‘Get down, fools!’ Neferata shouted, as the arrows sped forth. She did not look to see who had fallen. Instead, she turned, alerted by the quiet tremble of the aqueduct. The butt end of a staff caught her in the belly, folding her over. She sank to her knees and looked up. ‘You,’ she hissed.
‘Neferata,’ Khalida of Lybaras said in a voice like the rustling of ancient silk. Her slim form was bound tight by the ceremonial wrappings and her proud head still wore her funerary head-dress and the mortuary mask that hid the ravages that death had made upon her once beautiful face. ‘In the darkness I dreamt of you, cousin.’
‘I dreamed of you as well, little hawk,’ Neferata said, rising slowly to face her cousin.
‘Hawk no longer. My wings are dust and bone,’ Khalida said. Her wrists creaked as she began to spin the asp-headed staff. It was the same staff that she had been entombed with. Neferata had placed it in her hands herself. ‘I crawl through time now, like an asp.’ So saying, she struck out, the serpentine head of the staff cracking Neferata across the shoulder and nearly spinning her around. Khalida slid forwards, the water seeming to part for her linen-wrapped feet as she struck again and left a red gash across Neferata’s back.
Neferata fell forwards into the water, agony such as she had never felt spitting through her. She rolled aside, nearly falling out of the aqueduct as the bronze-shod end of the staff came down, cracking the stone. Water began to flow down through the crack.
‘You took my wings, Neferata. You made me crawl. Now I will return the favour. Crawl, cousin,’ Khalida said, her tone remorseless and empty of the emotion that should have permeated such a statement. ‘Crawl.’
‘Never,’ Neferata snapped, kicking Khalida in the midsection. The dead woman staggered and Neferata came to her feet, her talons flashing and ripping through the wrappings around Khalida’s chest, revealing the leathery flesh beneath. Fingers like iron bands fastened on Neferata’s throat and she felt herself hefted, then she was flying down into the plaza. Tiles cracked and exploded beneath her. The dead circled her, but none moved to attack. She was Khalida’s prey, and no other’s.
Neferata pushed herself to her feet as her cousin approached, her torn wrappings fluttering about her like hissing snakes. The staff snapped out, catching her on the chin, and she was airborne again before landing heavily. ‘Nehekhara is dead, Neferata, and all her people with her. Why should you escape the fate of the Great Land? Why should you walk in twilight, while your people suffer in darkness?’
‘Because I am queen,’ Neferata snarled, lunging up and grabbing the staff. The two of them swung about, struggling. ‘And the suffering of our people is not my responsibility, cousin. I tried to save them!’
‘Is that what you call it?’ Khalida said, wrenching the staff away. Neferata ducked the blow and her claws scored the beautiful mask. Khalida stepped back. ‘Your actions damned them, though they knew it not until the end.’
‘No,’ Neferata growled.
‘Yes,’ Khalida said. She struck again and again, forcing Neferata to dodge and back away. The dead allowed her to retreat. ‘Your existence dishonours the memory of our people, cousin. It spits on their grave.’
‘They dishonoured me,’ Neferata shrieked, anger burning through her. ‘They forced me out! They burned my beautiful Lahmia! They deserved all that Nagash did to them!’ As the words slipped her lips, she felt it again — that dark, watchful presence that had been coiling within her ever since she had set foot on Sartosa’s shores. It purred in satisfaction and she saw darkness. She shook her head and Khalida’s staff caught her on the arm.
There was a voice in her head, calling out to her as if from a vast distance. It called her to the black, pleading with her to look, to see, to come. The staff cracked against her upraised forearms. Khalida lunged smoothly, as she had in life. A gash opened across Neferata’s left breast, and then her claws punched through the paper-thin flesh of Khalida’s midsection. Bones crunched and linen tore as she savaged the corpse-woman.
There was a sigh from the ranks of waiting dead, and then they stepped back, opening a path for her to join the others. Neferata looked down at Khalida, lying broken much as she had centuries before. But this time, she was not dead and her tongue was not stilled. ‘Go, Neferata. Your master calls.’
‘What?’
‘Your master calls. Run to him. We will meet again.’
Neferata hesitated, yearning to smash the white death-mask, to eradicate that mocking, solemn expression. Instead, she turned and ran. As she did, she swore that she would never do so again. And even as she swore that, she knew that it was a lie…
Time passed differently for immortals. It was something that had taken some getting used to; the passage of days was now like an eye-blink and centuries became as days. Even so the time spent in the darkness moved altogether too slowly for Neferata. Patience was not a virtue she possessed in abundance at the best of times and she was fast running out. But as bad as it was for her it was worse for others, whose hungers were stronger for all that they were less controlled.
‘We should take them now,’ one of the vampires, a cunning creature called Varna, growled, shifting her weight from one bare foot to the other as they crouched in the shadows of one of the interior tunnels that ran between the levels of the hold. A prisoner they’d taken a few days previously had, under the influence of Neferata’s mesmerism, confirmed that the tunnels were old ore veins that had been repurposed as doglegs to be used in the event that the Silver Pinnacle was ever compromised. The tunnels explained how the dwarfs had launched their ambushes and counter-assaults in the first weeks of the siege. They had also used them to send messengers to other dwarf holds. None of those messengers had got far.
Neferata didn’t reply to Varna’s remark, nor did she take offence as she once might have. Weeks with barely palatable blood and the strain of the constant dance of ambush and counter-ambush in these cramped tunnels had rendered even Naaima irritable. For the younger vampires, it was likely a torment. Iona snarled wordlessly at the other vampire, silencing her complaints.
Iona’s group had rejoined them after the destruction of the dwarfs’ breweries and water supplies. Rather than demoralising the dawi, however, the destruction of their beer supply had only served to incense them. Neferata had lost two more of her handmaidens in the days following, to dwarf ambushes in or around tempting targets. The dwarfs had lost more, however.
Now they crouched within one of the cramped tunnels that crisscrossed the entirety of the hold. From them, one could reach anywhere within Karaz Bryn if one didn’t mind travelling in nearly suffocating darkness for days on end. Even the dwarfs weren’t certain how many there were these days. Some had been sealed off and forgotten for one reason or another, their iron doors rusted shut. It was on one side of such a door that Neferata and her followers waited.
On the other side, dwarf voices murmured. The dwarfs had been using the ore veins for the last month to launch surgical strikes against the flanks of the Strigoi forces as the dead moved steadily and inexorably through the upper levels of the hold. How he had gotten the interior entry gate open, Neferata couldn’t say. Regardless, once inside, Khaled’s talent for bloodletting had come to the fore and the dwarfs had been forced into a steady retreat. There were only a few thousand warriors in the Silver Pinnacle, not nearly enough to stem the advance of the dead. With Morath at his side, Khaled had forced the dwarfs back and back, as she had known he would. The dead might not be able to rule the living, but they could grind them down well enough. Gate after gate had fallen.