“And then?”
Arleth Vann paused. “Once they had completed the crypt the elders had them all killed and interred within.”
“Mother of Night,” Malus gasped. “A hundred and twenty dwarfs, cut down in their prime?” The waste of so much valuable chattel staggered the imagination. A highborn could build and outfit a raiding ship for the cost of just one dwarf slave. Short of dragon eggs there was no more expensive commodity in all of Naggaroth.
The assassin shrugged. “Bad for them, but good for us. The lodge was built deep below the hill — deeper even than the Vermillion Gate — and no one has come here for millennia. Only a few records of the place remain in existence, buried in the archives of the temple library.” He nodded to himself. “It’s a perfect base of operations, really: defensible and difficult to reach, but close enough for us to reach the passage leading to Thel’s old house and communicate with the loyalists in the city if we need to.” He sighed. “Now I’ve just got to get back up into the tunnels and lead the rest of our people down here past those damned beasts,” he said. “This could take time. Will you be all right until I get back?”
Malus had nothing to say. When Arleth Vann looked over at his master he found the highborn had passed out once more.
Chapter Sixteen
DARKNESS AND DOUBT
“The wound is grave, my lord.”
Malus’ eyes fluttered open. He was lying on the stone slab in the antechamber of the dwarf tombs. Someone had stripped away his kheitan and robes, and gooseflesh raced along his bare shoulders and back.
Firelight danced along the walls and limned a robed and hooded figure at work beside one of the long tables at the highborn’s right. Malus heard the sound of metal ringing faintly on stone as the figure laid out a series of small tools. The voice he’d heard was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
He tried to rise, fearful that the figure would see the daemon’s taint upon him, but ropes pulled tight at his wrists, shoulders and forehead. Memories of his days in his father’s tower sent a cold thrill of panic racing up his spine. “What is going on?”
“There is an infection,” the figure said. “Your lung has collapsed, and the wound is… corrupted. Something must be done quickly, or you will die.”
A shiver of fear wracked his body. He knew what the figure was trying to say. “You are going to have to cut the infection away,” Malus said, unable to keep a note of dread from his voice. “Have you any hushalta?”
“No,” the figure said, holding a small, curved blade up to the light. “You must brace yourself for what must be done, my lord. It is the only way.”
The figure turned towards him, reaching for his chest with a long-fingered hand. Orange light shone on the blade’s razor edge. Malus could feel the wound in his side begin to throb and his heart quicken in fearful anticipation.
“I will work very quickly” the figure said. Fingers played across Malus’ ribs, fluttering like spider’s legs over the raw, bleeding wound. “You may scream if you wish. It will not trouble me.”
Malus opened his mouth to reply, but the words were lost in a terrible groan as the figure’s bare fingers pressed into the cut and spread wide, enlarging the tear. Hot blood welled up in the wound, flowing down his side as the knife went to work. A spear of white-hot pain lanced again and again into his chest, stealing his breath away. Just when it seemed he could take no more he saw the figure straighten, holding up a lump of pink, glistening meat in its hand. The hooded face looked down at him.
“You see? Almost the size of a fist. As I said, very grave.”
A shudder passed through Malus. “I feel… cold…”
“Of course,” the figure replied, tossing the flesh onto the floor. “That is to be expected, but it is a small price to pay for your health, is it not?”
The figure raised the knife again, but this time its bloodstained hand pulled at the hem of its own robes. With a flick of its wrist it pulled its robe open and revealed bare, gleaming ribs stained black with corruption. Nearly all of the internal organs were missing, save for a wrinkled sac of flesh pulsing close to the breastbone.
“Nearly done,” the figure said. As it spoke, it reached up into its chest cavity and cut away the tattered, oozing remnant. “The wound is painful, but it will heal, and then you and I will be stronger than ever.”
Malus tried to move but the bonds held him fast He screamed, shouting curses at the figure as it bent low and pushed the corrupted tissue into the highborn’s gaping wound. At once, he felt the alien flesh wriggle and squirm inside him — and worse he felt his organs heave and rise up to meet it.
The hooded head turned, close enough for Malus to see the face sheltered within. It was his face, pale and perfect, devoid of any daemonic taint. Only the eyes — black orbs like shards of the Outer Darkness itself — suggested the depths of the corruption that seethed within.
Tz’arkan smiled, showing jagged, obsidian fangs.
“You’ll be a new man before you know it,” the daemon said with a gruesome chuckle.
“Careful! Careful! Hold him tight!”
Malus awoke with a shout, struggling against the grip of the four druchii who held him pinned to the stone slab. Arleth Vann loomed over him, pressing a hand to his clammy forehead and forcing a small vial between his lips. “Drink,” he said, his voice hard and unyielding.
The taste of burnt copper flooded Malus’ mouth. He gagged and tried to spit the hushalta out, but the assassin cursed fiercely and covered the highborn’s mouth. Glaring at the retainer, he reluctantly swallowed the healing draught and forced himself to relax.
Arleth Vann studied Malus’ eyes closely for a moment, and nodded in satisfaction. “All right. You can let go,” he told the druchii, and the loyalists withdrew. They eyed Malus fearfully as they returned to sentry positions on either side of the dwarf lodge’s entryway.
Malus raised a trembling hand and pressed it against his side. The wound ached fiercely. He pulled open his grimy robe and peered at his ribs, discovering the cut scabbed over and beginning to shrink. The black bruises remained, however, giving him the look of a week-old corpse. His mouth still tingled with the sharp taste of copper, and his joints creaked like dried leather. “Water,” he said hoarsely.
The retainer lifted a leather water bottle to the highborn’s lips, and Malus drank greedily. It was warm and brackish, but he savoured it like rare wine. When his fierce thirst abated somewhat, he glared at the grim faced assassin. “You’ve been drugging me,” he croaked.
“You were going to die otherwise, Scourge or no,” Arleth Vann replied.
Malus drew a deep, slow breath, his eyes narrowing as he tested the extent of his injury. “How long have you kept me out?”
“Three days.”
“Mother of Night!” Malus seethed, grabbing a handful of his retainer’s robe. “Have you any idea what you’ve done? Rhulan has been waiting outside the wall all this time! You may have damned us all!”
“Rhulan is not at the wall,” the assassin replied. “In fact, I can’t say for certain that he’s even in the city anymore.”
The highborn’s anger faded. “He hasn’t rallied the warriors of the temple?”
Arleth Vann shrugged. “If he tried, they evidently didn’t listen,” he said gravely. “I made my way out through the house of Cyrvan Thel the night after we reached the lodge, hoping to locate some food and other supplies,” he explained. “The city had gone mad. Bloody riots were raging in the streets and much of the city was burning. From what I could discern, the temple warriors are holed up in scattered pockets all across Har Ganeth, cut off from one another by the raging mob. Certainly no one is directing their efforts to regroup and reach the temple.”
Malus took his hand away from Arleth Vann and slowly, painfully, he forced himself upright. The pain gave him something to focus on beside the rising tide of dismay that lapped at his brain. “So Rhulan and Mereia ran afoul of the riots,” he said.
“It is p
ossible. There are bodies everywhere,” the assassin replied. “Or they might be trapped with one of the isolated war bands and can’t find a way to communicate with the rest.”
The highborn gave his retainer an appraising stare. “You don’t think so,” he said.
Arleth Vann weighed his reply carefully. “If he isn’t dead, I think he’s escaped the city,” he said with a sigh. “Perhaps his courage failed him. Who knows? You heard him in the crypts. He thought Urial couldn’t be beaten.”
“Damnation,” Malus spat. “I thought at least Mereia would have been made of sterner stuff. We needed that diversion to help us reach Urial.”
The assassin straightened and set the water bottle on a nearby table. “In a way, the temple warriors may be serving us better in the city than they would outside the temple gates,” he said. “As long as the fighting continues, Urial must divide his forces between the temple fortress and the riots in the streets. He doesn’t dare ease up on the pressure and allow the war bands to link together.”
Malus considered this. “How easily can you move about the catacombs?”
“I can come and go as I wish, so long as I’m careful,” the assassin replied. “The tunnel network is just too vast and interconnected to patrol effectively. I still hear Urial’s hunters prowling through the crypts, but in truth they are poor trackers. So long as one is patient and quiet, they can be circumvented.”
“All right,” the highborn said with a sigh. He suddenly felt completely drained, as if the mere effort of sitting upright had consumed every ounce of his energy. “How many of us are left?”
“Eight, counting you and me,” Arleth Vann replied. “After the flight from the crypt I was able to find out where six of the volunteers were hiding and led them down here one at a time. Khaine alone knows what happened to the other two.”
The highborn nodded. His eyelids were getting heavy. He realised that it was because of the damned hushalta. “No more mothers’ milk,” he mumbled. “No time to waste. Find where Urial is hiding… how he’s being guarded…”
Arleth Vann said something in reply, but the assassin’s voice seemed to fade into the distance as the healing drug pulled him under.
When he awoke again, Arleth Vann was gone.
Malus was ravenous. He took that as a good sign. The highborn lay on the stone slab in the centre of the dwarf lodge for several long minutes, gauging the stiffness of his limbs and the degree of pain in his chest. Finally, he summoned his resolve and swung his legs off the side of the table.
His knees nearly gave way beneath him when he slid to the stone floor. The sentries at the door stirred as Malus caught himself on the edge of the table. “I’m all right,” he said, waving them back to their places. In point of fact, he felt anything but.
Malus looked around the chamber. Several small oil lamps flickered on three of the long side tables, and the assassin’s water bottle still lay nearby. The door opposite the lodge’s entrance stood open, and he thought he heard faint sounds echoing from beyond.
He reached for the water bottle and took several deep draughts, wincing at the vile taste. “What time is it?” Malus asked the sentries.
The loyalists looked to one another and shrugged. “Night time, I think,” one of them said. “I no longer know what the hour is.”
Malus nodded thoughtfully. Then, gritting his teeth with effort, he walked towards the open doorway.
Beyond the low threshold he found himself in a long, irregular chamber that stretched off to his right. The features were a strange mixture of square-cut pillars and straight walls connecting small, rounded niches that had been carefully shaped to resemble natural caverns. In each niche the stone floor rose up to form a squat, rectangular tomb, inscribed with angular dwarf runes and overlaid with arcane magical sigils that glittered in the lamplight. There was no gilt-work or precious gems, no grave goods or mummified slaves, but the sheer scope and craftsmanship of the crypt was staggering. The caverns and their connecting passages had been hollowed out of solid rock, and the crypts constructed with surpassing skill.
Malus could see that the four tombs closest to him were open. He limped slowly to the nearest one, noticing a name inscribed at the foot of the stone coffin in druchast. Thogrun Hammerhand, it read, Stonemaster. A broad-shouldered dwarf clad in a slave’s simple woollen robes lay in the coffin. His red beard was thick and stiff as wire, and his skin was the colour of granite. Only the faintest signs of decay could be seen around the stonemaster’s seamed eyes and rounded nose. It was as if he’d been laid in the coffin only a few days before. The edges of the gaping cut that bisected the stonemaster’s throat were only just beginning to shrivel. A veritable pall of sorcery hung over the figure, encasing it in a tight weave of magical energy.
More sounds echoed through the chamber from its far side: the scrape of stone, mutters, and faint, tired sounding curses. Frowning, the highborn sought out the source of the noise.
The room curved slightly to the right, following a logic that perhaps only a dwarf could appreciate. Malus walked past nine more crypts before the walls of the room narrowed to form a short, broad entryway into a connecting chamber. Two loyalists worked in front of the entryway, hauling heavy, rectangular stone panels into place to form a kind of defensive breastwork facing back the way Malus had come. They looked up at the highborn’s approach and paused in their labour, wiping their faces with grimy rags.
Malus reviewed their work and nodded appreciatively, noticing that the stone panels were the thick lids used to seal the dwarf tombs.
“I see my retainer has been keeping everyone busy,” he said.
One of the men nodded. “This is the last of them, my dread lord,” he said, a little breathlessly. “There are more like this going all the way back to the prime chamber. We didn’t have much to work with, since this place is practically built like a fortress already. A handful of people could hold off an army down here if they wanted to.”
Malus considered the crude fortifications and had to agree. With multiple, well-protected bastions to retreat to, they could take a fearsome toll of Urial’s zealots if discovered. His half-brother’s Chaos-spawned monsters were another matter, but he didn’t think it wise to point that out. “Where is our camp?” he asked.
The loyalist gestured over his shoulder. “Five chambers further back, my lord,” he said, “just outside the prime chamber. There’s some food and water there if you’re hungry. Your man brought in supplies a couple of days ago.”
Malus nodded again and carefully picked his way over the defensive barriers. “With luck, we won’t have to put these to the test,” he said, “but carry on, all the same.” The men went back to work as the highborn disappeared into the chamber beyond.
The grave lodge wound back and forth through the rock beneath the hill like the track of a serpent. Each burial chamber was slightly curved, running away at an angle from the one before it. Possibly it was a technique to allow such a large number of tombs to fit within the stone confines of the region, but Malus suspected there was a ritual purpose to the layout, as if the curving lines of the chambers formed a sigil or sacred rune carved into the undying rock. At each entryway the druchii had built a defensive position using the lids of the tombs found nearby. One or two oil lamps sputtered in each chamber, providing just enough light to travel by.
By the time he’d passed through the second burial chamber the sounds of work behind him were swallowed by the stone walls, leaving Malus wrapped in funereal silence. For a brief time he felt truly alone, passing from shadow to shadow like a ghost amid the broken tombs, and it soothed him after a fashion.
“Did you have pleasant dreams?” whispered the daemon inside his head.
Malus paused at the entrance of the next burial chamber. Was it the fourth, or the fifth? He hadn’t been keeping track. “I dreamt of stuffing you into a chamber pot and throwing you into the deep sea,” he growled.
Tz’arkan chuckled. “Dreams of vengeance and spite. I should
have expected no less.” The daemon uncoiled itself within the highborn’s breast. “What of your wound? Are you healing well, little druchii?”
Malus’ hands clenched into fists. “You should know better than I, daemon. Soon I’ll be no better than the wretches confined in these tombs, infused with so much sorcery that not even the worms will touch me.”
Obscene laughter raked along the inside of Malus’ ribs. “Such childishness! Such vanity! Your body has recovered from a mortal wound in less than a week. There are men who would think that an awesome gift, one worth almost any price.”
The highborn entered the next chamber, picking up his pace. “The difference is that I see through your deceptions,” he replied. “Every time I open myself to your power I let you increase your hold over me.”
“I have your soul, Darkblade.” The daemon sounded genuinely amused. “What greater hold over you do I need?”
“Then why this?” Malus pulled open his robes, revealing the glossy, black scabs on his chest and the deep bruises in his flesh. “Your gifts are making me into an abomination!”
Tz’arkan sighed. “No, they are making you worthy of the fate that awaits you. Do not dissemble, Malus. I know your heart’s deepest desires. You crave power.
“You dream of the day when all of Naggaroth bows before you.”
Malus continued on in silence, stalking angrily past the dwarf tombs.
“Did you think that mere treachery and cunning would be enough to supplant one such as the Witch King? You will need power beyond that of the greatest druchii heroes. That is what I offer you, yet you reject it at every turn.”