The Serpent Queen Read online

  It was the queen who had shared the dream with Nitocris, long, long ago. She had placed the idea of Lahmia, with all of its wonders and majesty, all that it was and all that it could be, in Nitocris’s mind as gently as she had pierced her flesh with her fangs. As sweetly as she had imparted some of her divine strength to her sister-monarch, and raised Nitocris from the mistress of few, to a queen of many.

  And all she asked in return was that Nitocris do as she had always done. All she asked was that the Serpent Queen strike, with fire, fang and ferocity, again and again until the Southlands bowed to the whim of the Queen of Mysteries. It was a small thing, and one Nitocris would have done regardless, and had been doing before she had been inducted into the sisterhood of the Handmaidens of the Moon.

  In her sleep, she could hear them, though only faintly. Their voices stretched across trackless deserts, and towering snow-capped mountains such as Nitocris had never seen, but dearly wished to. There was so much to see and experience beyond the swamps and shadows of the Southlands. Her sisters whispered to her of those things, and she caught glimpses of the sun-dappled vineyards of Tilea and the harsh hills of Estalia. She smelt the strange spices that lingered in the air of the Street of Booksellers in Copher, and heard the rattle of drums and the thunder of hooves as the armoured knights of the far distant Empire broke into a gallop. All of these sights and sounds and smells filled her mind almost to bursting, and she groaned in longing. The images spun away like a morning fog, and behind them, her purpose rose up again.

  Lahmia, her sisters whispered.

  Lahmia, the Queen of Mysteries promised.

  ‘Lahmia,’ Nitocris murmured. The dream passed, and her eyes flickered and widened. A hiss of disappointment echoed through the chamber, and she sat up. As she did so, her handmaidens rose smoothly from where they’d knelt about her in a great circle. They made no sound, save the rustle of their clothing or the clink of golden jewellery. Nitocris spread her arms and allowed those most favoured in her esteem to raise her from the bier and set her down on the moss-encrusted stone floor.

  ‘Lahmia, my sisters,’ she said, her voice carrying easily throughout the chamber. She kept her arms extended to either side, and those women who had lifted her began to dress her in her war-panoply, as was the custom.

  ‘The City of the Dawn, from whence our mother, the Queen of Moonlight and Shadow, the Lady of Air and Darkness, set forth her sandaled foot upon the jewelled thrones of this world and said to them, “Obey”,’ she intoned. As she spoke, her handmaidens slid heavy bracers, wrought from the red iron that lurked in the valleys deep in the interior, over her hands and onto her forearms. ‘She made them whimper like whipped curs, my sisters. Have we not done the same, in her name? Have we not brought low the crude chieftains of our lands, and broken the backs of our enemies, like so?’

  She raised her legs, one at a time, allowing her handmaidens to place sandals made from the sinews of a great river crocodile upon her feet. Greaves made from the same strange ore as her bracers were strapped to her shins. ‘Have we not beaten back the two-legged lizards which sought to deny us passage to this frontier?’ she said as her handmaidens slid a cuirass made from the thick, mottled scales of one of the aforementioned creatures about her torso, and cinched tight the rawhide thongs that held it shut. ‘Have we not lined the jungle road with the skulls of our myriad foes, to mark our passage and progress? Have we not left a scar across these lands, a sign that we were here, and that we were strong?’ A robe made from the hides, both false and flesh, of the leopard-worshippers who had once claimed this place as their own, was settled about her shoulders and pinned with a clasp of bone. ‘Have we come far enough, my sisters?’

  Many pairs of red eyes met hers, and her handmaidens snarled, as one, ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ Nitocris purred. ‘No, we have not. Our sisters call to us, my fair ones.’ She flung out a hand. ‘They call to us, and urge us on, for there is much yet to do.’ She pressed her hands to her chest. ‘The dry dead of the treacherous sands still stand between us and that which is ours by right, my sisters. The false dead, the slave dead, who know not the caress of the moon or the pulse of blood – the broken dead, who would dare deny us all that our Queen of Mysteries has promised us. The lands beyond the wastes, the kingdoms beyond the moon and the great water – these are ours,’ she said, digging her claws into her cuirass. She flung out her hands again. ‘This she has promised me, promised us, and by her token, we know it to be true!’

  A handmaiden hurried forwards to kneel before Nitocris and raise the heavy, ancient Nehekharan sword, in its sheath of crumbling saurian leather. Nitocris drew the blade and it seemed to sing as it caught the moonlight. It was stained still with the blood of the last person to feel its sting, though that had been centuries ago, and in another land. ‘This,’ Nitocris said softly, clutching the hilt in both hands and pressing the flat of the blade to her face, ‘This blade, which shed the sour blood of our lady’s false friend, the false serpent of decadent Lybaras, is our banner.’ She raised the blade over her head. ‘This blade, this fang, is our decree of war against the usurpers of the empire that is ours by right. For are we not the daughters of Lahmia? Are we not the Handmaidens of the Moon, and the Children of the Dawn? And by this blade, we shall show our queen that we are her true sisters. By this blade, which pierced the breast of the false serpent, the true Serpent Queen shall right the course of things!’

  As she shouted those words, her handmaidens raised a cry that echoed throughout the chamber. It was a savage noise, and joyous in its savagery, and Nitocris luxuriated in it. She threw back her head and gave vent to her own pealing cry, like the shriek of some great hunting cat. This was what Nitocris had been built for, from her first breath to her last as a mortal woman. She had been made for battle, the way a sword was made, or a spear.

  She had been born in battle. Her mother had given birth to her even as she defended the crude palisades of her tiny kingdom against invaders from the lands of the mangrove coast. Her people had been the people of the serpent even then, worshipping at the altar of the great stone snake that had been carved originally by the two-legged lizards that haunted the ancient cities to the south.

  Her mother had raised her to be chieftain, as was her right, and in her youth, Nitocris had proved herself by leading raids deep into the mangrove coast, to harry and break the tribes there and drive them into the shadows.

  She had led sorties across the slopes of the fire-mountains, to claim the mineral wealth of the tribes who dwelt there. She had wielded spear and sword against the worshippers of leopards, lizards and bats. She had led a coalition of tribes to repulse invaders from the east and the lands she now knew were called Ind.

  Her mother had died at the hands of an armoured raider from some hellish shore, come to take slaves and souls for his skull-hungry god. She had drawn the raider and his followers into the jungles and left them to sink in the mud and marsh, dragged down by their heavy armour while her warriors killed those who made it to solid ground with spear thrust and arrow.

  She still had his great helm, with its beast snout and crooked horns and the bloodstains that marked the visor from where she’d pierced his eyes with two quick thrusts of her blade, as a reminder of her mother. She shook off the memories. Such moments were long past and no longer concerned her. Only Lahmia mattered now.

  As the echoes of her cry faded, she passed through the ranks of her handmaidens, who fell in behind her. They followed her from the chamber, murmuring to each other. They had been drawn from a dozen tribes over the centuries, offered as tribute initially, and then, when her fame had spread from coast to coast, they had fought for the right to join her. Their tribes were long gone now, dispersed or exterminated in the course of her conquests, but as with their mistress, such mundane matters no longer concerned them. They were daughters of Lahmia now, as much as she was, and it was to Lahmia that their thoughts were turned.

&
nbsp; She left the chamber and swept out onto the top of the ziggurat, passing beneath the crude stone arch, shaped like the mouth of a giant skull. The night welcomed her. Bats passed across the surface of the moon above and hundreds of torches lit the grounds below.

  From the flat, broken expanse of the roof behind her, the beat of drums throbbed through the steamy air. The thump of those drums pulsed through her, and she knew that it did the same, though to a greater extent, to all the dead. The sound of the drums had wrenched the dead from their holes, and brought them to her. They still did so, in fact. Zombies, human and otherwise, stumbled into the city in groups and singly, following the drums, and her army swelled with every new arrival. She looked down the slope of the ziggurat, towards the rest of the ruin.

  The ziggurat occupied the aleph of what had once been a temple city, known by the local tribes as the Temple of Skulls. Crumbled buildings and shattered avenues spread out around it, and all were visible from where she stood. Who the city had belonged to and what fate had befallen them was a mystery she had been unable to solve, more through lack of interest than difficulty. It had been empty of life even in the days of Settra the Imperishable.

  When she and her army had arrived, it had been occupied by a tribe with similar aims of conquest to herself. They worshipped a foul deity and waged war to acquire slaves to sacrifice to him. Their priests and champions had worn leopard skins and employed iron talons to shed the blood of their slaves in the name of their murder-god. Nitocris had toppled their altars and butchered their priests and champions, and she had torn the head from the snarling, beast-headed god-thing that had overseen their rites, with its brass collar and blood-dappled fur. The leopard-folk now served her, though in a reduced capacity.

  The temple city bustled with activity. Stumbling corpses, animated by the dark will of her handmaidens, carried felled trees to the wharves that lined the sluggish, mosquito-shrouded river running through the northern quarter of the city; there, gangs of emaciated slaves constructed crude dhows and barges. Others forged weapons and armour from scrap iron and bronze to arm the silent legions she had raised from the steaming muck of the jungles. The Southlands were built upon bones; hundreds of generations had risen and fallen, and not just those of men, but of orcs as well, and beasts. As she watched, one such, a massive horn-headed quadruped with an armour-plated tail and a gaping death-wound in its side staggered forwards, dragging a load of lumber towards the shipyards. The dead were her servants, no matter what they had been in life.

  ‘It is beautiful, in its way, my queen,’ a soft voice said. Nitocris turned. How the newcomer had got so close, without alerting either her or her handmaidens, she could not say. It was one of her more impressive tricks. The woman was pale, paler than Nitocris or any of her handmaidens, and had hair the colour of fresh blood. It hung in sweat-soaked knots and rat-tails from her scalp, and her features were obscured by the tattoo that made it appear as if her face were naught but a grinning skull. Rings of gold, silver and iron decorated her slender fingers, and beneath a thin cloak of feathers, scales and fur, she wore a filthy burnoose, taken from some unfortunate and ill-fated Arabayan. His blood still stained it, in places. She had shed that blood with his sword, which she had also taken, and now wore belted about her waist. She rested a palm on the pommel and inclined her head. ‘The dead are so much more pleasant than the living. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘That depends entirely on the nature of the dead, Octavia,’ Nitocris said. ‘Some are less pleasant than others.’

  ‘True,’ Octavia said. ‘As ever, my queen, you speak a mighty truth.’ She hesitated. Nitocris examined her, surreptitiously. Octavia was a native of those far-off lands that so haunted her, crimson haired and milky fleshed, her accent strange and harsh, like the caw of a scavenger bird. She had a peculiar grace, though. Nitocris had noticed it the very first moment she had seen her, staggering along in a slave caravan, bound for an Arabayan outpost near the Gulf of Medes. Nitocris and her warriors, in need of repast, had descended upon that caravan in a fury of fang and claw, and amidst the carnage, Octavia had seized her moment with an alacrity that was at once endearing and worrisome. Endearing, because Nitocris valued ferocity in her servants, but worrisome, for Octavia’s mind moved as quickly as Nitocris’s own.

  She had almost killed Octavia then and there, but something about her, some darkling pulse just beneath her flesh, had warned Nitocris that to do so would be a mistake. And when Octavia had dragged her enslaver to his feet and set him to freeing her, with his fumbling dead hands, Nitocris had smiled then, even as she smiled now, her lip curling to expose one long, delicate fang. ‘What do you wish to say, woman?’

  ‘My brothers,’ Octavia said, bluntly. ‘Where are they?’

  Nitocris made a careless gesture. ‘Out there, somewhere,’ she said. Her handmaidens giggled. Octavia did not deign to notice their tittering. Her eyes were only for Nitocris.

  ‘You should not have sent them away,’ Octavia said, softly, respectfully.

  ‘I do what I wish with what is mine, necromancer,’ Nitocris purred. ‘You gave them to me, and I must find use for them, eh?’

  ‘I did not give them to you,’ Octavia protested. There was a hint of anger in her words, and Nitocris smiled again. It was rare that the necromancer showed any emotion. Her brothers were her weak spot, unworthy beasts though they were. ‘You took them.’

  ‘Either way, they are mine, as you are mine, Octavia of Ostermark.’

  ‘Altdorf,’ Octavia said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m from Altdorf, my queen. Not Ostermark,’ Octavia said.

  Nitocris blinked, momentarily nonplussed. There was no insult in Octavia’s words, no hidden jibe. It was merely a statement of correction, said without thought or agenda. That made it worse. She frowned. ‘That is what I said,’ she growled.

  Her handmaidens had ceased their giggling, and they watched, ready to leap upon Octavia at her command. Indeed, she knew that many among them would take any opportunity to do so, even as they had taken the necromancer’s brothers for their playthings. She had punished her sisters for that – men were not worthy of her kiss. They were not worthy of eternity, and not necessary. Octavia, however, was.

  Nitocris raised a hand, and her sisters relaxed, though their red gazes did not waver from Octavia, who, for her part, didn’t seem in the least concerned. And perhaps she wasn’t. This close, Nitocris could feel the chill of the cold fire that burned in the necromancer. There was power in that pale frame, at once lesser and greater than her own.

  Nitocris had learned the arts of death at the feet of her queen, who had tutored her in the ways of their kind, even as she shaped the course of Nitocris’s coming centuries. But while Nitocris’s will was strong enough to control armies of the dead and even raise small numbers of them, her skill with the formulas of the Corpse Geometries was lacking. The bloated zombies of marsh and river could not resist her call, but the phantoms of ruin and jungle slipped through her fingers like sand. Octavia, however, had a gift for ghosts. They swarmed about her like loyal pets, and she plucked them from the bodies of the slain with the same ease that Nitocris could pluck out a man’s heart.

  It was Octavia who had raised the fleet of Cathayan war-junks, Arabayan dhows and Imperial merchantmen from the greedy waters, and drawn their waterlogged crews upriver to the Temple of Skulls, where they now sat in hastily constructed quays, waiting to take her legions on board. And it was Octavia who would enable her to tumble the stones of Lybaras.

  ‘Of course, my queen,’ Octavia said. She inclined her head. It wasn’t quite a bow, but it was as close as the red-headed woman got. ‘I merely misheard.’

  Nitocris growled softly. Then, she sniffed and looked away. ‘I sent your brothers away. They cannot control themselves. They are rapacious, and we cannot afford to spare any more slaves to feed their gluttony.’

  ‘If you would let them st
ay by my side, I could control them,’ Octavia said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Nitocris said. She looked at Octavia and added, ‘Another reason I sent them away.’

  Octavia frowned. She made as if to protest, but then visibly thought better of it. Instead, she said, ‘My scouts report that the Serpent Queen’s fleet has engaged that of Mahrak in the Bitter Sea.’

  ‘Do not call her that,’ Nitocris snapped, whirling to face the necromancer. Octavia frowned and stepped back. ‘I am the Serpent Queen. That false creature is nothing but a memory long overdue for forgetting,’ Nitocris snarled, snapping her fangs. The words were not hers, but those of her mistress. She had learned them by rote, and they sprang unbidden to her lips. The way her queen had spoken of the warrior-queen of Lybaras had always disturbed her. Fondness for an enemy was an alien emotion to Nitocris. Enemies were for killing, not for sighing over.

  And the false serpent of Lybaras was her enemy now, even as she was the enemy of all the children of the City of the Dawn. Nitocris would break her. She would sweep aside her city and rebuild it over into a gateway to Lahmia.

  ‘As you say, my queen,’ Octavia said. She raised her hands in a placating gesture. ‘I merely wished to inform you of the success of your plan.’

  Nitocris nodded, mollified. She turned and raised the sheathed Nehekharan blade over her head. ‘Do you hear, my sisters? Our enemies fall upon each other like squabbling apes. Their eyes turn from us, and we shall use their distraction to strike. First, we pull Lybaras to pieces stone by stone, and then – Lahmia!’