The Serpent Queen Read online

  ‘Grievance, no,’ Antar said. ‘Antar bears no grudges! He is as magnanimous in defeat as victory, elsewise he would have slain thee and thy stunted monkey for shaming him!’

  ‘Then why agitate for war with them?’ Felix asked, recalling what Zabbai had told him about Antar and his fellow princes. The tomb-prince reminded him of any number of arrogant aristocrats he and Gotrek had run across in their travels – so convinced of his own rectitude that he couldn’t see the very real harm his actions might cause.

  ‘Agitate? Agitate! Who claims that Antar agitates? Name him and Antar shall challenge him to the Test of Seven Scorpions!’ Antar stopped and whirled, so quickly that Felix almost ran into him. ‘Antar is no agitator, he is a hero!’

  Felix pointed past him, at Zabbai, as she stepped into view. ‘Her,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ Antar said. ‘Yes, well, say, rather, that Antar urges his kingly forebears to consider the merits of war.’ He looked at Felix. ‘War is the only entertainment available in the Great Land. Antar cannot taste grapes or wine, he cannot touch a woman and his paints are all dust. The ink has dried, and Antar’s poetry goes unwritten.’

  ‘You were a poet?’

  ‘Antar was the greatest poet! His verses made Asaph herself weep for the beauty of them,’ he said. ‘Alas, truth and beauty fled with flesh, and now Antar is but a shadow of his former glory – though he is still more glorious than any who would compare themselves to him.’

  ‘Not that anyone would do so willingly,’ Zabbai said as she drew near. ‘We’re almost there.’ Her warriors followed her, their skulls creaking as they surveyed their surroundings watchfully.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Felix said.

  ‘Offhand, manling, I’d say because we’ve been walking through it for some time now,’ Gotrek growled. It was the first thing the dwarf had said since the sky had begun to lighten. Gotrek swept his axe out, chopping through a curtain of vines and rotting leaves to reveal the ancient stonework hidden beneath.

  Felix looked around in surprise. Now that he’d been made aware of it, he could see that what he’d taken for trees or stones were in fact the remains of walls and wide shapes that might be statues beneath their coverings of vegetation. ‘What is this place? Is it another outpost?’

  ‘No,’ Gotrek said. He ripped aside a handful of vines and revealed the surface of a strangely carved square column. Felix realised that there were other columns, all equally massive and connected by flat, vine-encrusted archways. They were in some sort of overgrown plaza. Gotrek glared at the markings on the column and then spat.

  Felix knew better than to question the dwarf further. He moved around the columns, examining them. Unlike the outpost, the stones were not so much carved as shaped. When he cleared aside the vines to touch the flat surface of the column, he felt a tingle in his fingertips and a bitter taste at the back of his tongue. ‘Magic,’ he murmured.

  ‘The Temple of Skulls was a ruin before Settra had made himself king of kings,’ Zabbai said, from close behind him. Felix turned and nearly ran into her. She grabbed his wrist and held it up to examine it. ‘Your skin is raw,’ she said.

  ‘Old metal and harsh conditions,’ Felix said, gently removing his wrist from her grip. ‘I’ll be fine as soon I get it off, I assure you.’

  She reached up and touched his face. Then, with a quick jerk, she dragged him forwards. Felix stumbled into her, a protest dying on his lips as he heard the vines rip and tear behind him. Something thrust its way out of a heretofore hidden alcove set in the centre of the column, and clawed for him with rotting fingers.

  Felix whirled around as the moss-encrusted mockery of a man lurched towards him. Soggy hands groped for him, and he ducked aside. Karaghul was in his hands a moment later and he chopped into the zombie’s midsection like a woodcutter hewing at a tree. The corpse wheezed as a stinking cloud of air was shoved out of its lungs. Even as Felix jerked his blade free of the collapsing body, more zombies burst from hidden alcoves or rose from beneath the ground and thrashed through the vegetation towards them. ‘They were waiting for us,’ he shouted. Zabbai and her warriors were accosted as well, as bodies covered in tangled roots and slime rose and clutched at them. Felix saw one of the skeletal warriors dragged down by a trio of zombies and its skull smashed.

  ‘They were waiting for anyone, manling. We’re just the ones they caught,’ Gotrek growled. His axe glittered as it carved a black path through two of the zombies at once, beheading one and shattering the spine of another. ‘My father claimed that the cursed Von Carsteins used to do the same thing, to guard their camps and lairs, during their wars with your people. They’d line the roads out of Sylvania with mass graves, so that they would always have troops ready to do as they needed. ‘He grunted and spun his axe, slicing first through a groping arm and then cutting the legs out from under the arm’s owner. ‘They’d use the dead as watchdogs, and their moans would draw the others like moths to candlelight.’

  ‘At least these are silent,’ Felix said, burying Karaghul to the hilt in a slack face. He jerked the blade free as clammy fingers clutched at his hair and face. As he made to drive his blade through the flailing zombie, an explosive groan burst from its sagging lips. One by one, the others joined in, until a communal rumble of dead voices began to fill the muggy air.

  Gotrek paused in his efforts to glare at Felix. ‘You just had to say something, didn’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you’d be overjoyed,’ Felix snarled, redoubling his efforts. ‘More zombies on the way mean more chances for you to die!’

  Gotrek brightened. ‘It does, doesn’t it? My thanks, manling – maybe this won’t be a wasted trip after all!’

  ‘I was joking,’ Felix protested.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Gotrek said. He grinned and spun his axe between his hands, scattering rotting flesh from the blade. ‘Come on, you overripe sacks of meat! Come on!’ he roared, momentarily drowning out the groans of the dead. ‘Bring all of the dead of these jungles to me! Come at me until I can no longer lift my axe, until my breath sears my lungs, until the shadows of death enfold me.’

  ‘Be silent,’ Zabbai hissed. Her axe looped out to split a zombie’s head from crown to jaw, and she easily wrenched it free. ‘There is more at stake here than your selfish desires, dwarf.’

  Gotrek laughed wildly. ‘My desires are all that concern me, crow-bait.’ He backhanded a corpse carelessly, sending it staggering onto Felix’s sword.

  Felix cursed and kicked the thrashing zombie off of his blade. ‘And is my life so meaningless? If you bring every zombie down on us here, we won’t reach the temple in time, and this damned bracelet will kill me!’

  Gotrek ignored him, and his laughter lashed Felix like a whip. Anger surged through him. He’d always known Gotrek was selfish and self-absorbed, but after the Slayer had made his bargain to rescue Felix, he’d thought that the Slayer had, at last, come to see him as something other than a companion of convenience. Obviously, he’d been wrong. ‘Is this how you want to die?’ he shouted. ‘Is this how the great Gotrek Gurnisson goes to the halls of his ancestors? Pulled down by reeking corpses? Do you think Grimnir will smile on you for dying this way? Or will he turn his face from you, for choosing an easy death?’ He fairly screamed the last two words.

  Gotrek’s laughter ceased. His jaw tensed pugnaciously and he began to hew grimly at the staggering, empty-eyed dead men. The Slayer rapidly made headway, sending bodies and pieces of bodies flying as he pushed through the ranks of the dead. With Gotrek’s ire thus concentrated, Felix and the others were free to strike down the dead as the latter turned the bulk of their attentions on the dwarf shoving his way into their midst.

  ‘He is mad,’ Antar said wonderingly. ‘Even Antar, Touched by Ptra and Scion of the Third House, is not so heedless. And Antar is fairly heedless.’ The prince of Mahrak took the head off of a zombie with his khopesh and backhanded another with h
is flail.

  He paused and added, ‘Or so he has been assured by his many and multifarious cousins, doctors, priests and concubines.’

  The dead fell on Gotrek like a tidal wave. They struck him with flabby, heat-bloated fists and bit at him with wobbling jaws. The dwarf hunched forwards, waiting until ten and then twenty or more of the corpses were clawing and biting at him. He vanished beneath them, and for a moment, Felix thought that Gotrek had decided to let the dead kill him out of spite. Then, with a roar that seemed to rumble from out of the depths of the earth, Gotrek surfaced from the charnel wave. His rune-axe shone with water and rotten blood as it carved a single canyon through every corpse in its path. Such was the force of the blow that dead men were sent jackknifing backwards and upwards and away from the seething mass of dwarfish muscle.

  Felix was reminded of misfiring cannons he’d seen, and the havoc they had wreaked on their unlucky crew. Bodies tumbled into the water or struck the bent trees. Gotrek stood in the midst of once-human wreckage and shook himself with a gusty sigh.

  He watched dully as Zabbai and her warriors finished off those zombies still capable of movement. ‘You’re right, manling. That would have been a stupid death,’ the Slayer said, looking up at the lightening sky. The way he said it, however, convinced Felix that he didn’t mean it. Gotrek shook himself again and hefted his axe. ‘Let’s go before any more corpses arrive,’ he muttered. ‘My doom waits, and I would not have it do so for long.’

  ‘For one who seeks doom, he is curiously easy to dissuade,’ Zabbai said, as they watched Gotrek hack his way through the muck and murk of the overgrown ruin. Felix ripped down a dangling vine and flung it aside as they followed him.

  ‘Gotrek isn’t looking for a doom. He’s looking for the doom. The one that will elevate him from what he is to someone his folk – all folk, really – remember for all time,’ he said.

  ‘Hubris,’ Zabbai said.

  ‘Desperation,’ Felix corrected, softly. ‘I have learned much, in my time with Gotrek. I have learned things about him that he would never allow me to speak of, were he aware that I knew them.’

  He gestured towards the Slayer’s broad, scarred back. ‘That is all that remains of a brave, clever, energetic dwarf. He is the ghost of a damning oath, echoing down through the ages, moving inexorably towards some unrevealed fulfilment.’ Felix looked up at the sky, where it appeared in the gaps between trees. ‘I think, maybe, that Gotrek once could have been the hope of his people.’ He looked at her, and smiled sadly. ‘It’s just a fancy, and likely Gotrek was no one, and nothing more than what he was before he took up that axe and began his march towards his appointed hour. But there are moments where he seems to me to represent the best and worst of his folk, like no other dwarf I’ve met. We were told once, not long after we’d met, that when Gotrek fell, so too would his people. I’ve had that thought in the back of my head for longer than I care to think about.’

  ‘And do you believe it?’ Zabbai said.

  Felix shook his head. ‘I hope that was an exaggeration, but there are times when I think… I think that when he finally dies, something great and mighty will go out of the world, and never pass this way again.’ He looked at Gotrek. ‘I don’t think I’ll outlive him, by much. And if I did, I’m not sure I’d want to.’ He shook his head again. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’ll find his doom here, and I’ll survive, and go back to Tilea – perhaps lie on the beach and drink something that tastes of fruit, rather than wheat.’

  Zabbai looked at him for a moment. Then her dry, cool hand fell on his shoulder. ‘If I were a living woman, I would take you as my own, for however long you lasted. It would not be long, for you are thin and fragile, but it would be memorable,’ she rasped.

  Felix blinked. He tried to formulate a reply, but all he could come up with was, ‘Thank you?’

  ‘I’d take her up on it, manling,’ Gotrek said without turning around. ‘Among my folk, a woman who can crush a grobi skull between her hands is considered quite a catch.’

  Felix didn’t reply. He swallowed, wondering how much Gotrek had heard. He shook his head and looked at Zabbai. ‘Thank you for saving me, back there.’

  ‘It is my duty to keep you alive, Felix,’ Zabbai said.

  ‘A bit contradictory,’ he said, tapping the bracelet.

  ‘That is not for you,’ Zabbai said. ‘It is for him.’ She gestured to Gotrek.

  ‘So you’ve said,’ Felix said, flexing his hand. ‘What I want to know is why?’ He looked at her. ‘You’re obviously capable of going to get this sword yourself. Why bother with Gotrek and me? Is it just because Djubti said so?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Zabbai said. She made the rasping noise that Felix had come to associate with laughter.

  ‘Then why?’

  She fell silent. Felix looked at her. ‘You may as well tell me. We’re here. And we may not make it out. And I, for one, would hate to die in ignorance.’

  Zabbai expelled a rattling sigh. ‘This is not the first time that the thirsty dead have gathered here.’ She looked at him. ‘Like the plagues they are, they have their seasons. It is this so-called Serpent Queen’s season now, but before her were the Empress of All Bats and the Jackal-Lord, the Adder-King and the Bride of Ten Scorpions – others, dozens, hundreds. The dead have been culled from these jungles before, and they will be again. This place calls to them, and more besides – greenskins and daemon-worshippers gather in these ruins as well, when the war-season is upon them. We have learned to our cost that there are places here where we cannot go.’

  She noticed his look of confusion and said, ‘Spells of protection and binding, some old and some new, mark the great ziggurats for which the ruin is named. The very old folk who built this place laid spells with the first capstone. Many princes and warriors were lost storming those high places in centuries past. Their bones became as powder and their souls were snared and lost, never to return. Death is never the end for us, Felix. It is but a respite. Were I to fall, I would rise again in a day, a year or a century hence and return to my duties, for such is our curse. But to enter the ziggurats at the heart of this ruin is to be unmade utterly and completely.’

  ‘Why didn’t Khalida simply tell us this?’

  ‘She is the High Queen,’ Zabbai said. ‘She does not have to explain. She has but to command, and that is enough.’ Felix had no reply.

  ‘If you two are done chattering,’ Gotrek said, ‘I’d advise you to turn your eyes forward.’ The Slayer had stopped. His axe slashed out, hacking aside a tangled mat of vines and leaves to expose another archway. And beyond it, a vast pyramidal shape that bore a strong and unpleasant resemblance to a malformed human skull, albeit grossly magnified, stretched above the jungle mist. It loomed higher than the smaller ziggurats and the thick walls that rose up in the distance over the trees and ruins about them.

  ‘Behold,’ Antar said, ‘the Temple of Skulls!’

  ‘Really,’ Felix said. ‘And here I was thinking it was some other ruined temple. Thank you for clearing that up, mighty prince.’

  ‘No thanks are necessary, peasant,’ Antar said as he swept past Felix and Zabbai. ‘Antar is aware of your ignorance, and he is magnanimous with knowledge!’

  The ruin was less overgrown once past the archway. There were strange trails in the vegetation that covered the flagstones, as if many bodies had been dragged slowly over them over a long period of time. Felix shied away from the thought and tried to concentrate on their surroundings. Something seemed strange about the shape of the avenues and pathways. When he mentioned it, Gotrek grunted and said, ‘This place is sitting in a natural river basin. Everything leads down to that big ziggurat in the centre, in a roundabout fashion.’ He gestured about them with his axe. ‘These avenues and archways are simply the overgrowth of the main temple complex, spreading out from the aleph, like spokes from a wheel. They get narrower as they draw closer to the inner wa
lls.’ He motioned to the distant walls. ‘This was a bastion, once.’ He spat. ‘Now it is the haunt of monsters.’

  ‘It wasn’t a dwarf bastion, though, was it?’ Felix said.

  ‘No,’ Gotrek said. ‘It belonged to another folk, older even than my own.’ He looked around. ‘But they fell. Even as our holds fell, and the outposts of the elves, so too did their cities fall in the time of the Ancestor Gods, when Grimnir, Grungni and Valaya walked among us. Their cities burned and crumbled, and their empire was shattered, even as ours flourished in the Golden Age that followed.’ He looked at Felix. ‘That is the nature of empires, manling. They all fall, in the end.’

  ‘Even that of the dwarfs?’ Felix said, expecting Gotrek to bluster a denial. Instead the Slayer fell silent and pressed one hand to the great wall, as if to commune with the ancient stones that made it up. Unnerved, Felix cleared his throat and said, ‘What now?’

  ‘Now, manling, we go get the dead woman’s play-pretty,’ Gotrek said.

  Khalida Neferher stood in the Avenue of Kings, before the entrance to the pyramid of Rhupesh the Seventh, of the Third Dynasty of Asaph’s Wrath, Devoted Husband of the Asp and Tiger of the High Wall. His pyramid was one of the largest in the avenue, and built like a fortress. Rhupesh had been a mighty builder in his day, Khalida recalled. It was he who had overseen the construction of Lybaras’s fortified harbour, and the massive, high walls of pale stone that guarded the city still, millennia after his death in the War of Two Thousand Arrows.

  Djubti stood beside her, his staff extended before him and his voice raised in the Incantation of Awakening. Arrayed about the liche-priest and his queen were those princes and kings who had already been awakened from their imposed slumber at Khalida’s command. Quiet arguments, centuries in the brewing, rippled through their ranks, as old rivals became reacquainted. Any moment now, Khalida knew, challenges would be issued and swords would rattle, and she would be forced to intervene. Such annoyances were a large part of why she had issued the Edict of Asaph’s Chosen, and sent the fractious nobility of Lybaras into enforced slumber during the Wars of the Kings.