Abruzzi hesitated. He looked at her, but did not ask the question she knew was foremost on his mind. For that she respected him. Only a fool asked the obvious question. ‘And if you do this… what?’ he said.

‘I would expect an appropriate compensation, commensurate with my standing,’ she said prettily.

Abruzzi was silent for a moment, looking at an orange and yellow blossom that nodded in the breeze. He touched the flower and sniffed it. ‘You have much aided the senate, my lady, in removing certain obstructions to the furtherance of our influence over the more — ah — short-sighted of our nobility.’

‘Best to leave such thankless tasks to an outsider, I have always thought,’ she said, fanning herself.

‘Hmm.’ Abruzzi looked at her. ‘Not a single Sartosan, you say? You can spare our people from the bellies of the black arks?’

‘Yes,’ Neferata said.

‘And your appropriate reward?’

‘A seat on the senate,’ she said. She raised a hand before he could protest. ‘Not for me. For a… protégé of mine. His wife has done me many services, and I would see her — and him — rewarded.’

Abruzzi grunted. ‘Easily done,’ he said.

‘Then we have an accord,’ Neferata said, smiling…

The snow fell with a silent fury across the mountain. Ice gripped Neferata’s hair, changing the once-lustrous mane into something resembling a nest of black snakes. Across her shoulders, the dark-furred cat stirred, its triangular, tufted ears twitching. Yellow eyes opened and a quiet chirp escaped its mouth. She stroked it with her free hand. She wore a heavy bearskin and the black, ornate armour of Ushoran’s honour-guard, and the cat nestled between the pauldrons. Neferata moved through the waist-high drifts slowly but steadily, the haft of Razek’s axe clenched tightly in her grip. His blood still stained the handle and hers stained the blade, but if there was some meaning in that, she had had little time or desire to contemplate it.

Instead, her eyes found the great stone dragon head that seemed to lunge down towards her through the storm of falling snow, from the heights of the peak. It was a large thing, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the craniums of the giant lizards she had seen in the Southlands. The artistry that had gone into the crafting of it boggled her mind; her people had been known far and wide for their craftsmanship, but even they had lacked the sheer attention to detail that the dragon head displayed. It seemed to have no purpose, jutting as it did from the tightly packed rocks. Her keen eyesight picked out distant outlines that were likely other, similar protrusions, encircling the apex of the peak in a crown of dragons. With difficulty, she pulled her eyes down to examine that which she had come for.

The great doors of Karaz Bryn rose over her, looming bulwarks of stone and ancient metal fashioned by the artisans of a dying race and controlled by mechanisms which mankind would still struggle to understand a thousand years hence. The doors were set into a massive archway that had been decorated with an intricate latticework of carvings that might have depicted anything from legends to episodes of historical significance. The doors themselves were decorated as well, with a profusion of glowering, stylised faces done in the sharp, blocky style preferred by dwarf artisans.

There was a faint glow to those faces and it was one she knew would be invisible to human eyes. Even she could only glimpse it dimly. There was some magic worked into the very substance of those doors, and it bothered her to look at them for too long.

Even with the snow, her preternatural eyesight picked out the tiny holes where dwarf eyes watched her approach. She could almost hear their thoughts. And she certainly heard the whine of crossbows being readied. She stopped. Her muscles tensed and readied to propel her in one direction or another. Her hold on the axe tightened. The dwarfs had quietly moved to a war-footing in the year since Ushoran had taken Nagash’s crown for his own. Trade had not quite dried up, but it was more guarded. Fewer merchants came bearing King Borri’s seal. Fewer dwarf-made goods found their way to Mourkain. Even as she had warned Ushoran, the trust of dwarfs was a fragile thing and easily cracked. And she was here now to shatter what remained utterly.

‘I request entrance to Karaz Bryn,’ she called out, her voice echoing. Minutes passed. Snow settled on her shoulders and head. The cat chirped querulously, and she murmured soft nothings to it.

‘Who are you to ask such?’ It was a rumble of sound, echoing from the peaks that rose around her and sending small avalanches of snow tumbling from on high. Speaking tubes and amplifying flutes gave it such an effect, she knew. Nonetheless, it was impressive.

The voice spoke in Khazalid. Neferata replied in kind. ‘One who has come to return something which was lost,’ she shouted, holding the axe up to where the unseen speaker could see the runic insignia stamped on the swell of the blade.

Silence fell. She waited. Minutes passed into hours. Hours passed into days. The cat leapt down from her shoulders and trotted into the darkness, returning some hours later, as if checking on her. She could not fault it for its anxiety. Neferata stood for a time, and then sank to her knees, kneeling in the snow, Razek’s axe in her lap. The cold was nothing to her, nor was the snow. It was nothing but an irritation. It was simply another indignity heaped upon the pile.

Ushoran had beaten her.

He had beaten her at her own game. Even as she had undermined him, he had worked a deeper game, breaking apart the bonds of loyalty that she thought unbreakable. She blinked a snowflake from her eye. No, he had not broken it. He had twisted it instead, turning devotion and desire into something altogether more vicious.

Pride was her curse. It always had been. She had too much of it, too much to see the obvious, at times. And she had paid for it again and again. That too she hadn’t seen. Not for what it was.

Ushoran had made her bow.

That thought rattled around in her head as she waited. She grimly forced it down, and then it would stubbornly shoot to the surface, taunting her like a splinter beneath her thumbnail.

He had forced her to her knees. He had forced her to swear allegiance to Strigos, to Mourkain, and to him. He had forced them all, though some had gone more willingly than others. Some of it was the crown’s influence. That was what Morath had tried to warn her of, what W’soran had been terrified of. Nagash’s night-black will made manifest. It was impossible to resist.

That was the only reason she still lived. It stuck in her craw, that thought, but even she wasn’t so blind as to pretend it was any other way. She had bowed and Ushoran had let her live. She was more useful alive than dead. Abhorash was still occupied in the south. Vorag and his rebels had fled towards the Sour Sea, and her former champion doggedly pursued them. W’soran too was gone, fleeing in the months after Ushoran’s ascension. Neferata suspected that the old monster was heading south as well, seeking Vorag’s protection. That was what she would have done in his place.

That was what she should have done.

Instead, she was here, kneeling in the snow. Her features rippled with a snarl. The cat stiffened and nuzzled her throat, purring softly. She stroked it and fought to control the beast within. There were too many eyes on her and too much depending on her. Her web was stretched thin and fragile and one false move, one moment’s surrender would render it so much ragged gossamer on the wind.