The huge unliving creature growled and moved to obey. Jaderac’s enemies were as good as dead. Nothing that lived could best such an engine of destruction by night. It had cost him greatly to make the creature but now it would prove its worth.
He looked at the cultists. It was time for them to earn their share of the power they coveted. “Take up your positions,” he said. “Ready your censers. We begin.”
He focused his mind, and concentrated on the ritual. Some time passed before he noticed that Tamara had vanished.
Suddenly Sardec heard screaming. Muskets flared in the gloom. There was a sound of bones breaking, men dying. A group of soldiers broke and ran. “Stand firm,” he bellowed. He heard Sergeant Hef shouting the same. Something hideous erupted from the brush in front of him. Before he could react it was on him, and he was caught in a grip that made him feel like a mouse in the jaws of a cat.
Red eyes burned into his. Yellow teeth grinned down out of a lipless smile. He stared into the face of death. He knew he faced a Nerghul, and he doubted he was going to survive this second encounter.
He slashed at the thing’s face with his hook, peeling away part of its cheek, and letting the white of the teeth shine through. He continued to tug but the blade seemed to have caught on bone. The Nerghul lashed out with its free hand. He went flying, heard the sound of bone crunch as his body impacted on a gravestone.
Lightning flashed, dazzlingly close. The smell of ozone filled his nostrils. His hair stood on end. He looked up and saw the charred form of the Nerghul reeling away from Asea. Lightning arced from the wand in her hand, smashing into the creature, keeping it at bay even as it stripped the flesh from its body. It tried to get closer but, for all its ferocious speed, it could not move against the flow of deadly energy. Asea did not let up. She knew that if she did the thing would be on her in a flash. Blue sparks flickered from the side of the Nerghul’s head. The snow sizzled where they landed.
Sardec groaned and picked himself up and checked his limbs. His jacket was torn and blackened. He could smell burning hair. Everything seemed intact until he realised that he had lost his hook. It must have slid free from its mounting and remained buried in the jaw of the Nerghul. It was the metal of it that appeared to draw Asea’s lightning. He could see metal glowing. He thought he understood now how that ever-twisting worm of lightning kept aimed at the undead beast’s head no matter how hard it tried to evade. The metal was attracting the energy to it like a lightning rod drawing a thunderbolt. Sparks kept leaping from Sardec’s hook. He shuddered to think what might have happened if he had remained attached to his artificial limb.
The Nerghul spasmed and fell. The lightning crackled and faded. The Foragers sprang into action hacking the creature with their bayonets. Even crippled as it was, it managed to toss them off, and headed towards the source of its torment, Asea. The Barbarian crashed into it from one side. His blades hacking at the thing’s blackened, smoking flesh. Weasel’s rifle spoke thunder and a truesilver bullet smashed into the thing’s brain.
Karim sprang forward and separated its head from its body with one stroke. Even as he watched the Nerghul began to decompose, as if the unholy energies binding its form together had dissipated and could not longer hold it together. Perhaps the lightning had something to do with it. After a few moments there was only a pool of protoplasm, bubbling in the snow.
“We won,” said the Barbarian. He sounded stunned.
“This one was weaker than the last,” said Asea with certainty.
“If that’s a weak one, I would not like to see its stronger brethren,” said Sergeant Hef.
“Sergeant, round up the men,” said Sardec. He was proud that there was no sign of the shakiness he felt in his voice. He managed to ignore the pain in his side as he walked over to Asea where she studied all that was left of the Nerghul’s corpse.
“I would not touch that hook if I were you,” she said. “It’s red hot and most likely poisoned as well.”
“Let’s hope there are not any more of those things out there,” said Sardec. “We may not be so lucky next time.”
She nodded. “We’re running out of time,” she said. “The ritual has started.”
Jaderac chanted. His followers echoed the words. Smoke, bearing the substances they had extracted from the ghoul corpses emerged from the censers they bore, and floated out over the graveyard.
Black fog flowed towards him, entered his mouth and his nostrils, extended tendrils into his lungs and brain. He felt the fog now, as if it were an extension of himself, as if he had fingers of mist. Playfully he touched Sardontine with them. The old Lord flinched but kept chanting; what else could he do. Like all of them, he knew the ritual could not be interrupted on pain of the most severe sorcerous repercussions.
Jaderac extended his misty limbs and touched the ground. For days now, his followers had been preparing this area with alchemicals, letting them saturate the ground, sink deep into the earth until all that was needed was the catalyst and the ritual to call all the creatures down there back to unlife. He sensed the substances responding to his touch. He sent his consciousness burrowing downwards, worm-like, and felt the presence of the decomposing forms and the tiny semi-sentient fragments of necromantic energy with which the graveyard had been seeded. He gave orders. The dark spirits flowed into the bodies, providing all that was needed to complete an alchemical reaction already begun. Bodies began to move, to claw their way towards the surface, guided by Jaderac’s implacable will.
He stood at the centre of a great web of energy now, as it slowly extended its way through the graveyard. He touched the bodies hidden in the mausoleums and felt them respond. They too were filled with death energies. Jaderac called them to him and sent his misty tentacles on through the graveyard.
In a hundred crypts, dead eyes sprang open, green witch-fires burning in them. A hundred corpses rose and began to shamble out into the night, their minds filled with an unholy hunger.
Chapter Thirty
Rik listened to the clock tick. It sounded loud as a drum in the quiet of the apartment. He notched the tip of another truesilver bullet and put it in his pocket. He doubted he would get the chance to use it but it was best to be prepared. He had half a dozen of them now.
He wondered what was happening at the graveyard, and how Asea and his comrades were doing. He wished he was with them, but the voices whispered to him that his place was here. That tonight was the night that Malkior would strike. Out there, in the snow, the soldiers of Talorea were moving. Everything was in confusion. There would never be a better time for an assassination attempt.
He thought about the notes they had found, which had told of the ritual. They had the hallmarks of a trap. Rik was sure that Asea knew that as well as he did, but she could not afford to leave the matter uninvestigated. The risks were too great.
The ticking of the clock became louder, and it began to strike the hour. It was midnight. The chimes were echoed by every clock in the building and then Rik felt it, the tearing sensation that told him that somewhere nearby a shadowgate had opened. Now that the moment had come, he felt weak, as if all the strength had drained out of him. He realised that he might have only minutes of life left to him. The voices babbled. Some urged him to hide. Some urged him to seek his prey. He rose to his feet, and invoked the spells Asea had taught him. A moment later, he sprang out into the corridor and raced through the Palace.
Even with his metabolism accelerated by spells of speed and strength fuelled by the stolen energies of the Quan, he felt as if he was too slow. It was like being in a nightmare where he ran towards a goal which seemed to recede before him and which he had no chance of reaching.
As the corridors blurred past, he was not sure he even wanted to reach that goal. Part of him was deathly afraid of confronting Lord Malkior. He knew his chances of survival were not great. Malkior was far older and more experienced in the ways of sorcery than he. He was a Shadowblood with access to all their powers and uncanny skills. Part of Rik wanted to run off into the night and hide yet he forced himself to run on.
A great hatred burned in him, stronger than his fear. Malkior had killed Rik’s mother and would kill Asea and Kathea if he could. He had left Rik to die in the most horrible way imaginable and all the horrors that haunted Rik now could be traced to that. He planned to turn the whole world into a vast prison camp in which all the humans
