The End Times: The Return of Nagash

‘Well?’ Mannfred hissed, from where he lurked beneath the trees. His eyes were pinpricks of crimson in the shadows, and his fingers tapped against a tree trunk impatiently.

‘Well what?’ Arkhan asked. He gestured and a shattered catapult began to repair itself. An easy enough task when the engine in question was composed of bone, dried flesh and hair. It was child’s play for a creature like Arkhan – barely worth the effort it took to accomplish it. In fact, none of what he was now doing was worth his attention. Any halfway competent hedge-necromancer could keep the mass of skeletons attacking a wall, and the catapults and their crews functioning.

‘Don’t taunt me, liche.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I was. I am trying to concentrate, vampire. You are disrupting that concentration. Unless you have something pertinent to say, I’ll thank you to keep quiet.’ Arkhan gestured again, resurrecting a pile of shattered skeletons moments after a cannonball tore them to flinders.

He’d spent most of the night before stalking the steep slopes beneath the distant western wall of the city, drawing those selfsame skeletons to the surface. The worms had fed well the previous year, and thousands of bodies, both human and orc, had been buried in mass graves on the field before the wall. Their spirits, only barely aware, were restless and eager to rise and fight again. Arkhan was only too happy to give them that opportunity.

The catapults had been a stroke of genius on his part. He had found a spot where the dead had lain particularly deep, and manipulated their remains to form his war engines, as he had so long ago in the Great Land. Frames of twisted bone and ropes of hair and stretched ligament worked just as well as iron and wood. His magics supplied the ammunition as well – great, cackling balls of witch-fire.

‘Do not bandy words with me, sirrah,’ Mannfred snapped. ‘Have we drawn them out?’

‘You can hear the trumpets as well as I,’ Arkhan said. In his mind’s eye, he could see what the dead saw. Balls of lead hammered into the dead ranks as they advanced up the muddy slope towards the western wall, fired by the increasingly desperate ranks of handgunners on the parapet. The men loaded and fired with an almost mechanical precision and, for a moment, Arkhan almost admired them. They displayed a courage and dedication that rivalled that of the legions of Khemri at their height. But it would buy them nothing. ‘The knights are exiting through the southern gates, as you predicted. They will crush my fleshless legion and the artillery with ease, when they get around to charging.’

‘Not too much ease, one hopes,’ Mannfred said, glaring up at the sun. It was riding low in the sky, and obscuring clouds clawed at its edges. ‘We need to keep them occupied for another few hours.’

‘Easily done. You know where the Black Armour rests?’ Arkhan looked at him. Mannfred’s cruel features twisted into a smile.

‘I’ve known for months, liche. It is sequestered in the vaults of the castle from which this detestable little pile takes its name. While you keep them occupied here, I shall seize my– Your pardon, our prize. My forces but await the weakening of the sun’s gaze.’

‘Good,’ Arkhan said.

‘That said, you should keep an eye socket tilted further west,’ Mannfred said, watching the skeletons march into the teeth of a cannonade.

‘Reinforcements?’

Mannfred’s smile widened. ‘Of sorts,’ he laughed. ‘A herd of beastmen are gambolling towards us, even as I speak. I have set wolves, bats and corpses on them, to occupy them for the nonce, but they are heading this way.’ He examined his nails. ‘They’ve come a long way, for such blissfully primitive creatures. Almost as if they were looking for something, or someone.’

Arkhan felt a cold rush of frustration. ‘Was there a winged creature leading them?’ he demanded, after a moment’s hesitation. Mannfred’s gleeful expression told him that the vampire had been expecting that question.