Another blade hammered down onto his shoulder. Arkhan barely registered the blow. The weapons were nothing more than common steel, and little danger to one as steeped in the raw essence of dark magic as he. They might as well have been hitting him with flowers. There was no need to even call upon his magics, save in the interest of cutting to the chase.

It was a game, then. He knew better than most how boredom crept up unawares and inexorably on the long-lived. Had it been her idea? Perhaps… She had been spiteful in life. There was no telling how much worse death had made her.

After all, look what it had done to him.

He stepped back, easily avoiding a blow that would have taken his head off, and lowered his sword. The vampires advanced cautiously. Arkhan flung out his free hand. Eldritch energies crackled, first in his palm and then beginning to crawl across his bony fingers. The vampires stopped.

‘Enough,’ a voice said. The curtains were swept aside by pale arms as a yellow-eyed woman looked down at Arkhan for a moment before indicating that he should approach. Arkhan closed his fingers and let his hand drop to his side. The vampires slunk aside and he stepped past them, sheathing his sword as he went.

‘You are either courageous or foolhardy to attack a representative of the Great Necromancer,’ he said, letting his words carry. ‘Nagash does not forgive such insults.’ The whispering and chittering of the things in the shadows and on the balconies ceased at the mention of the name. The skeletal guard stepped aside in a rattle of bones and armour.

Arkhan started up the steps. The woman stepped aside, her robes swishing softly. She eyed him narrowly, the dark veins that ran beneath her pale flesh pulsing. Her lips curled, revealing delicate fangs. ‘She has been expecting you,’ she said softly.

‘Has she?’ Arkhan said. Looking at her, he recognised her dimly. One of the first of her mistress’s get, turned back in those distant, happy days before Nehekhara had gone to dust. He didn’t recall her name, only that she was a Cathayan, and had been a concubine, once.

‘Or a messenger, at least,’ the vampire said, shrugging.

‘Should I be insulted?’ Arkhan said.

‘I thought you were dead,’ a new voice said, from the throne at the centre of the dais, and the words held a familiar teasing note.

Arkhan bowed his head to the figure on the throne. ‘I was,’ he said, his voice issuing from between his bony jaws like a spurt of smoke. The words hung on the air for a moment, echoing oddly.

‘Yes… Several times over, I imagine,’ the Queen of the Silver Pinnacle said, leaning forwards on her throne as he stepped inside. She gestured lazily to the woman. ‘Leave us, Naaima.’

The vampire nodded and stepped past the curtains, letting them fall closed behind her. Arkhan looked at the creature that reclined regally in the throne, and the dim ghosts of ancient emotion stirred sluggishly. ‘Neferata…’ he said. She was still as beautiful as he recalled, though that beauty no longer evoked the same desire. Even if it had, he no longer possessed the means to express it.

As pale and as cold as marble, her aristocratic features had sharpened from their former softness into something altogether more predatory. If Arkhan had been alive, he would have felt terror mingled with his desire, for Neferata of Lahmia was ruin in the flesh. Eyes like polished onyx stared unblinking at him and her great mass of night-black hair had been bound in thick serpentine plaits that coiled about her shoulders and across her décolletage. Despite the chill of the tomb, she wore nothing save a thin silk dress akin to the type she had worn when he had first seen her, so long ago. Golden armlets clung to her arms, and there were fine rings on her fingers and visible on her toes within her sandals; a belt of the finest wrought gold hugged her waist.

‘Arkhan,’ Neferata said. She gazed at him coolly, studying his emaciated shape with detachment. ‘You are less than you once were.’

‘As are you,’ Arkhan said, gesturing to the stone floor. Neferata’s eyes became slits, but Arkhan continued, ‘You have gone from ruling a nation to hiding in a tomb.’

‘Hardly,’ Neferata countered, leaning back. ‘It is a fortress, dear Arkhan. My fortress.’ She smiled. ‘But it could be a tomb, depending on what message you came here to deliver.’

There was no sign as to whether the threat had registered save for the briefest flicker of Arkhan’s eerie gaze. ‘Nagash sends his regards,’ he said.

Neferata paused. There was no trace of the fear that the Great Necromancer’s name had once engendered in the one-time Queen of Lahmia. Instead there was simply wariness. ‘I was not aware that Nagash walked among us once more,’ she said.

‘I have lost my flesh, Neferata, not my senses,’ Arkhan grated, his sword hilt creaking in his grip. ‘You knew the day he awoke, as I did.’

‘Maybe not the day,’ she said, smiling thinly. ‘Have you rejoined him?’

It was Arkhan’s turn to hesitate. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Why?’ There was no malice in the question, only simple curiosity.

‘Why did you set your dogs on me?’ he countered.

She chuckled. ‘To see what was left of you,’ she said. ‘To see whether you were merely a husk animated by Nagash’s will, or something more…’

‘I should have thought Bel Aliad would have taught you better,’ Arkhan said.

‘Oceans of time, dear Arkhan, have passed over that moment,’ Neferata said, idly examining her fingers. ‘Things — people — change, even those like ourselves who are, by definition, changeless.’

‘So I see.’

‘What does Nagash want?’ she said.

‘What he always wants: servants.’ Arkhan said it flatly. There would be no lying to Neferata. She was too cunning for that and Arkhan had little reason to hedge. ‘Vampire servants,’ he added.

‘I would have thought his experiences with poor, unfortunate W’soran would have taught him better than that,’ she said.

Arkhan made a grinding sound. W’soran had been a greedy fool, and Arkhan had paid for the vampire’s overconfidence more than once during the war against Alcadizzar. ‘I tried to find the sorcerer. He stole something of Nagash’s and fled in the last days of Nagashizzar.’

‘He’s dead,’ Neferata said bluntly, ‘and good riddance to him, the fool.’ She sighed and met Arkhan’s eerie gaze unflinchingly. ‘Servants, is it?’

He inclined his head. She snorted. ‘And I am supposed to — what? — throw open my gates and yield my divine right to his majesty, the King of Bones?’

‘If not, I am to take it by force,’ Arkhan said.

‘Do you think you could?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Neferata rose smoothly from her throne and pressed her hands to his chest. Her fingers rose, tracing the contours of his skull with delicate caresses. ‘Oh, my sweet, savage Arkhan… You would, wouldn’t you?’

‘As swiftly and as surely as I destroyed Bel Aliad.’

She made a pouting expression and sniffed. ‘Yes. And wasn’t that a terrible waste.’

‘For you,’ he said.

‘For both of us,’ she said.

‘The dead can never rule the living, Neferata. They can only destroy them,’ Arkhan said, in a tone of one who has no wish to re-hash an old argument. She snorted and a slip of laughter escaped her.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said.

Arkhan paused. ‘You have changed, then…’ he said. Bony fingertips brushed a strand of dark hair out of her face. Her own hand came up instantly and swatted his aside. The fingers of her other hand pressed deep into the metal of his ancient cuirass and suddenly he was flying backwards, out through the curtains and down the stairs.

Arkhan picked himself up slowly as Neferata stepped through the curtains, his sword in her hand. Automatically he glanced at his now-empty sheath and then up as she sprang towards him, aiming a blow at his skull. Arkhan twisted desperately, avoiding the strike. The sword crashed into the stone, cracking it. Neferata whipped the blade up and around with a skill he had not known that she possessed, nearly taking his head off as he bent back beneath the blow.