time since I’ve spoken to a barbarian from the northern wilds, I will admit.’

  ‘Barbarian?’ Felix asked, stung.

  ‘Do you prefer savage?’ Zabbai cocked her head. ‘You’re an Unberogen, no? You look like them, though you are quite skinny.’

  ‘You’re one to talk,’ Felix muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Felix said, looking at his reflection in her golden mask. ‘Have you met many barbarians, then?’

  ‘I took their heads. Does that count as meeting them?’ She patted the haft of her axe. ‘They fought well, those mountain-folk, but I rode with Nekaph, and even the gods would hesitate to meet the Herald of Settra in battle. We harried them to their brute palisades, and put their hovels to the torch. We mounted the heads of their petty kings upon stone pillars, where the carrion birds could strip them clean.’ She spoke proudly, and Felix felt slightly ill. She stretched out a hand towards the sun and spread her fingers, as if to clutch at it. ‘Our empire stretched from sunrise to sunset, and the earth trembled beneath the wheels of our war-chariots.’

  ‘And now it is dust and ashes,’ Gotrek rumbled.

  Both Zabbai and Felix turned. The Slayer wasn’t looking at them. Gotrek had been staring at the wake of the galley since the liche-priest, Djubti, had intimated that he would find his doom, as if the waters held some secret in that regard. The dwarf ran his thumb over the edge of his axe and stuffed the bloody digit into his mouth. He turned and fixed them with a gimlet stare. ‘Everything ends, manling. Empires rise and fall, and the world keeps turning, whether we wish it, or not. And those of us who remain are forced to wade through the ashes of that which we once knew.’ He spat over the rail. ‘That or we wallow in them. It seems that the dead are no different to the living, in that regard.’

  ‘Our empire still exists,’ Zabbai said. ‘It has existed, and will exist again. It is imperishable and eternal. We are imperishable and eternal.’

  Gotrek grinned. ‘Like the markings on a tomb,’ he said.

  Zabbai half raised her axe. If she’d been alive, Felix might have thought that she was contemplating burying her axe in Gotrek’s head. As it was, he had no idea what was going on behind her mask. Could the dead be insulted? He decided to play peacemaker. They were guests – or prisoners, a traitorous part of his mind murmured – though Gotrek seemed to have forgotten that, as usual. ‘Tell me of Lybaras,’ he interjected, quickly.

  Zabbai looked at him. Then she lowered her axe and said, ‘Lybaras is vengeance given form. It is the wrath, the wrack and the ruin of all those who would dare challenge the Great Land. The shadows of its white towers stretch from the Devil’s Backbone to the west, to the Cursed Jungle in the south, and to the Gulf of Fear in the east. Only from the north may Lybaras be safely approached, and it is the north that Lybaras guards, for in the north lies cursed Lahmia and twice-cursed Nagashizzar.’ Zabbai settled her axe in the crook of her arm. ‘The Serpent Queen, High Queen Khalida, has set herself the task of barring the way, should there be any attempt to rouse the damned spirits which lurk in Lahmia’s ruins, or to once again light the hell-forges of Nagashizzar. While the other kings, queens, princes and princesses of the Great Land are lost to the memory of flesh, or content to wage war upon one another for boredom or spite, Khalida alone sees the greater purpose of our curse.’

  ‘Greater purpose,’ Felix repeated.

  ‘We failed,’ Zabbai said softly. ‘We failed our land, our people and our gods, and thus we are stripped of eternity and condemned to watch as the world moves on without us, without our wisdom. We are not rulers now but gaolers, set to guard the Usurper’s foul treasures so that none might make use of them as he did.’

  ‘Who is “the Usurper”?’ Felix asked.

  He never got his answer. The drumbeat changed rhythm and Zabbai snapped around, staring towards the
horizon. Felix followed her gaze and saw the shapes of several approaching galleys. They were cutting through the water, against the current, but approaching speedily for all that. They bore a hawk or some other bird of prey on their sails and he recalled the second flotilla he’d seen from the deck of the Orfeo. Had they fallen afoul of some internecine squabble between tomb-cities? The thought wasn’t a pleasant one.

  Zabbai said something in her own tongue. He thought it might have been a curse. ‘What is it?’ he asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

  ‘Mahrak,’ she said. ‘We are in waters that the City of Decay claims.’

  ‘I take it that you don’t agree with them,’ Felix said.

  ‘Their fleet is a third the size of ours, and they claim a third more of the sea,’ Zabbai said. ‘King Tharruk has ever overestimated Mahrak’s reach.’

  Felix shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun and peered at the approaching ships. ‘Just now, I’d say they outnumber you, whatever the size of their fleet. We’re one to their three.’ He nervously fingered the hilt of his sword. He’d never been a fan of boarding actions.

  ‘We have already met them in battle once. We broke them then,’ Zabbai said.

  ‘Aye, and our ship as well,’ Gotrek said. He peered at the approaching ships with interest. ‘Then, your folk have never given much thought to anyone else, have they?’

  ‘And yours have?’ Zabbai said. Like Gotrek, she stared at the galleys, which were swiftly closing the distance. Felix wondered if they were using some fell magic to do so, and then looked about the deck, at the skeletal crew that surrounded him, and shook his head. He caught Gotrek’s eye and the Slayer chuckled.