The Rise of Nagash Read online

  Then came the thunder of hooves, and several squadrons of light horsemen charged out of the haze towards the line of archers. The cavalrymen wielded compact horn-bows of their own, and the Khemri warriors unleashed a ragged volley as they bore down on the bowmen. Arrows sped back and forth across the killing ground. Horses and men went down in a spray of dirt and rock, but the bowmen of the Bronze Host shrugged off the enemy fire. Protected by the invocations of their holy priests, most of the Khemri arrows broke or glanced harmlessly from their bare skin.

  Still the horsemen bore down on the thin line of archers, heedless of the appalling losses inflicted by the bowmen. Bronze scimitars flashed in the riders’ hands as they closed in. At thirty yards the archers fired a last volley into the front ranks of the horsemen, and then turned and raced for the safety of their battleline.

  An eager cheer went up from the front ranks of the Bronze Host as they made ready for the enemy charge. The Khemri horsemen lashed at the flanks of their mounts, but the weary horses could not catch up to the fleeing bowmen. Frustrated, they reined in less than a dozen yards from the shouting infantry, and then wheeled about and withdrew, leaving several hundred of their fallen brethren littering the battlefield.

  The sacrifices of the cavalry, however, bought time and distance for the Usurper’s infantry, who were almost upon their foes. With a final clash of cymbals and a rattle of hide drums the silent companies surged forwards, brandishing stone axes and short-handled maces above their arrow-studded shields. The two armies came together with a hollow crash of flesh, wood and metal, punctuated by fierce shouts and the screams of the dying.

  The warriors of the Bronze Host moved back not a single step from the force of the enemy’s charge. Filled with the vigour of Geheb, their patron god, they splintered shields and shattered bones, dashing their foes to the ground. Decades of pent up anger against the tyrant of Khemri found its voice in a hungry, wordless roar that reverberated from the warriors of Ka-Sabar. Akhmen-hotep and the chanting priests felt the echoes reverberate across their skin and were awed by the sound.

  Dust was thickening around the churning mass of warriors, making it difficult to see. Akhmen-hotep scowled, studying the rearmost ranks of his footmen. They were pressing forwards, eager to join in the killing, which he took to be a good sign. The priest king sought out the priests of Phakth. He saw them a short distance away, shrouded in plumes of fragrant incense.

  “Glory to the god of the sky, who sped our arrows in flight!” he shouted. “Will great Phakth stretch forth his hand and wipe the dust from our eyes?”

  Sukhet, High Priest of Phakth, stood in the centre of the chanting priests, his shaven head bowed in prayer. He opened one eye and arched a thin eyebrow at the priest king.

  “The dust belongs to Geheb. If you would have it lie still, importune him instead of the Hawk of the Air,” the priest said in his nasal voice. The priest king scowled at Sukhet, but did not press further. Instead, he turned to his trumpeter.

  “Sound the general advance,” he commanded.

  Horns wailed, echoing up and down the line. The champions of the infantry companies raised their blood-streaked swords and shouted orders to their men. Shouting, the warriors took one step forward, and then another. Bronze-tipped spears jabbed and thrust, streaming blood, and the exhausted warriors of the Living City gave ground.

  Step by step, the warriors of Ka-Sabar drove the enemy back the way they had come. They climbed over the bloodied corpses of the fallen until blood stained the wrappings of their sandals up to their ankles. Meanwhile, the companies at the far ends of the battleline began to curve inwards, trying to surround the retreating enemy. The Khemri light cavalry harassed the flanks of the spearmen with arrow fire, but did little to slow the inexorable advance.

  Akhmen-hotep gestured to his charioteer, who took up the double reins and lashed the team of horses into motion. The chariot rolled forward with a clatter of bronze-rimmed wheels, keeping pace with the advancing army.

  A runner appeared from the right flank, his face flushed with excitement.

  “Suseb asks permission to attack!” he cried in a piping voice. The priest king considered this for a moment, cursing the dusty haze. Finally he shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he answered. “Tell the Lion to bide his time a little longer.”

  So, the advance continued. The Bronze Host moved inexorably across the plain, drawing slowly but steadily closer to the ridge line. Akhmen-hotep’s chariot bounced and lurched over the corpses left behind by the fighting. The priests of the city were far behind him, hidden by the dust of the advance, while the churning haze continued to mask the fighting to the fore. He could hear the rattling of chariot wheels off to his left and right, and the nervous whicker of horses as the cavalry kept pace with the footmen. The priest king listened intently to the timbre of battle, waiting for the first signs that the enemy companies were broken and in full retreat.

  Despite the steady, remorseless slaughter, the warriors of the Living City refused to break. The closer they drew to the silent, black pavilions lining the ridge, the harder they fought. They pressed against the shields of the enemy spearmen, as though the death looming before them was preferable to what waited at their backs.

  Within an hour, the fighting was nearly at the foot of the low ridge line. From the rocky summit, the battle resembled nothing so much as the swirling edge of a sandstorm, lit from within by hard glints of flashing bronze.

  Figures waited silently on the slope, watching the approaching storm. Companies of heavy horsemen waited among the dark linen tents, their banners hanging listlessly in the hot, still air. Smaller bands of heavy infantry, clad in leather armour and bearing bronze-rimmed shields, knelt stoically before the great pavilions, awaiting the call to battle.

  A group of priests stood together at the centre of the line, outside the largest of the tents. Tall and regal, they wore the black robes of Khemri’s mortuary cult, circlets set with sapphires and rubies adorning their shaved heads, and their narrow beards bound with strips of hammered gold. Their dusky skin was pale, and their hawk-like faces were gaunt, but dark power hung over them like an invisible shroud, causing the morning air to shimmer around them like a mirage.

  These terrible men waited upon a stooped, elderly slave that crouched at their feet and watched the progress of the battle on the plain below. Blind and nearly toothless, the slave’s blue eyes were clouded with milky cataracts, and his brown skin was dried and wrinkled like aged parchment. His bald head was cocked to one side, balanced precariously on his scrawny neck. A thin line of drool hung from his trembling lips.

  Slowly, the wrinkled head straightened. A ripple went through the assembled priests, and they shuffled forward, their faces expectant. The slave’s mouth worked.

  “It is time. Open the jars,” he said, in a voice ravaged with pain and the weight of too many years.

  Silently, the priests bowed to the blind slave and went inside the tent. A pair of sarcophagi stood within, carved from glossy black and green marble, fit for the bodies of a mighty king and his queen. Baleful glyphs of power were etched upon their surfaces, and the air surrounding the coffins was as cold and dank as a tomb. The priests averted their eyes from the dreadful figure carved upon the king’s sarcophagus, kneeling instead before eight heavy jars nestled at its feet.

  The priests picked up the dusty jars in their hands and carried them out into the open air. Each of the clay vessels vibrated invisibly in their grasp, sending a deep, unsettling hum reverberating through their bones.

  Slowly, fearfully, the priests set the jars down on the uneven ground. Each vessel was sealed shut with a thick band of dark wax, engraved with rows of intricate glyphs. When all of the jars were in place, the men drew their irheps, the curved ceremonial daggers used to remove the organs of the dead for interment. Steeling their nerves, the priests cut away the wax seals. At once, the buzzing grew louder and more insistent, like the drone of countless angry wasps. The heavy clay lids
rattled violently atop the jars.

  Nearby, horses shied violently away from the unsealed vessels. With trembling hands, the priests reached forwards and pulled the lids away.

  Akhmen-hotep raised his hand to signal his trumpeter. Now was the time to send the chariots and horsemen forwards to break the enemy line once and for all.

  All at once, the swirling haze of dust was swept away. The priest king felt a cold wind rushing over the skin of his upraised arm, goose bumps prickling his bare flesh.

  The pall of dust flowed up the rocky slope of the ridge in a single, indrawn rush. For a dizzying instant, Akhmen-hotep could see the battlefield in every detail. He saw the struggling companies of enemy foot-sloggers, reduced to ragged bands of tormented warriors forced back almost to the very foot of the ridge line. Beyond them, the priest king saw the rocky slope, leading upwards to a long line of black linen tents, and squadrons of rearing, plunging horsemen.

  Then he saw the priests and their tall, heavy jars. The dust formed whirling cyclones over the open vessels, and then Akhmen-hotep watched them darken, turning from a pale tan to deep brown, and then to a slick, glossy black.

  A seething, whirring drone radiated down the rocky slope and washed over the combatants, sinking through armour and flesh, and vibrating along their bones. Horses bucked and screamed, their eyes white with terror. Men dropped their spears and clapped their hands over their ears to try to shut out the awful noise.

  The priest king watched in growing terror as the ebon pillars stretched upwards and poured out a pall of roiling darkness that spread like ink across the sky.

  TWO

  Second Sons

  Khemri, the Living City, in the 44th year of Khsar the Faceless

  (-1968 Imperial Reckoning)

  On the seventh day after his death, the body of the Priest King Khetep was taken from the temple of Djaf, in the southern quarter of the Living City, and borne within an ebon palanquin to the House of Everlasting Life. The palanquin was carried not by slaves, but upon the shoulders of Khetep’s great Ushabti, and the king’s mighty champions marched with their heads hung low and their once-radiant skin stained with ash and dust.

  Throngs of mourners crowded the streets of the Living City to pay homage to Khetep as the palanquin passed by. Men and children fell to their knees and pressed their faces to the dust, and mothers wept and tore at their hair, calling to Djaf, god of the dead, to return their monarch to the land of the living. Water drawn from the River Vitae, the great Giver of Life, was cast upon the sides of the palanquin amid tearful prayers. Potters brought out the cups and bowls that had been fired on the day of Khetep’s death and dashed them to pieces on the street in the wake of the priest king’s passage. In the merchant’s quarter, wealthy traders tossed gold coins into the dust before the cortege, where the polished metal caught the light of Ptra’s holy fire and blazed beneath the Ushabti’s marching feet.

  By comparison, the streets of the noble districts surrounding the palace to the north were silent and still. Many of the households were in mourning, or preparing the exorbitant ransoms expected to redeem their lost kin after the disastrous defeat outside Zandri a week before. The atmosphere of sadness and dread settled over the procession like a shroud, weighing heavily on the shoulders of the devoted. Khetep had ruled over Khemri for more than twenty-five years, and through a mix of diplomacy and military prowess he’d forced the cities of Nehekhara to put aside their feuds and live together in peace. Nehekhara had enjoyed an age of prosperity not seen since the great Settra, five hundred years before.

  All that had been swept away in the space of a single afternoon on the banks of the Vitae. Khetep’s great army had been broken by the warriors of Zandri, and the Ushabti had failed in their sacred duty to protect the king. The news had spread across the Blessed Land like a dust storm, sweeping all before it, and the future was uncertain.

  The silent procession made its way into the palace grounds, where the king’s household lined the great avenue leading to Settra’s mortuary temple. Noblemen and slaves alike prostrated themselves in the dust as the palanquin approached. Many wept openly, knowing that they would soon be joining their great king on his journey into the afterlife.

  Settra had built his temple to the east of the palace, facing downriver where the Vitae led to the foot of the Mountains of the Dawn, and symbolic of the journey of the soul after death. The avenue led to a massive, roofed plaza, supported by ranks of huge sandstone columns that led all the way to the temple’s grand entrance. The shadows beneath the broad cedar roof were cool and fragrant after the fierce, dry heat of the day. Their footsteps echoed strangely among the columns, transforming their heavy, measured tread into mournful drum beats.

  A thirty foot high doorway stood open at the far end of the plaza, densely carved with sacred glyphs and flanked by towering basalt statues of fearsome warriors with the heads of owls, the horex, servants of Usirian, the god of the underworld.

  A procession of solemn figures strode from the shadows beyond the great doorway as the Ushabti approached. The priests were clad in ceremonial robes of purest white, and their dusky skins were marked with hundreds of painted henna glyphs, sacred to the cult. Each priest wore a mask of beaten gold, identical to the burial masks of the great kings who lay in their tombs in the sands to the east, and wide belts of gold adorned with topaz and lapis lazuli encircled their waists.

  The priests waited in silence as the Ushabti laid the palanquin down at last and drew open the heavy curtains that concealed the priest king’s body from view. Khetep had been tightly wrapped in a white burial shroud, his hands folded across his narrow chest. The great king’s shrouded face was covered in an ornate burial mask.

  For the only time in their lives, the great Ushabti sank to their knees and prostrated themselves before someone other than their king and master. The mortuary priests ignored the mighty champions. They drew near the palanquin and carefully removed the body of their exalted charge. Two by two they bore the shrouded corpse upon their shoulders, and took it into Settra’s temple, where only the dead and their eternal servants were allowed.

  Once upon a time, the services of the mortuary cult were reserved for the Priest Kings of Khemri alone. Over time, their practices had spread across all Nehekhara, and grew to encompass noble families who enjoyed the priest kings’ favour. Now, even the lowliest families could purchase the services of a priest to attend upon their loved ones, though the price was steep. No one begrudged the cost, even though a man might scrimp and save for a lifetime for the privilege. The promise of immortality was a gift beyond price.

  The priests carried the body of the king into the depths of the great temple, through vast, sandstone chambers whose walls were covered with intricate mosaics depicting the great Pilgrimage from the East and the Covenant of the Gods, wrought more than seven centuries before. On those walls, great Ptra led the people to the great, life-giving River Vitae, and Geheb sowed the dark earth with rich crops to make them healthy and strong. Tahoth the Wise showed the people the secrets of shaping stone and raising temples, and when the first cities had been built, glorious Asaph rose from the reeds beside the river and beguiled the people with the wonders of civilisation.

  Another chamber lay beyond these wondrous halls, low-ceilinged and dark. Smooth red sandstone gave way to glossy blocks of polished basalt, joined together so cunningly that no seams between the stones were visible. The carvings were highlighted here and there with faint touches of silver dust or precious crushed pearl: landscapes of fertile plains and a wide river, presided over by a mighty range of mountains that dominated the distant horizon. The details were vague, made all the more ephemeral by the shifting light of the oil lamps that flickered around the marble bier at the centre of the room. The Land of the Dead was a beguiling image, like a mirage of the deep desert, beckoning seductively to the viewer only to fade once he drew near.

  The priests laid the body of the king upon the bier, and reverently pulled away the line
n shroud. Khetep’s body had been cleaned by his attendants at the battlefield, and the priests of Djaf had further washed it in a solution of ancient herbs and earth salts. The great king’s angular face appeared serene, though the cheeks and eyes were already sunken and there was a strange, bluish-black tint to his thin lips.

  A silent procession of acolytes filed in and out of the room as the priests worked. They bore clay pots of expensive ink and fine brushes of camel hair to paint Khetep’s skin with glyphs of preservation and sanctity, as well as jars of raw herbs, perfumed water and still more earth salts. Finally came a procession of four young priests carrying intricately carved alabaster jars that would store Khetep’s vital organs until his eventual resurrection.

  The senior priests worked swiftly, preparing the body for preservation. The priests of the city temples had declared that the coronation of Khetep’s heir and his sacred marriage must proceed at sunset, only seven hours away, so there was little time before the dead king’s interment. Once the burial shroud was removed, they gathered in a circle around the bier and faced the statues of Djaf and Usirian, which flanked a ceremonial doorway on the eastern wall of the chamber. The senior priest, Shepsu-het, raised his stained hands and prepared to utter the Invocation of the Open Door, the first step in securing Usirian’s permission to one day return Khetep’s spirit to the Blessed Land.

  Just as the priest began to speak he felt a chill race down his spine. The back of his neck prickled beneath the weight of a cold, inimical stare, much as a mouse might suffer under the unblinking gaze of a cobra.

  Shepsu-het turned to face the shadowy figure standing in the chamber’s entrance. The other priests followed suit, and sank quickly to their knees as they recognised the figure.

  Nagash, son of Khetep, Grand Hierophant of the Living City’s mortuary cult, favoured the kneeling priests with a disdainful glare.