The End Times, page 16
The sun broke through, a ray piercing the storm gloom to light Malekith with a pale glow, blinding him momentarily, forcing him back into the grotto.
‘How can you defeat me when you cannot even find me,’ taunted the handmaiden. As the Witch King recovered his sight he spied a faerie light bobbing in the shadows cast by the canopy, whirling left and right, up and down.
‘You forget to whom you speak, child,’ Malekith said as his body slewed into a new shape, armour dissipating like mist, his form becoming that of a giant panther with burning amber eyes, claws and fangs of iron. With a roar he pounced into the woods towards the light. The gleam dodged and fled, zigzagging between the trees, Malekith’s claws tearing up the mulch as he chased it just a few steps behind, snarling and snapping.
The light cut sharply to the left behind the bole of a huge oak, and Malekith lost sight of it. He skidded to a stop, his gaze like a lantern beam as he passed it to and fro in the arboreal twilight. Suddenly he spied the hovering wisp of energy but before he could set off another appeared, a little further away. A third emerged from the leaves of a holly bush just a little way to his right. Within a dozen heartbeats there were scores of floating spheres, a tiny winged figure with the face of Ystranna in the heart of each.
Malekith looked past the glamour of the artificial world they had created to visualise their immaterial duel, seeing the raw winds of magic at work. Malekith was a knot of raw power, bloated and seething with unreleased energy. Dark magic required a focus, a fulcrum in the real world through which its power was harnessed. For the most powerful magic this was usually a sacrifice, to avoid the corruption of the mortal body of the sorcerer, but Malekith’s immortal form placed him beyond such petty consideration.
In stark contrast, Ystranna’s spirit was dispersed across the forest, absorbing Ghyran from everywhere. It was a structure of harmony and balance, kept alive by the interplay of energies themselves, taking from one area and giving to another. It was a creation of great intricacy, requiring intense concentration to maintain. There was no central point, no convergence for him to use to locate Ystranna. She was, as far as it mattered for the winds of magic, everywhere.
‘Impressive,’ he growled. ‘But your parlour trick has run its course. I do not need to find you to defeat you.’
Malekith’s panther body shuddered, black fur falling away, flesh becoming a thorn bush, his limbs extending and splitting into roots that delved deep into the earth. Down and down the Witch King pushed his avatar, striking out to find the roots of the trees, the rivulets of water that sustained them, deeper even than the Ghyran that Ystranna commanded. Spreading like an oil slick, Malekith’s dark magic pooled beneath the forest, cutting it off from the swell of the winds of magic, forcing Ystranna to shift the balance of her counter-spell. Malekith probed and stretched, claw-like roots rasping at Ystranna’s enchantment, seeking to tear through the harmonic web that made it possible.
He felt a stab of white fire as the other mages lent their support to the handmaiden, sensing that Malekith’s plan might work. Their panic only strengthened his resolve and bolstered the dark magic coursing through his projection. Their fire guttered and died, leaving silver trails back into the minds of the Sapherians. Malekith’s glee gave haste to his next attack. He pulsed dark magic into the thoughts of the mages and on the ground above they shrieked their horror as blood leaked from their eyes and bones split within their flesh.
‘You should choose your allies more carefully,’ Malekith gloated, feeling the pool of Ystranna’s power dwindling with every moment.
The handmaiden was losing control of the Ghyran, unable to maintain the balance of power as Malekith’s assault switched and veered from one place to the next, making inroads towards her.
All of a sudden Malekith felt the closeness of Ystranna, her magical presence within reach. He made a metaphysical grasp at her, ensnaring her will with his own. A moment later they both materialised back in the grotto, Malekith’s fist inside Ystranna’s chest, clutching her heart.
Feeding on the earth power the handmaiden commanded, Malekith’s magical presence swelled, growing and growing to gigantic proportion, towering above the forest like a tornado of dark wind, crackling with lightning. Her projection crumbled into dust as she fled, cutting herself off from the winds of magic, but it was too late. Malekith laughed as her avatar slipped away, leaving a slender thread of green and golden sunlight in his hands, pulsing beneath armoured fingers. He had all the power he needed, Ghyran stripped of all its earth power to become raw magic. Swelled by this he became a bloated thundercloud of destruction that flowed between the trees and billowed into the air.
Atop Seraphon’s back, Malekith opened his eyes. Much of the day had passed during his metaphysical battle; his forces below had been pushed steadily back and now formed a semi-circle around the encampment, hard pressed on three sides. Dusk was not far off, and defeat closer still.
With a grim smile, he unleashed his spell.
The ground shuddered, throwing asur and druchii alike from their feet, toppling trees and treemen. As the broken remnants of the forest swayed, the thunderous grinding grew even stronger until the Witch King’s magic burst forth, fuelled by the strength of mountain roots, gushing directly from the vortex that whirled in the bedrock of Ulthuan. An immense chasm cracked open, swallowing hundreds of Ystranna’s maiden guard in a tumble of boulders and broken trees.
Like a volcano erupting, the Ghyran-fuelled dark magic spewed into the sky, a black-tinged fog spreading out through the daemon-cursed trees, freezing every living thing it touched but bringing life to dead branches, filling petrified trees with vitality so that they lifted up limbs and roots and set upon the archers cowering beneath them with thorn-nailed hands.
Higher and higher swelled the sorcerous mass, touching the clouds that roiled overhead. Fire and lightning flickered in their depths and rain started to fall, droplets of flame that quickly became a burning hail and then a storm of flaming meteors that crushed elves and chariots, set fire to tree-kin and lions, obliterated shadow warriors and great eagles.
Malekith felt the burning in his heart first. The spell was channelling more and more power through his body, trying to break free of his control, the peripheral effect causing his already ravaged flesh to steam with fresh vigour, the fires that had crippled him burning behind his eyes and in his bones.
With a last snarl of hatred, Malekith let the spell end, collapsing exhausted in the saddle-throne. Seraphon continued to circle, keeping any potential attack at bay with blasts of gaseous breath and roars, while below the druchii surged out of their defensive line to charge the devastated Chracians and Avelorn maiden guard. To the west the aesenar slunk back towards Phoenix Pass, their retreat covered with hails of black arrows.
His vision dimming, Malekith directed Seraphon to the mountainside and dismounted, almost collapsing as his feet touched the magic-scoured rock. Hidden by the bulk of the black dragon, he knelt down, light-headed, limbs trembling.
Time passed but the Witch King could not mark how long. Eventually the crackle of ancient fires died in his ears and some measure of strength returned to his body. He opened iron-lidded eyes with some effort. It was dark but the clouds parted to reveal the Chaos moon in full ebb, the red orb glaring down like the eye of a wrathful god. The Witch King rose to his feet, flakes of ash drifting from his armour, and stepped past Seraphon to regard the battle below.
Total victory seemed certain. The spirits of the forest had gone, either destroyed by Malekith’s spell or fled from the vengeful counter-attack of the Naggarothi. Malekith’s army advanced in three prongs, while the Caledorians had flown eastward to the bottom of the valley in pursuit of the phoenixes and great eagles.
Malekith moved to pull himself up to Seraphon’s saddle but stopped a pace away, sensing something changing in the winds of magic. He looked up, drawn to the Chaos moon, and it appeared as though its cratered surface were a skull glaring down at him.
Death. Death filled the air.
The winds of magic stilled, impossibly, as though the entire world had frozen. Malekith’s breath steamed on air that had been hot a moment before. In the pass below both sides came to faltering stops as the embattled elves, always sensitive to magical change, felt the unnatural stillness. A cold terror filled the hearts of asur and Naggarothi together as they gazed up at the skull moon.
Malekith realised what was happening and he too felt a chilling dread. What if Teclis had been wrong? What if the Great Necromancer had awoken with all of his power?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE GREAT NECROMANCER
‘I suddenly feel… inadequate,’ Malekith told his companion.
‘Not even the Tower of Hoeth can rival it,’ replied Teclis.
It had once been a mountain, standing on the edge of a massive crater caused by a meteoric impact during the Coming of Chaos. Centuries of labour had turned the peak into a fortress the like of which could not be found anywhere else in the world. Countless battlements and leagues of crenellations wound their way up the lower slopes, and as the mountain narrowed, jutting turrets by the hundred marked its flanks. Windows in the tens of thousands gleamed, lit from within by a pale witchlight. The summit was clad in permanent cloud, glowing fitfully with magical energy.
It was surrounded by rings of walls that made the great gates of the Annulii look like a fence between troublesome neighbours. In the depth of the crater stretched an inland sea, the waters murky, bubbling, tainted by the huge deposit of warpstone. The touch of that ancient meteorite was death and mutation to everything in the vicinity, leaving only the ghoulish descendants of cannibalistic humans to scavenge the mutant fish and loathsome slugs that survived in the tainted waters, when they did not feast on captives from rival tribes.
The warp-taint was so strong it pervaded everything, even the dry air, so that jutting stones had rictus faces. Plants resembled dangling bones and the only flowers that bloomed were black-headed roses with thorns like daggers. The wind hissed ghostly warnings on the edge of hearing that might have just been the fluttering of the thousands of tattered banners that decorated one of the shorelines, trophies taken during millennia of conquest and despotism. Arches of bone grew from the bare rock, an ossuary-avenue that led three leagues to the outermost gates of the fortress.
Nagashizzar, the most dread-inspiring fortress in the world.
Beneath the horrific castle toiled an endless army of the dead. Skeletal soldiers patrolled walls cracked and pitted by millennia of desert winds from the west. On the highest steeples and spires perched enormous dragons, ragged wings furled around half-skeletal bodies, drawn here from their dying fields on the Plain of Bones. Like monstrous gargoyles they appeared, hunched and malevolent, ready to drop down on any interloper, clouds of desiccating fume dribbling from dead lungs between cracked fangs.
Beneath the dark clouds swooped other dead things. The remains of enormous crows and buzzards, large enough to carry off a full grown elf, were themselves dwarfed by reanimated griffons and manticores that circled on endless watch beside horrific creations made from stitched body parts and bound together with necromantic magic.
The Wind of Death, Shyish, was ever-present, clinging to the rocks like fog, dribbling up through cracks and fissures in invisible steaming clouds. Wraiths haunted the deep caverns in the base of the mountains. On the higher flanks stood the cairns of wights, revenants of kings long dead sworn to the service of the Great Necromancer after whom the citadel was named.
Nagash.
Even thinking the name sent a thrill through Malekith, in equal measure jealousy and concern. There were few truly immortal beings in the world and Malekith was amongst them, but even he marvelled at the magical power that had once been at the command of the Great Necromancer. First in his Black Pyramid in Nehekhara to the south and later here, at Cripple Peak, his sorceries had blighted whole empires and laid low entire civilisations. Even the catastrophe of the Sundering unleashed by Malekith paled in comparison to such devastation.
In spirit form he and Teclis walked along a path of skulls that ran between two outer buttresses of grey rock. They passed into the shadow of Nagashizzar, the heat of the sun lost, and Malekith shuddered despite the fact that his avatar felt no mortal sensation. It was more than temperature that caused the reaction.
‘You have never come here before?’ Teclis asked. ‘Never before been tempted to look on this grandest of evil works?’
‘I had other matters to keep me occupied,’ said Malekith, not willing to admit that he had dared not come here before, for reasons both of vanity and security. ‘Besides, what purpose would it have served? There is nothing here except the mindless dead serving commands uttered three ages past.’
‘Is that so?’ Teclis made a gesture and the two of them disappeared, their spirits coalescing before an immense gatehouse, one of four that guarded the approaches to the citadel.
The gate itself was made of some black material that shone like burnished obsidian. Bone-coloured towers flanked it, each grander than the keep of Tor Achare, stouter than the forts of Karak Kadrin.
On the battlements above, motionless skeletons stood beside war machines of fused bone and sinew – bolt throwers loaded with the thigh bones of giants etched with dire runes and catapults whose phalangeal baskets held ensorcelled skulls that would burst into flame when launched.
Standing against the wall of each tower, to either side of the gate, were two rows of giant beings, made from the bones of dragons, hippogryphs, nameless lizards of the southlands and other huge creatures, bound together by enchanted gold bands. The undying guardians held spears as tall as buildings and carried bows that could fire arrows capable of splintering trees.
The pair stopped before the immense barrier and looked up, invisible even to the eyes of the undead.
‘You mean to enter?’ said Malekith. ‘To what purpose?’
‘To show you the truth,’ Teclis replied. He looked at Malekith with an infuriating half-smile. Few patronised the Witch King, and no other lived long after.
‘Not walls alone protect this place,’ warned the Witch King. ‘There are some powers that even I would not stir.’
‘Did you think that the Great Necromancer would lie dormant for eternity?’ Teclis stepped through the gate. Malekith, feeling ashamed that he hesitated, followed a moment after. Protective runes flared at the intrusion but Malekith was a strong enough sorcerer to bend aside the magical barriers set within the gate itself, emerging from the dark material to find Teclis waiting for him on a long road made from crushed bone.
‘You mean to wake… him?’ Malekith’s projection flickered as he slid ahead of the mage to stand in his way. ‘You tell me that the End Times come, that the Great Powers unite to bend their will to the enslavement of the world, and you seek to bring further ruin upon us?’
‘The gods must return,’ Teclis said, leaning on his staff, out of habit rather than tiredness. The top of the rod was cast in the shape of the moon goddess, his muse and mythical sponsor. ‘The gates of Mirai must be opened, and there is only one that can wrest control of the underworld from Ereth Khial.’
Malekith almost said the name but thought better of it. Names had power and here in the Great Necromancer’s fortress it was impossible to predict what attention the name of its creator might bring. ‘You are mad. Even as the tide of Chaos comes in, you would raise up a cliff of the undead to crush us against.’
‘Not so,’ said Teclis, passing through Malekith’s projection. Around them dead masons, withered to skin and bone, tapped with hammer and chisel at hieroglyph-covered walls, endlessly chronicling the turning of the world, day after day. The dead paid no heed to the wizards as they accelerated, becoming a blur of white and black until they reached the inner gates of Nagashizzar.
The presence of the warpstone was stronger here, making everything seem more tangible, a thickness to the air, of primordial, unrefined magic that invested every rock and bone. Sentinels crafted from the remains of trolls and ogres lined the corridor inside the gate, heads replaced with facsimiles of old Nehekharan gods, twice the height of Malekith, their scythe-like blades gleaming in the glow of green corpselight that suffused the innards of the fortress.
‘The dead do not change. He that raised this citadel desires nothing but a world of the dead enslaved to his will.’ Malekith noted that Teclis shared his caution regarding the name of the dread castle’s architect. ‘The powers of Chaos thrive on the changing ambitions of mortals, to provide the answers to questions only mortals ask. The dead have no need of rage and ambition, despair and charisma.’
‘Two forces opposed,’ muttered Malekith, seeing the clash in his mind’s eye, the legions of the dead on one side, the daemon hordes of the Chaos Powers on the other. There was one problem with that scenario. ‘And of those caught between? You choose to be a puppet of the Great Necromancer rather than the mutated spawn of Chaos?’
‘We need a bulwark against Chaos. I have done what I can to prepare the humans, the dwarfs will do as they always have done and protect their own. In Lustria the great minds of the Old Ones’ servants account nothing for our survival in their astromantic equations. This place holds our greatest chance of resisting the onslaught to come.’
They ascended, level after level as though they climbed through Mirai itself, the caverns of the damned. The dead in their hundreds of thousands waited in endless ranks for the return of their creator or laboured in mines and forges to furnish wargear to an army three thousand years in the making.
