Maybe Mourkain would provide answers to that as well.

She looked back at her followers, drifting through the column of riders with the feline grace that so characterised those with whom she shared her blood-kiss. They would return to her side, minds full of gossip, rumor and knowledge for her to sift through.

In life, she had employed the priestesses who served as her handmaidens in much the same fashion. No one noticed women or slaves. And they always heard such useful things.

What would they hear in Mourkain, she wondered? Maybe the answer to what the black sun was. She looked up, wondering what had attracted Vorag’s attention.

She looked ahead and the black sun seemed larger now; it had expanded in size, until its darkness swallowed all the stars and moon. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? Why–

Something brighter than the light of creation’s darkness flared into being around her, seared the air that filled her useless lungs and burned her pale skin to cracked and blackened scraps. She threw up her hands, but she was already blind and burning.

It rose over the mountains like some obscene beast crouching on the crags, its corona flickering through her thoughts like the tips of many knives. Cold heat slashed at her, chilling her bones even as it burned the flesh from them.

Neferata stood at the heart of the black sun and was consumed.

A world died.

Every living thing in this world died and then stirred, bones ancient and new alike shifting and rising. The Corpse Geometries flexed in the ocean of stars as the Kings and Queens of the Land of the Dead rose one by one from their mighty tombs and marched towards the black heart of the charnel kingdoms.

Familiar faces and forms stirred in the dust, rising and joining the march. She called out to them, but to no avail. They responded only to one voice, terrible and empty and cold. It was the voice like needles on bone. Simultaneously high and deep, like wind whistling through a ribcage, it spoke to her of the empire to come, the empire of ghosts and corpses, silent and perfect and eternal. The empire soon to rise…

Now that she was here. Now that she was in Mourkain.

Neferata opened her eyes and moaned. She swayed in her saddle as cemetery thoughts washed over her, seeking to pull her down. Again she tasted grave-dirt and smelled the rot of centuries. The concentrated essence of death filled her, making her light-headed.

‘Neferata,’ Naaima said, reaching for her. Neferata turned and saw the horror that hid beneath her handmaiden’s beauty. Maggots writhed through the gaping holes in the Cathayan’s cheeks and suppurating rents marred her nose and mouth. Teeth like razors flashed behind tattered lips. And in her chest beat a black sun just like the one in the sky.

Neferata felt her gaze drawn down. A similar pulsing mass of corruption throbbed in her chest. She looked at her hands in growing horror, seeing the sickly glow of her bones beneath the pallid, porous flesh. She looked up, and something impossibly massive and impossibly evil crouched between her and the sky, nestling in the dead stones of the mountains like a beast preparing to spring. It was a nightmare orchard of skewed minarets and thrusting towers, sprouting like broken spears from the bloody soil of a battlefield.

Hurry, Neferata! Come, claim your throne! You will be Queen of the World, Neferata. A queen of all that is, of all that ever will be for eternities without end. Come… come…

‘Neferata,’ Abhorash said from behind her. He grabbed her arm. She tore it free and spun, her fingers digging into the gorget that hid his throat. He crashed from his horse with a roar of surprise. Men’s hands flew to their weapons as Neferata leapt from her horse and dived on her former champion. Worms moved beneath his skin and for a moment, she considered trying to dig them out.

There was corruption everywhere she looked, seeping into the rocks and strangling the life out of the crooked trees. And not just the trees; the Strigoi were bound by black threads that held them tight to their vampire masters, and they were shrunken, skeletal things to her eyes.

Swords hissed out and she twisted aside as Abhorash’s men closed in on her from either side. She slid across the slushy ground on all fours, her jaws agape with a serpentine looseness. The red-armoured vampires advanced slowly, their blades extended.

‘Walak, Lutr,’ Abhorash gasped, pulling himself to his feet. ‘Don’t—’

They didn’t listen. The one called Lutr came in fast, his sword chopping out towards her midsection. She caught the edge of the blade on her palm and drove it into the ground. Her fist connected with the vampire’s helmet, crumpling the metal. Lutr dropped like a stone as Walak’s blade sliced through her furs and the flesh beneath. The pain brought her back to herself, banishing the nightmare voice and its attendant phantoms.

‘I said no!’ Abhorash roared, grabbing his warrior and hurling the man aside in a prodigious display of strength. The warrior landed in a heap in the snow. The two vampires faced each other, fangs bared. Neferata was the first to let hers sink back behind her lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, forcing herself to utter the words. She needed Abhorash. Whether or not he was a willing ally, she knew she needed him. She needed his strength, his staunchness. She needed her champion.

Abhorash hesitated, and then nodded brusquely. In his eyes, she saw that he knew exactly what it was that had driven her into such frenzy. Abhorash had seen it himself. ‘Mourkain,’ he said, pointing.

She turned, half fearing that the black sun would take her into its mad embrace once more, or that the foul mass she had glimpsed would lunge for her. Instead, she saw the land rise sharply into a crown of broken hills, through which slithered a dark and fierce river. And there, at the top, was Mourkain. The city rose up like tombstones over the hills and peaks and she knew that it was far larger than it appeared. It was not quite the abomination she had seen moments earlier, but she knew that it wasn’t far removed.

‘It is beautiful, is it not?’ Vorag said.

‘Yes,’ Neferata said, not knowing whether she was telling the truth.

FOUR

The desert tribesmen ululated wildly as they shook their weapons at the night sky. The victory had been swift and decisive. The Nehekharan pickets had never known what hit them, so swiftly had the tribes struck. Out here, on the edge of the Great Desert, the warriors of Nehekhara had grown lax and soft and they had paid for their inattentiveness with their lives. In contrast, the tribesmen were savages, clinging precariously to a harsh and unforgiving existence that had made them hard and fierce.

Neferata reclined on a pile of cushions, smiling benignly as she sipped from a cup of blood. She was clad in iron armour, bloodstained now. Naaima crouched nearby, speaking softly to Rasha. Neferata considered eavesdropping then dismissed the idea. There was no cause to suspect that Naaima was doing anything more than teaching her newest handmaiden some detail or other about her new existence. Neferata examined the young woman, smiling slightly. Rasha, a chieftain’s daughter, had taken well to immortality. She had ripped out her own father’s throat and butchered her brothers for Neferata. Women, even chieftains’ daughters, were not treated well in the desert.

With Rasha’s tribe beneath her thumb, she had swiftly brought others to heel through similar methods — chieftains and warlords torn to pieces by daughters and wives in nightly orgies of long-repressed violence. She glanced around at her new handmaidens; twenty in all, they reclined or supped on the bodies of captives taken in the raid. The garrison soldiers had been strung upside down from posts within the tent and their blood dripped into clay basins. As she watched, a woman lapped at the blood like a cat, her hair trailing through it. What the tribesmen thought of the peculiarities of their new mistress, she had never bothered to inquire.