untold depths and seeping through the stone, had the regular rhythms of a man’s heartbeat. Steady, strong… familiar. ‘No,’ she said as the sound caressed her ears.
Ushoran turned, his face twisted in a sneer. ‘Yes. Listen to it, Neferata. Do you hear it? Do you hear his heart? Does it beat faster?’ He made to grab her and she slithered back instinctively, out of his reach. ‘Do you hear him?’
The air became cold and sluggish and damp. Neferata swiped instinctively at it, as if it were full of cobwebs. A hand grabbed her wrist, but dissolved into curling wisps of mist as she spun. Words bled through the rock, snippets of past conversations.
‘Damn you, Ushoran, who is buried here?’ she snapped.
‘You did this,’ Ushoran said. ‘You made him this way!’
Neferata turned around and around as half-formed faces made to speak and dissolved in a silent storm surrounding her. All familiar, though they spanned swathes of time she had not been there to see. The faces were of a child, a boy, a man and – what? – a corpse or a wraith or wight? Regardless, he was a king.
Alcadizzar, the boy she had raised as her own. The man she had groomed to be king and the king who had died for Nehekhara. Neferata hissed and spat as the smoky fingers drifted across hers in a gesture at once familiar and abominable. ‘Away, wraith,’ she said, swiping her claws through the wisps.
‘Mourkain is built on his bones,’ Ushoran snarled, lunging through the mist. He grabbed her wrists and his human façade rippled and tore like wet papyrus, revealing the horror beneath. Grey dead flesh over an ape’s skull, with a thicket of fangs spilling from a lipless mouth. Eyes like the embers of a dying fire glared at her as he tried to pull her close.
‘W’soran cannot break his hold over the crown! And without the crown I cannot truly be king! But you – maybe you…’
Neferata bent and brought the soles of her feet sliding up between them. Catching Ushoran in the belly, she tore him loose and sent him flying back. He hit the rock and screamed, as if it burned him. She rose. The floor felt warm beneath her feet. She smelled the hiss of cooking meat and, a moment later, felt the pain.
She was burning, even as Lahmia had burned, as Khemri and Zandri had burned, at Nagash’s command. Alcadizzar whipped her with a lash of fire and regret and she screamed in agony. Ushoran, driven berserk by pain, roared and charged and his massive talons nearly took her head off. She ducked and he cut a gouge in the rock face. She cut through his belly and chest and his growls became screams as she opened him to the spine. He fell and writhed on the ground, his skin bubbling and rupturing. Turning, she began to run even as the heat ate into her own limbs. She had to escape this place. Her feet were burned raw and an agony she hadn’t felt since that first night of her new existence raced over her nerves, eating at them like acid. Still, she stumbled on, trying to escape the embrace of the tunnel. If she could get to the main chamber, perhaps the pain would stop. That was all she could think about.
She could hear Ushoran following her, his claws scraping stone. The corridor felt as if it was closing like a fist around her and the needle-on-bone voice of the crown was drowned out by the grim rumble of stone and the echoes of Alcadizzar’s voice as it thrummed through her mind, evoking ancient memories and ancient pain.
She burst out of the tunnel like a bat from the depths, flames wreathing her slender shape. She screamed, and there was nothing human in her voice. Ushoran caught her in mid-air, his grotesque gargoyle shape having sprouted wings. He too was on fire and the flames congealed greedily as his talons sought her throat. Maddened by pain and need, the two vampires crashed down onto the floor.
Her hair crisped and crackled like cloth in a cooking fire and her face split and shrank against her bones as she sank her fangs into Ushoran’s throat. He howled and bucked, pummelling her with burning fists. They thrashed and fought, rolling across the floor. She worried the flesh of his throat, the blood boiling from the heat even as it reached her mouth.