'You will see.'
'You need my blood, do you not?'
Skanda tilted his head back, and eyes older than the moon surveyed Graal. Skanda smiled, but there was no real humour there, just a mask held in place by necessity and discipline. 'Yes. You are observant.'
'Well, I didn't think you dragged me all the way out here for my cooking skills.'
Skanda shrugged. 'Your blood-oil runs thick with the souls of thousands. It is rich with death and slaughter. General Graal, I don't believe I could have found a more worthy and more potent specimen if I tried.'
'You will perform magick?'
'I will.'
'And what will happen?'
'You will see, General. You will see.'
And despite the fire, despite the warmth of the flames, General Graal realised he was shivering.
Dawn broke, the sky filled with grey ice. Pink highlighted the edges of huge, thundering stormclouds. The world looked bleak. To Graal, the world felt bleak. A desolation. A world without hope.
They rode from their makeshift camp, and soon could make out the huge, crumbling walls which surrounded the once-majestic and truly ancient city of Old Skulkra. The walls were thick, collapsed in segments, battlements crumbling, and within the city buildings had become slaves to time. Houses were fragments, part collapsed, spires crumbled, domes smashed and deflated, towers detonated as if by some terrible explosion. Those buildings that were intact were sometimes skewed, twisted, walls leaning dangerously or gone altogether. Graal observed all this as they rode from Valantrium Moor, and it was exactly as he remembered it. Back when he'd sent the cankers to kill Kell and Saark…
Old Skulkra was haunted, it was said, and as Graal and Skanda grew closer they saw a thin mist creeping through the streets, passing over cracked and buckled paving slabs, ghostly fingers curling around the blackened figures of skeletal trees lining many an avenue. Graal reined in his horse and took a good, hard, long look at this ancient, threatening place.
It was rumoured the city had been built a thousand years ago, but Graal knew this was a misconception. It was probably closer to three thousand years old, maybe even four; it certainly pre-dated the Vampire Warlords and their First Empire of Carnage. It had been a derelict tombstone when Graal first walked the young plains and forests of Falanor. It was simply amazing to Graal that still the city stood, as if defying Nature, as if defying Time and the World.
The city was filled to the brim with a majestic and towering series of vast architectural wonders, immense towers and bridges, spires and temples, domes and parapets, many in black marble shipped from the far east over treacherous marshes. Old Skulkra had once been a fortified city with walls forty feet thick.
Huge, vast engine-houses and factories filled the northeast quarter, and had once been home to massive machines which, scholars claimed, were able to carry out complex tasks but were now silent, rusted iron hulks full of decadent oils and toxins.
A wide central avenue divided Old Skulkra, lined by blackened, twisted trees, arms skeletal and vast and frightening. Beyond this central avenue were enormous private palaces, now crumbled to half-ruins, and huge temples with walls cracked and jigged and displaced, offset and leaning and not entirely natural.
It was said Old Skulkra was haunted.
It was said the city carried plague at its core.
It was said to walk the ancient streets killed a man within days.
It was said dark, slithering, blood-oil creatures lived in the abandoned machinery of the factories, awaiting fresh flesh and pumping blood, and that ghosts walked the streets at dawn and dusk waiting to crawl into souls and disintegrate a person from the inside out…
It was said Old Skulkra, the city itself, was alive.
People did not go to Old Skulkra. Through fear, it was a place to be avoided.
Gradually, Graal and Skanda found their way to a breach in the massive walls. Gingerly, their mounts picked their way amongst ancient rubble, and then a coldness hit them and Graal shivered. The mist swirled about the hooves of his charger, and they walked the beasts down a broad, sweeping side-street lined with ancient shops, the fronts now open like gaping wounds, the interiors dark and sterile. They emerged onto the wide central avenue, and now they were closer Graal inspected the twisted and blackened trees – as if each one had been struck by lightning, petrified in an instant. Graal eased his mount closer, and touched the nearest trunk. He looked back at Skanda with a frown.
'It's stone,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Were they carved?'
'No. They were changed. There was bad magick here, once. Old magick. Come on, follow me.'
Skanda led the way, and Graal gazed up at the massive buildings which lined the avenue. They were vast, many of the carvings stunning to behold even after all this time; even the ravages of nature could do nothing to take away their ancient splendour, their oncemajesty, their foreboding and intimidating watchfulness.
They are looking at me. Watching me through veils of stone. What is this place? What secrets do the rocks hold? What terrible legends do they hide and protect?
At the far end of the avenue, distant but growing larger with every hoof-strike squatted a giant building of dulled black stone. It looked almost out of place amongst the majesty of every other building on the avenue, and strangely it seemed less worn, less ravaged; none of the walls leant or were broken, and the roof – a single, sloping slab of black – was unbroken. Pillars lined the front, along with huge steps which, Graal realised as he drew closer, were each as high as a man.
'Was this place populated by giants?' said Graal.
'We found it like this,' said Skanda. 'The Ankarok. It was our home, but we did not build it. Even we do not know how it was made; what incredible engines, what mighty clockwork must have been used in its untimely creation.'
Graal craned his neck, gazing up and up and then across the mighty front facade. Skanda turned his horse to the right, and Graal followed, and there was a ramp, smooth and black. Skanda dismounted and tethered both horses. The beasts were skittish, wide-eyed, ears flat back against their skulls. Graal reached out to calm the beast, not out of any compassion but because he simply didn't want the horse bolting and leaving him stranded… here.
They walked up the ramp, Graal's boots echoing dully, Skanda's feet slapping a soft rhythm. They stopped at the apex, and Graal peered in. It was warm in there, uncomfortably warm, surprisingly warm, and for a horrible moment Graal had a feeling he was stepping inside a creature, a living entity, into an orifice. He cursed himself, and stepped forward into the temple, hand reaching out to steady himself against a smooth wall.
Behind him, Skanda smiled, and started to sing a soft, lilting lullaby, and he followed Graal into the darkness which soon shifted by degrees into a warm, ambient, orange glow. Graal moved down long ramps through a massive, vacant room. At the head there was an altar, and glancing back as if for confirmation, Graal continued down and along the black stone floor until he reached steps. He looked up then, and nearly jumped out of his skin. The high vaulted ceiling was alive with thick black tentacles, that moved ever-so-gently, almost imperceptibly, but they did move, and there were thousands of them, and Graal realised his mouth was dry and he felt a strange primal fear course through his blood-oil. He was here, and he felt sleepy, and he was way out of his depth, and he laughed easily, the noise a discordant clash of sound, for he reasoned he'd been duped once more, just like with the Vampire Warlords… only now he thought it might turn out a lot, lot worse. It would seem Kell was not the only pawn in these games…
'Climb the steps,' sang Skanda, talking and singing the words at the same time and the small boy followed Graal upwards and the albino vachine stood on the altar and turned and looked out, as if an audience awaited his performance and for an instant, just an instant, the ground seemed to squirm as if alive with black maggots. But then the feeling, the image, the essence, was gone, and Graal tried to speak, but found he could not.
'Over here,' said Skanda, and took Graal's hand, and in a bizarre scene led the tall, athletic killer, warrior, soldier, vachine to the centre of the stage. They stood there, in the warmth, and Graal felt sweat creeping down his forehead, down his cheeks, trickling under his dull black armour and making him squirm.
Skanda's song rose in pitch, and suddenly in intensity and Graal could feel it, feel the magick in the air and he
