Free 02 - Nagash the Unbroken by Mike Lee - (ebook by Undead)

unnervingly warm, and where it touched his skin he felt the faintest
brush of sorcerous energy. The necromancer considered the tendrils of steam
writhing like serpents across the flank of the distant mountain. If there were
enough burning stone buried within the mountain to taint the neighbouring sea,
his vengeance upon the living world would be great indeed.
    He wound between hummocks of thick, yellow marsh grass and stunted trees,
listening to slithering, splashing creatures hunting through the mist. Strange
howls and high-pitched cries echoed from the moss-covered branches of the trees,
and once he saw a pair of faintly glowing yellow eyes regarding him intently
from the shadows to the left of his path. But the creatures of the marsh shunned
him, as all living beasts did. More than once he heard something huge rise up in
the mist ahead of him and go thrashing off into the water at his approach. When
the sun finally broke over the horizon, hours later, he crawled into a muddy
hollow formed by the thick roots of a half-dead tree and waited for nightfall.
    Voices and the sounds of thrashing water roused him from his meditations,
many hours later. Darkness had fallen, though the moon was still low in the sky,
and as he crept to the edge of the tree’s sheltering roots he could see a yellow
haze of lantern light playing upon the surface of the water.
    The voices sounded human, guttural and strained with effort. There were at
least two speakers, perhaps three, calling out to one another in a barbarian
tongue unlike anything Nagash had heard before. It was difficult to tell how far
away the voices were, the sounds echoing flatly from the surface of the water
and the surrounding trees.
    Nagash eased carefully from his hiding place, head low, and searched for the
source of the noise. The thrashing continued unabated, punctuated by grants and
muffled blows. It was coming from beyond a screen of moss-covered trees just a
few dozen yards away. The glow of lanterns seeped between the gnarled trunks,
flickering crazily as straggling figures moved past the source of the light.
    The necromancer still carried two of the large bronze daggers he’d looted
from the corpses of the rat-things so many years ago. He drew one of the blades
from his leather belt and crept from tree to tree until finally he caught sight
of the source of the noise.
    Peering through a screen of hanging moss, Nagash saw a wider patch of water
just past the hummock where he stood. Perhaps ten yards away a low,
flat-bottomed boat had poled up close to another small, tree-covered hummock,
and within the globe of light cast by the lantern set at its bow, four men were
wrestling with the thrashing body of what appeared to be a huge, whiskered fish.
Two of the men stood up to their waists in the murky water, their arms thrown
around the fish’s scaly flanks as they tried to heave it up into the boat. A
third stood in the boat and tried to grip the creature’s flat, toothy head,
while the fourth tried to kill it with blows from a short, thick club. From
where Nagash stood, it was difficult to tell which side was winning the fight.
    The men were barbarians; that much he saw at once, but they had little in
common with the tall, fair-haired northerners sold on the slave block at Zandri.
Their bodies were short and squat, thick with muscle but deformed in different
ways. He saw hunchbacks and misshapen skulls, long, ape-like arms and bulging,
knobby spines. Their heads were hairless, and their skin was a sickly, pale
green. The men in the boat wore simple, belted kilts of rough leather that hung
below their knees, and their chests were decorated in swirling scar patterns
similar to Nehekharan tattoos.
    So it wasn’t the rat-creatures who inhabited the north shore after all,
Nagash realised. Clearly these barbarians had lived close to the tainted waters
for much, if not all their short, squalid lives. The mutations wrought by the
burning