The End Times | The Return of Nagash by Josh Reynolds

Author:Josh Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2014-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Heinrich Kemmler watched as Tancred’s head rolled through the mud. He tried to smile, but all he could muster was a grimace of pain. He levered himself awkwardly to his feet with his staff, its skulls, hung from it with copper chains long ago gone green with verdigris, dangling grotesquely. It was a potent artefact, his staff, and he drew strength from it as he gazed down at the wound Tancred had left him as a parting farewell. Blood seeped through his coat and dripped down into the dirt. The wound hurt, but he’d suffered worse in his lifetime. He scrubbed a boot through the dirt. ‘That’s the last taste you’ll have of me,’ he hissed. He looked up as a shadow fell over him.

Krell, coming to check on him, like a faithful hound. Or perhaps a hound-master, checking on his pet. As he gazed up at the scarred and pitted skull of the wight, Kemmler wondered, and not for the first time, if he was fully in control of his own fate. He thought of the shape he sometimes saw, that seemed to lurk in Krell’s shadow – a phantom presence of malevolent weight and titanic malice. He thought that it was the same shape that padded through his fitful dreams on those rare occasions when sleep came. It whispered to him, indeed had been whispering to him all of his life, even as a young man, after he’d first stumbled upon those badly translated copies of the Books of Nagash in his father’s haphazard ancestral library.

Those books had started him on his journey, the first steps that had seen him defy death in all of its forms, benign or sinister. He had fought rivals and enemies alike, striving to stand alone. The Council of Nine and the Charnel Congress – rival consortiums of necromancers – had faded before his might, their petty grave-magics swept aside by his fierce and singular will. He had pillaged the library of Lady Khemalla of Lahmia in Miragliano and driven the vampiress from her den and the city, and in the crypts beneath Castle Vermisace he had bound the liches of the Black Circle to his service, earning him the sobriquet ‘Lichemaster’.

He had counselled counts, princes and petty kings. He had gathered a library of necromantic lore second only to the fabled libraries of forsaken Nagashizzar. He had waged a cruel, secret war on men, dwarfs and elves, prying their secret knowledge from them, and with every death rattle and dying sigh the voice in his head, the pressing thing that had encouraged him and driven him, had purred with delight. Until one day, it had gone silent.

It had abandoned him to a life of scurrying through the hills, a broken, half-mad beggar, his only companion a silent, brooding engine of destruction, whose loyalties were unfathomable. He had thought, once, that Krell was his. Now he knew better. Now he knew that they had been at best, partners, and at worst, slaves of some other mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.