‘Take her,’ she said, waving the guards back. Neferata rose smoothly to her feet and swayed towards the frightened woman. The guards fell back as she approached, their dark eyes watching her warily. The knife came up, but Neferata placed a fingertip on the bloody tip and pushed it gently aside.

‘What is your name?’ Neferata said softly, leaning close. The woman’s chest heaved and her face was dripping with sweat as she backed against the rail.

‘I… Lu-Lupa Stregga,’ she said, her eyes going unfocused as Neferata gazed deeply into them.

Lupa was the local word for she-wolf. ‘Appropriate,’ Neferata murmured. ‘Sleep, Lupa. You will be safe with me.’ Her will crashed over the woman’s, easily battering it down. She snatched the dagger from her slack grip as she slumped. Neferata caught her easily and motioned for Khaled to come and take her. The vampire did, wrinkling his nose as he did so.

‘She smells of fish,’ he growled.

‘So she does,’ Neferata said, licking the blood from the knife and closing her eyes as the heady taste of druchii blood burned pleasingly in her mouth and throat. She tossed the knife down, so that it sank blade-first into the deck.

Megara eyed the knife, and then looked up. ‘We’ll call it a gift, shall we?’

‘You are too generous, Megara,’ Neferata said.

‘Mmm, indeed. For instance, I have another gift to go with that one.’

‘Oh?’

Megara smiled and leaned forwards. ‘You have spies in Araby, I trust?’

Neferata frowned. ‘If I do, I don’t see what concern it is of yours.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes. Have they mentioned Zandri?’

Zandri. The name of what was once the greatest seaport of long-dead Nehekhara sent a chill through Neferata’s curdled blood. ‘I know it. What of it?’

‘My kin say that sails have been seen in the sour waters there,’ Megara said, her voice low. ‘Tattered sails belonging to ships of wood and bone, they say.’

‘What else do they say?’ Neferata asked.

Megara smiled. ‘They say the dead are preparing to sail, Neferata. And that they are coming for you…’

The river was already freezing over as the twelve vampires waded into its depths, their hands clasped. The water closed over their heads, leaving not a ripple to mark the passage of the human chain as it sank into the depths.

The river bottom was rock and silt and clouds of the latter followed them as they made their way down. They fed on fish and, once, on one of the serpent-things that dwelt in the river, draining them of their turgid juices and leaving the husks to float up. Silt and ice collected on their armour and flesh as they moved, but proved little more than an annoyance. The crushing cold was as nothing to beings who had left mortality far behind, and the trail into the dark was easy to follow.

Dwarfs were no neater than men and they used the river harshly. The cold water clutched close the scents that the Silver Pinnacle excreted, and it was this trail that Neferata and her brood followed into the mountain. The walk through the depths was a long one, a tide of endless hours punctuated only by the appearance of the schools of blind fish which swam up from the mountain’s deep reservoirs and the pale serpentine things which preyed upon them.

Days passed. Neferata’s mind wandered as she walked. She had ever tried to burrow into existing power structures and rise to the top through the meat of the beast, but such was doomed to failure, even as Ushoran’s rule over mortals was. Living societies would expel her even as her own flesh expelled bolts and bullets. But a dead society… Such a society she could rule forever and a day.

It was akin to Nagash’s vision, and yet not. There was no need to eat the world hollow, not when all she required was a few sips of its life’s blood. With a solid power base, without the need to waste her energies fighting rivals and assuring her own safety, there was no limit to what she might accomplish.

Images of vampiric handmaidens spreading outwards from the silent peaks of the Silver Pinnacle, dwarf gold in their saddlebags and her commands in their ears, filled her mind’s eye. She could control nations from the safety of this place; an unseen queen, ruling an invisible empire.

The world would be hers. Nations would rise and fall at her merest whisper. Her daughters would craft empires in the west to match any in the east and they would all bend knee to her as she waited in this place, which straddled the spine of the world.

And then… and then… what?

Before she could come up with an answer, something new intruded on the darkness and silence. Sound carried strongly through the water. Down in the dark, Neferata looked up and saw the teeth of a great wheel bite into the water, and heard the thump and thunder of distant mechanisms. She thrust herself upwards, floating high, reaching out a hand. Her claws sank easily into the tough wood and she was unceremoniously yanked upwards towards the orange glow that lit the surface above. Below her, Naaima and the others followed suit, launching upwards to cling like barnacles to the wheel.

Water cascaded down her face and down in rivulets across the jagged planes of her armour as she burst upwards into the light and heat. Neferata crouched on the wheel as it rose towards the apex of its cycle. The mines of the Silver Pinnacle were as different from the mines of Nagashizzar and Mourkain as the day was from the night. They were places of reverence as well as toil and in the light of the lanterns hanging from the support beams she saw dwarfs everywhere, closing off tunnels and lowering grates over sluice gates. They were obviously sealing the mines in order to prevent just the sort of attack she was planning. They simply hadn’t done it quickly enough.

Neferata balanced on the moving wheel for a moment, readying herself, and then leapt off with a sinuous motion. As she landed, she bisected a surprised-looking dwarf with an almost playful flick of her sword. As the two gushing halves fell, she was already moving. Naaima and the others followed suit with predatory grace. The vampires spread out like a wolf-pack on the hunt. The dwarfs had noticed them by then and a number of them, carrying mine-tools or weapons, moved to meet the invaders with a loud cry. Others rushed for the exits. If they reached them, the alarm would be raised.

Naaima caught up with Neferata. ‘You have a plan, I trust,’ she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the roar of the forges and the cries of the charging dwarfs.

‘Oh yes!’ Neferata said, laughing. ‘We will make them afraid of the dark.’ Neferata spun towards the river. Through the centuries, the Silver Pinnacle had been besieged a thousand times, but it had withstood each and every attack. The bones of those defeated armies lay scattered across the mountains and the spirits of warriors killed by the murder-make of the dawi clung tenaciously to those bones, wherever they might lie. Savages from the north and orc tribes from the east, raiders from the west and monsters from the deep, all had broken themselves on the Silver Pinnacle.

The bottom of the river that coiled around the mountain like some grim, black serpent was littered with the decaying detritus of some of those expeditions. And more besides, for the same river stretched through the mountains, running like a living vein. There were a million dead clutched to the river’s bosom and Neferata intended to rip as many free as she could. As her handmaidens fought the trapped dwarfs, Neferata stared at the black waters. She stepped back and drew the whispering skeins of dark magic to her the way a weaver might pull threads. Black veins pulsed in her pale skin and her countenance became nightmarish as her human seeming died beneath the waves of dark magic washing over and through her.