‘Go,’ she said, gesturing sharply. They went, as silent as shadows. Ushoran watched them go. Then he grinned, displaying his mouthful of twisted fangs.

‘You always did have an eye for the pretty ones,’ he said.

‘At least mine stay pretty,’ Neferata said. It was a petty thing to say, but the abortive growl that rippled from Ushoran made it worth it. ‘I suppose that someone told you that Razek visited me?’

‘I needed no one to tell me he would,’ Ushoran said. He snapped at the air. ‘I need the dwarfs, Neferata. Strigos needs them. They have the artifice I need to pull this kingdom of apes up out of the muck.’

‘And you offer them gold in return,’ Neferata said, crossing her arms. ‘Where does that gold come from, I wonder? Have you turned these barbarians into a productive society?’

Ushoran gave a fart of laughter. ‘Productive? Ha!’ He grinned and scratched at the floor with his talons. ‘They were barely scraping by when I found them. In a few generations they would have been no better than the ghouls that haunt the tunnels beneath this place. Inbred cannibals!’

‘And Kadon?’ Neferata prompted.

‘Pfaugh, Kadon,’ Ushoran said, motioning dismissively. ‘He was nothing. Old and weak, like all mortals become. But he had his uses.’

‘He seems to have had something in common with an old friend of ours,’ Neferata said.

Ushoran sat back on his haunches and gazed at her silently for a moment. Then, ‘The dwarf said that, did he?’

‘Not in so many words.’ Neferata stepped past Ushoran and into her chambers. He followed nimbly. ‘Kadon was a necromancer, like W’soran.’

‘Like Nagash,’ Ushoran said.

‘Yes. And how did that come about, hmmm?’

Ushoran went to the dangling man and lifted him. A groan slipped from the man’s lips. Ushoran fastened his lamprey mouth over the unfortunate’s throat and, with a sound like ripping papyrus, began to drink what remained of his blood. Neferata sipped from her goblet, watching him.

When he had finished, he turned to her and said, ‘I don’t know.’

Neferata let the lie pass. Talking to Ushoran was akin to swordplay. The obvious drop of the guard was a likely feint. Instead, she settled for a change of tactics. ‘Where is the gold coming from?’ she asked again.

Ushoran cocked his head. ‘Mourkain has many secrets. Kadon collected much wealth during his tenure as hetman.’ He licked his fangs. ‘We are in the process of re-opening the vaults.’

‘And where did Kadon get this wealth?’ Neferata said. ‘Did he steal it from the dwarfs, Ushoran?’ Even you would not be so foolish, would you, she thought.

‘Here and there,’ Ushoran said. ‘Kadon was a fool and a degenerate, but he was a miser of some distinction. Perhaps he collected some dwarf wealth in his more active years. What does it matter?’

‘It matters quite a bit,’ Neferata said. ‘Show them to me.’

‘What?’ Ushoran said.

‘The vaults, my king, show them to me.’ She emptied her goblet. ‘Razek is curious, Ushoran, as am I.’

‘You think he may try to steal the gold?’ Ushoran said, and she could see by the look in his eyes that he had never even considered such a thing. Oh my cunning lord, your wit has abandoned you as thoroughly as your looks, she thought.

‘No, but I think that if he learns that you’re paying the dwarfs with their own gold he will not be pleased,’ she said. ‘And if that happens, our newborn alliance could quickly become enmity and Mourkain could find itself once more at war with the dawi. Now show me the vaults.’

Ushoran wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Very well. See if you can keep up.’ Then, with a scrape of talons across stone, he was bounding towards the window. Neferata was after him a half-second later. Even as she vaulted out of the window, Ushoran was plummeting downwards through the chill night air.

He struck an outcropping and twisted through the air as if he were swimming. His flesh snapped, ripped and spread with a sound like a rupturing melon, and wings unfurled from his broad back. Black blood, expelled during the transformation, splattered across the rooftops below as a winged shadow sped off. Neferata landed on the outcropping, her eyes wide. Ushoran had learned something during his time in the wilderness after all.

The game of skin-changing was a hard one, and it grew harder the younger and further from the source their kind was. Of Neferata’s get, one in three could shift shape to any appreciable degree, and of those whom her handmaidens brought over, fewer still could manage it. For herself, she had never faced any difficulty with it, and if Ushoran wished to show off, well, two could play at that game.

She leapt down, aiming for the highest, closest roof peak. As she landed, she sank her claws into the flesh of her scalp. Things moved inside her as she ripped the pale flesh from her frame, and freed the sleek, wet, black-furred thing within. Shedding her human skin, she began to pursue Ushoran’s gargoyle shape in the form of one of the panthers which occupied the jungles of Ind.

She bounded across the rooftops of Mourkain, her claws digging gouges in the stone and thatch. Ushoran was fast, but she was faster. She leapt from peak to peak, following the swell of the mountain that Mourkain occupied. Whoever had built the bones of the ancient city had wrought it from the very guts of the mountain, and it was into those depths that Ushoran led her.

The upper reaches of the city were absent of life, save torch-bearing patrols of hard-faced Strigoi, who staunchly kept their eyes averted from the great stone doorway leading into the mountain’s peak. The doors were open, and a foul effluvium emanated from within. Neferata’s lean shape slithered past the guards and darted through the arch. The smell of death enveloped her, even more strongly here than in the pyramid. The ground vibrated with a steady, mechanical pulse. Echoes of steel on stone rang from the rocks.

Something heavy and leathery thumped down in front of her, balancing on wing-limbs. The great bat shrieked and shook itself, trading one brute shape for another. Bone cracked and ruptured and then Ushoran stood before her, grinning widely.

Neferata loped towards him, shedding fur and rising to her feet as she reached him. She combed blood and the matter of change from her hair with her fingers. ‘I see I’m not the only one to learn how to move between shapes in these intervening years,’ she said.

‘We all like to keep ourselves amused,’ Ushoran said, flexing his great hands.

‘Yet you do not teach it to those whom you give the blood-kiss?’

‘And why would he do that? Power is only valuable when it is held by as few hands as possible,’ a thin, hissing voice said. The words tumbled weirdly from the rocks. Something thin and insect-like detached itself from the shadows and stepped forwards. Despite the lack of light, Neferata saw its features clearly. And she didn’t like what she saw. The face was that of a corpse, with blackened, dry flesh pulled tight over sharp bones, and cavernous eye-sockets, one of which was occupied by a milky, unseeing orb. The other was as black as a chip of polished obsidian and it glinted with malign intelligence. A thin strip of colourless hair, bound into a single worm-like lock, hung down from the pointed skull.

‘W’soran,’ she said.

‘Neferata,’ W’soran said, his good eye narrowing to a burning slit.

Neferata gazed at her former councillor with undisguised loathing. ‘The years have not been kind.’ And indeed, they had not. W’soran had become even more cadaverous in the intervening years since she had last seen him. Clad in ragged black, a deep hood over his verminous face, the vampire resembled nothing so much as a mummy which did not have the good grace to decay in silence.

‘Physical appearances were always more your purview, my queen,’ W’soran said. ‘I am concerned with higher matters than hygiene.’