Soul Wars Page 18

  ‘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 Phams, 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.

  Pharus felt a great sense of anticipation building in him He was at once cold and hot, hungry for something he could not put into words. His gauntlets creaked, as he clenched and loosened his hands in strange expectation. ‘What is that sound? Can you hear it?’

  ‘All dead things hear it. Nagash calls to you, on the wind and in your bones.’

  Phams twitched, feeling a sudden need, an urge, to turn and walk until he was commanded to stop. He could not resist it and did not wish to. ‘I am… hungry,’ he said, his voice no more than a whisper. ‘Thirsty. It hurts.’ Not as bad as it had, though. The war-plate he wore might be a cage, but it kept the pain at bay. Even so, he could still feel the storm, surging within him, seeking escape. He traced the hourglass shape on his chest-plate.

  ‘It will grow worse. Pain is the price we pay, to serve the Great Work. Even Nagash feels it - and your pain is but a shadow of his own. Remember that, Pharus Thaum. Remember that you are but a shadow of the Undying King, a part of him now and forevermore. When he reaches out, it is with a thousand hands, and you are one of them.’

  ‘Yes.’ The word felt wrong, somehow. Pharus’ hand fell to the sword now belted at his waist, in a sheath of rotting leather. It was a wide blade, meant for brute strength rather than finesse. Its hilt had been carved from a femur, and its crosspiece was made from the fangs of some large beast. Both the blade and the hourglass pommel had been made from some sort of dark, impossibly hard crystal - shadeglass, Arkhan had called it. It seemed to flex in eagerness as he gripped the hilt, and the sands in the hourglass hissed weirdly.

  He hesitated, feeling the malignant hunger roiling within the deceptively crude weapon - the weapon longed to part flesh and gorge itself on the final moments of the dying. And part of him longed to allow it to do so. He realised Arkhan was watching him. ‘You understand now, I think,’ the liche said.

  ‘I understand nothing. I know nothing. But I.’ Pharus hesitated. ‘It does not seem so important to know, as it did earlier.’ He flexed his gauntlets, watching the haze of his substance flicker through the gaps in the iron plates. For a moment, he wondered if he was no more than a memory of who he had been. He felt a spark of anger flicker within him.

  Before it could ignite, Arkhan said, ‘You have been remade, and all useless parts of you have been cast aside. If you have questions, it means he wishes you to ask them.’

  ‘Will he send me against Azyr?’

  ‘Do you wish him to do so?’

  ‘What I wish is not important.’

  ‘Good. You are learning.’ Arkhan sounded pleased.

  ‘Yes. I remember more of who I was. What I was.’ Pharus looked at him. ‘I also remember that you are the reason that Nagash spared me. He wished to destroy me. But you did not. Why?’

  Arkhan glanced at him. ‘Tell me - what do you know of Nagash?’

  Pharus hesitated. ‘He is. all.’ What else was there to know? Nagash was the sum totality of all things. All things were one, in him. Or so the voice beating in his brain insisted with monotonous rhythm.
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  Arkhan extended his staff. ‘Look to the east. What do you see?’

  Pharus looked and saw an unlight - a black sun, squirming against the dark curtain of the sky. It boiled and burned amid the ruins, eating away at the world around it. It swelled and receded with the voice in his head, and he found himself unable to look away. Vastation built in him, purging his lingering uncertainties.

  ‘Nagash is the black sun - the true sun’s shadow and twin,’ Arkhan said. ‘As Sigmar holds the sky suspended, so too does Nagash draw down the earth. They move in eternal opposition, pushing against one another.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  Arkhan’s teeth clicked in what might have been an expression of amusement. ‘In some ancient texts, the black sun illuminates the truth of the soul. Nagash is the totality of truth - an absence of all lies, even the most comforting. He is the black sun, burning in an inverted sky. He is the truth, and Sigmar, the lie. Sigmar is a husk, filled with falsehood. He demands much and gives little in return. Nagash, at least, offers justice.’

  ‘Justice,’ Pharus echoed. He looked down at himself. ‘Is this justice?’

  Arkhan laughed. ‘This is Nagashizzar. The place of final justice.’ He stopped and thumped the ground with his staff. ‘We are here.’

  They had come to a long avenue that stretched eastwards, towards the black sun. It had been cleared of much of the rubble, but work-gangs of skeletons still toiled along the edges. Clusters of bodiless spirits - chainrasps and flickerhaunts, gallarchs and lane-hags, scregs and flay-braggarts, masses of drifting, moaning spectres - bunched and floated through the ruins to either side, responding to the same call that drew Pharus.

  ‘What is this place?’ Pharus asked.

  ‘We approach the base of the Black Pyramid. Here, the Undying King has set his throne, so that he might receive the oaths of fealty owed him, by his most loyal servants.’ Arkhan turned west, towards the closest end of the avenue. ‘There, see? Three of the most prominent come now, to kneel at the Undying King’s feet - at their head comes Vorgen Malendrek, the Knight of Shrouds.’

  A silent host of deathly riders paraded down the avenue, past Pharus and Arkhan. At their head was a towering figure - darkly magnificent, balefire bleeding from his eyes, wrapped in spectral shrouds. He wore a black iron helm, topped by great, curving bat wings, and bore a fine sword belted to his hip, an hourglass set into the hilt.

  ‘Like you, Malendrek once served the God-King,’ Arkhan said. ‘And like you, he has seen the truth of Sigmar’s perfidy.’ He sounded almost amused. He pointed. ‘And there, Crelis Arul, the Lady of All Flesh.’ Behind Malendrek’s nighthaunt riders came a shuffling tide of rotting flesh. The deadwalkers moved with no grace or precision, stumbling along like confused livestock. The greatest mass of them bore upon their backs and shoulders a palanquin made from bone and raw, bloody flesh.

  The woman seated atop the hideous palanquin was draped in rotting and stained finery as of ancient days, her features hidden behind a crudely stitched leather mask. Two great dire wolves, their ribcages showing through tattered fur and their skulls bare to the moonlight, crouched to either side of her. Occasionally she stroked one or the other of them, as if they were living things.

  She raised a crumbling hand as if in greeting, and Arkhan returned the gesture. Then, he turned and lifted his staff. ‘And last but not least - save perhaps in his own mind - Grand Prince Yaros, Lord Rattlebone.’

  The deathrattle warriors who brought up the rear of the column marched as one, in perfect synchronisation. They bore heavy kite shields and long spears, to which had been affixed rotted pennants. Archaic armour sheathed the brown bones, and the rhythmic clamour of their passing was all but deafening.

  At their head rode a princely figure, wearing a battered crown of iron and a cloak of dusty fur. The Deathrattle King rode a skeletal steed and had a single-bladed axe balanced across his saddle. He lifted the axe in salute as he passed.

  ‘Three lords of death, come to serve he who forged them.’

  ‘Where are they going?’

  Arkhan silently extended his staff east. Phams turned. Dust clouds rolled across the far end of the avenue, momentarily blotting the black sun from sight. When they cleared, Pharus saw, at the far end of the avenue, an immense structure of black shadeglass. It resembled a dais, but was leagues across and surmounted by a towering throne, taller than any gargant, and circled by flocks of carrion birds. A great figure reclined atop the throne, and Pharus recognised the being who had remade him.

  Nagash. Unspoken, the name echoed through him regardless, down into the hollows of his spirit. The confusion he felt, the doubt and anger, it vanished all in an instant. The storm in him subsided, like a startled beast. Hoar frost crept suddenly across the panes of his armour, and he felt a chill digging into the marrow of his non-existent bones. Cries echoed up around him, so many as to occasionally merge into a single, great howl. He stepped back as something that might have been fear stirred in him

  The Undying King sat on his throne, amid a slow typhoon of souls, swirling about him in desperate celebration. Broken skeletons, crawling along the avenue, reached out to the distant figure as if in supplication. Pharus felt the pull himself. Impossible to ignore or defy. It was as if there were a great weight pressing down on him and pulling him all at once. Somehow, all things bent towards Nagash, even the winds and the light of the distant stars. It was as if he were a hole in the realm, and all that existed fell into him, to be lost forevermore.

  He groaned, and looked away, unable to bear such awful majesty for long. ‘He is all, and all are one in him,’ Arkhan said. ‘Do not resist. Let the silence of him fill you and smother all doubt in its cradle.’

  ‘I hear something.’ Pharus cradled his head. ‘Like a swarm of insects, rattling in my skull.’ He twitched, trying to escape the sound. ‘Is that him?’

  Arkhan gave a rattling laugh. ‘Come. He calls to you, and you must answer.’ He stepped onto the avenue, and Pharus followed. The spirits that huddled along either side set up a great wailing, which Pharus thought must be akin to applause. A hundred thousand souls clustered among the ruins. Some were nothing more than bobbing motes of witch-light, while others seemed almost alive, save for their pallor.

  More souls drifted down like ash from above, falling towards Nagashizzar from the dark skies. Some of these joined the throng that lined the avenue, while others were caught by the wind and whisked away, trailing despairing moans in their wake.

  ‘Where are they all coming from?’ Pharus asked.

  ‘Everywhere and nowhere. Wherever a mortal’s story begins, it ends here, and here is where all men must eventually come. Some will stay in Nagashizzar, caught fast by their crimes. Others will pass through the Sepulchral Gate and into whatever underworld calls them home. As it is inscribed there - by the manner of their death shall ye know them.’

  The avenue quickly became crowded by swaying deadwalkers and eerily still deathrattle warriors. They made way for Arkhan, their ranks shuffling aside as if shoved back by invisible hands. Arkhan led Pharus through them, towards the great dais at the end of the avenue, where Malendrek and the other deathlords stood waiting for the word of Nagash.

  Pharus felt their gazes on him as he approached, and he wondered what they made of him. Yaros seemed as stoic as any skeleton, the hollow sockets of his eyes burning dimly. Arul, the Lady of All Flesh, greeted them softly, her voice a liquid slur.

  ‘Lord Arkhan - it has been too long since you have visited my charnel gardens. They wax vibrant these days.’ She held out a mouldering hand, and Arkhan took it with courtly aplomb. His fleshless jaws brushed across her bruised knuckles.

  ‘I am sure their fragrance is as potent as ever, my lady.’

  Her flat, milky eyes fixed on Pharus. ‘And who is this handsome spirit? He wears the raiment of a deathlord, and yet I do not know him’ She held out her
hand to Pharus. He hesitated, but only for a moment. He took it and bent. Had he been alive, he thought the stench of her would have choked him. She was a dead thing and stank of rot.

  ‘He is called Pharus Thaum, and he is newly made,’ Arkhan said.

  ‘Ah, a new soul. How charming.’ She reached up and traced crumbling fingers across the side of Pharus’ helm ‘He smells of… lightning.’

  Malendrek stirred. The burning slits of his eyes, visible within his helm, narrowed. ‘What game are you playing, Mortarch?’ he rasped. ‘The glory to come will be mine and no other’s. Certainly not any pet of yours.’

  Arkhan turned. ‘Remember to whom you speak, Knight of Shrouds. You are not so high in our lord’s esteem that I cannot rend you asunder and reweave your soul into a more fitting shape.’ Malendrek drew himself up, one hand falling to the hilt of his blade.

  ‘Careful, Black One,’ he said. ‘You serve as his hand for the moment, but there are worthier souls in creation.’

  Arkhan laughed. ‘Your ambition is admirable, though wasted, Knight of Shrouds. If you wish to supersede me, you must get in line. Be warned though, I am told it is quite lengthy.’

  Malendrek hissed. ‘Speak, then. Who is this? Some broken liche of your circle?’ He looked at Pharus. ‘Arul is right. He stinks of lightning.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘Wait. I know him, now. Pharus Thaum - guardian of the dark places. One of Sigmar’s revenants. Another who received the blessings meant for me. And now you are here. The wheel of fate surely turns in strange directions.’

  Pharus gazed at him in incomprehension. ‘Do we - did we know each other?’ Something in the creature’s words stoked the storm in him Amethyst lightning sparked and crawled across the gaps in his armour.

  Malendrek’s eyes blazed bright as his pale hand fell to the hilt of his blade. ‘We fought side by side, against the soulblight warlord, Vaslbad. In Glymmsforge.’