‘It matters quite a bit,’ Neferata said. ‘Show them to me.’
‘What?’ Ushoran said.
‘The vaults, my king, show them to me.’ She emptied her goblet. ‘Razek is curious, Ushoran, as am I.’
‘You think he may try to steal the gold?’ Ushoran said, and she could see by the look in his eyes that he had never even considered such a thing. Oh my cunning lord, your wit has abandoned you as thoroughly as your looks, she thought.
‘No, but I think that if he learns that you’re paying the dwarfs with their own gold he will not be pleased,’ she said. ‘And if that happens, our newborn alliance could quickly become enmity and Mourkain could find itself once more at war with the dawi. Now show me the vaults.’
Ushoran wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Very well. See if you can keep up.’ Then, with a scrape of talons across stone, he was bounding towards the window. Neferata was after him a half-second later. Even as she vaulted out of the window, Ushoran was plummeting downwards through the chill night air.
He struck an outcropping and twisted through the air as if he were swimming. His flesh snapped, ripped and spread with a sound like a rupturing melon, and wings unfurled from his broad back. Black blood, expelled during the transformation, splattered across the rooftops below as a winged shadow sped off. Neferata landed on the outcropping, her eyes wide. Ushoran had learned something during his time in the wilderness after all.
The game of skin-changing was a hard one, and it grew harder the younger and further from the source their kind was. Of Neferata’s get, one in three could shift shape to any appreciable degree, and of those whom her handmaidens brought over, fewer still could manage it. For herself, she had never faced any difficulty with it, and if Ushoran wished to show off, well, two could play at that game.
She leapt down, aiming for the highest, closest roof peak. As she landed, she sank her claws into the flesh of her scalp. Things moved inside her as she ripped the pale flesh from her frame, and freed the sleek, wet, black-furred thing within. Shedding her human skin, she began to pursue Ushoran’s gargoyle shape in the form of one of the panthers which occupied the jungles of Ind.
She bounded across the rooftops of Mourkain, her claws digging gouges in the stone and thatch. Ushoran was fast, but she was faster. She leapt from peak to peak, following the swell of the mountain that Mourkain occupied. Whoever had built the bones of the ancient city had wrought it from the very guts of the mountain, and it was into those depths that Ushoran led her.
The upper reaches of the city were absent of life, save torch-bearing patrols of hard-faced Strigoi, who staunchly kept their eyes averted from the great stone doorway leading into the mountain’s peak. The doors were open, and a foul effluvium emanated from within. Neferata’s lean shape slithered past the guards and darted through the arch. The smell of death enveloped her, even more strongly here than in the pyramid. The ground vibrated with a steady, mechanical pulse. Echoes of steel on stone rang from the rocks.
Something heavy and leathery thumped down in front of her, balancing on wing-limbs. The great bat shrieked and shook itself, trading one brute shape for another. Bone cracked and ruptured and then Ushoran stood before her, grinning widely.
Neferata loped towards him, shedding fur and rising to her feet as she reached him. She combed blood and the matter of change from her hair with her fingers. ‘I see I’m not the only one to learn how to move between shapes in these intervening years,’ she said.
‘We all like to keep ourselves amused,’ Ushoran said, flexing his great hands.
‘Yet you do not teach it to those whom you give the blood-kiss?’
‘And why would he do that? Power is only valuable when it is held by as few hands as possible,’ a thin, hissing voice said. The words tumbled weirdly from the rocks. Something thin and insect-like detached itself from the shadows and stepped forwards. Despite the lack of light, Neferata saw its features clearly. And she didn’t like what she saw. The face was that of a corpse, with blackened, dry flesh pulled tight over sharp bones, and cavernous eye-sockets, one of which was occupied by a milky, unseeing orb. The other was as black as a chip of polished obsidian and it glinted with malign intelligence. A thin strip of colourless hair, bound into a single worm-like lock, hung down from the pointed skull.
‘W’soran,’ she said.
‘Neferata,’ W’soran said, his good eye narrowing to a burning slit.
Neferata gazed at her former councillor with undisguised loathing. ‘The years have not been kind.’ And indeed, they had not. W’soran had become even more cadaverous in the intervening years since she had last seen him. Clad in ragged black, a deep hood over his verminous face, the vampire resembled nothing so much as a mummy which did not have the good grace to decay in silence.
‘Physical appearances were always more your purview, my queen,’ W’soran said. ‘I am concerned with higher matters than hygiene.’
‘So I see,’ Neferata said, repressing a gag. W’soran stank of rot and strange spices. ‘And what higher matters might these be?’
‘You asked about the source of Mourkain’s gold?’ Ushoran said. He extended a claw towards W’soran. ‘There it is.’
‘Well, technically, there it is…’ W’soran said, indicating the stumbling, hooded shapes which had followed him out of the darkness. Neferata hissed as the shapes stepped towards her.
‘Corpses,’ she spat.
‘More than just corpses, my lady,’ W’soran gloated. ‘Bone, muscle, sinew, all that is dead in these mountains is mine to command!’
Ushoran swung his bulbous head towards the other vampire. ‘Even as you are mine,’ he rumbled. W’soran grunted.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said testily. ‘That is our bargain, Ushoran.’
‘King Ushoran,’ Ushoran corrected gently. The hint of menace lurked in those words and the dead reacted to it, even if their master didn’t. They closed about W’soran protectively.
‘I wondered where you’d got to, after Nagashizzar fell,’ Neferata said, breaking the moment. ‘It is a comfort to me that you’re still cowering in dark holes.’ W’soran hissed, his pointed ears flattening against his long skull. Before he could reply, she went on. ‘Show me,’ she said.
W’soran led them deeper into the mountain. Great stairs, crudely carved and decorated with bas-reliefs of skulls, spiralled down into the darkness at the heart of the mountain and vast edifices of unknown purpose and alien beauty hove to out of the gloom. Corpses wove in and out of rough tunnels and smooth corridors, carrying tools.
‘Kadon built all of this?’ Neferata said, awestruck despite herself. Conglomerations of bone and wood braced the tunnels and great stone dips, containing burning lumps of coal and bone, lit their descent. Curtains made from the hair of bats and men draped the landings of the stairway and tattered shrouds hung from the sides of the stairs like tapestries. Braziers exuding the smell of embalming spices were scattered randomly and W’soran inhaled their stink as he passed them.
‘Perhaps,’ Ushoran said. ‘Regardless, he extended it, century upon century. I watched him do it.’
‘You always were good at spying,’ Neferata said. Ushoran’s lip curled, exposing a fang, but he said nothing. The stairs wound down through the mountain, and as they moved deeper, Neferata caught the mildew-stink of ghoul nests and saw dozens of scuttling white simian shapes scaling the rocks to either side of the stairs. The scrabbling ghouls dislodged piles of bone, sending browned skulls rattling down into the depths.
‘Largest nest of the vermin I’ve seen outside of Nagashizzar,’ Ushoran grunted. ‘I feasted on them for decades before I revealed myself to the Strigoi. They hold hunts, sometimes, into the dark places. It used to be a rite of manhood, before I found better use for the creatures.’