Tragius’s half joking warning that they might emerge under the Great Lake, or in some equally remote spot, had worried and disturbed all of them, although none of them would have shown it, so there was a feeling of vast relief when they broke through the surface and found themselves in the middle of the enemy’s capital. As soon as they could look back on it in hindsight, of course, they were amazed that they could ever have doubted it. After all, where else in the world would the Agglemonians have put the heart of their teleportation network? It was still a relief to have it actually confirmed, though, and if they’d still been alive they would have breathed huge sighs of relief as they climbed or levitated out of the tunnel they’d made and saw the vast, sprawling expanse of the Necropolis spread out below them.

     As a matter of fact, they’d had their first indications that they were in the right place while Tragius had still been disintegrating the tunnel. As the others had followed him, they’d become aware of a growing feeling of warmth and hospitality. A sense that they were approaching a good place, a nice place. A place where they really belonged, where they could live happily and lead really worthwhile, fulfilling lives.

     This had confused the white raks for a while, as they’d been expecting exactly the opposite, until they remembered that they were now undead and that they were now within the jurisdiction of the Shadowlord; the Prince of the Undead. The Shadow was welcoming them in, they realised with unease. It was trying to seduce them into the service of the Bone Prince. And as their souls continued to turn to evil, how long would it be before they succumbed and willingly gave themselves into his service? A new sense of urgency had come upon them, and Tragius had given his wand another command, doubling the rate at which it disintegrated the rock around them.

     They looked around, and saw that they were near the top of a low, wide hill. One of the fabled hills of Arnor of which legend said there were seven but of which there were really only five. Below them they could see what had once been one of the city’s commercial districts; hundreds of acres of large, businesslike brick buildings now decorated with bones and macabre carvings in the style of the Shadowhosts. Beyond it lay the broad expanse of the river Icea, the lazily flowing water giving the city its only sense of life and normality, and beyond that were two more hills, one of which was topped by the vast bulk of the Palace itself, their destination. Few of them paid much attention to the city’s geography, though. Their attentions were instead fixed on the amazing spectacle taking place in the sky.

     Above them, the whole sky was a shifting, swirling pattern of rainbow colours, like the colours on the surface of a soap bubble. The white raks gasped in amazement. Amazement at the beauty of it and double amazement that such beauty should be found here, in the heart of the most evil place in the world. “It’s the Shadow,” gasped Tragius in disbelief. “The Shadow as seen by our new rak senses. Malefactos described it to me, but I never thought...”

     “Spiderwebs are also beautiful,” observed Aerethil, also gazing up at the sight. “It’s possible that even flies are overwhelmed by their beauty, right up until the moment they blunder into them. Remember that the raks can read disturbances in the Shadow and may be able to deduce our presence. We’re flies here. Never forget it.”

     “Not flies,” replied Resalintas, though. “We’re wasps, and we’ve come to sting the spider. Come on, let’s move.”

     They took to the air, all of them having the ability to fly in one way or another. All the raks, the Samnians, the Skorvosians, the wizards and the gl hugzi, were either able to cast flying spells or had Robes of Flying that mimicked the spell’s effect. The Eeii lacked all but the most basic spellcasting ability, but their phenomenal psionic powers enabled them to levitate and fly even faster than the raks, while the vampires, most of whom lacked any spellcasting ability at all, simply turned themselves into bats and flapped their way through the air behind the others. They rose to a height at which they would only be visible as tiny specks of darkness against the shimmering, iridescent sky, and then turned towards the Palace.

     If Resalintas had had any doubts about the truth of Malefactos’s account of his visit to Arnor, they were dispelled when he became aware of the lines of force running through the Shadow, stretched as tightly as piano wires and quivering and vibrating as the invaders passed through them. Each vibration, the priest rak knew, carried early warning of their coming, and their one hope was that the Circle of Raks would be so complacent, so unprepared for an attack on their headquarters, that they wouldn’t be paying much attention. Resalintas prayed that that was so, because if they failed to destroy the Shadow, if the Circle of Raks was alert and waiting for them when they arrived, then there was no chance at all of a second attack force being gathered. The various people, beings and entities comprising the current attack force were the most powerful in the world, the pick of all that Tharia had to offer. They were it, Tharia’s last chance. If they failed, then the eventual victory of the Shadow was assured. There was nothing and no-one else in the world that had a realistic chance of stopping them.

     All the lines of force were running in the same direction, converging on a point a couple of miles ahead where they all came together like the lines of magnetic force emanating from a bar magnet. That was the source of the Shadow, the priest rak knew. The place where the blanket of supernatural darkness that caused terror, hopelessness and madness to the living, was being generated, and sure enough it was all concentrated on the Imperial Palace, just as Malefactos had said. That was where the Shadowbeast was; the creature that had to be destroyed if there was to be any hope for Tharia, and the invaders pushed themselves to even greater speed as they flew towards it.

     If it hadn’t been for the Shadow, painting the sky with swirling, iridescent colours, they could almost have imagined that they were flying above a normal, living city, albeit an enormously large one. From this altitude, they couldn’t see the obscene ‘decorations’ and alterations that the enemy had made to the city’s architecture. Instead, they could only see the basic layout of the city. The network of roads and canals. The widest avenues up to fifty yards across looking like major blood vessels running through the tissues of some gigantic beast.

     The winding, meandering course of the wide, lazy river was crossed by dozens of impossibly tall, graceful bridges, many of which still seemed to be largely intact, and while most of the buildings were small and mostly identical, forming clusters of thousands that covered endless square miles, some, the public buildings and the homes of the noble and wealthy, were so large that they occupied entire city blocks. The open spaces around them, defined by the surrounding streets, had obviously once been parks and gardens.

     Nothing now moved in the city, though. No traffic choked the streets, no crowds of pedestrians thronged the pavements. No beggars or cutthroats lurked in the alleyways and no tradesmen occupied the markets. No boats or barges were moored along the river and, above, none of the legendary flying ships, the cloud destroyers of the Imperial aerial navy, drifted slowly and confidently across the sky. Instead, the only signs of activity were the thousands of tiny points of light that twinkled down there in the horribly transformed city, looking like the night sky reflected in the surface of a deep, still lake.

     Each one of those points of light, they knew, was the psycho-spiritual energy of an undead being, rendered visible to them by their new undead senses. Most of those undead beings were relatively weak and therefore of no real threat to them. Teams of skeletons and zombies doing rebuilding and decorating work under the direction of a wight or a cropazombie, or spectres carrying messages to and from the Circle of Raks. Some of them would be powerful, though. Only a small fraction of the total, of course, but so great were the numbers of undead gathered here that even that small fraction added up to a great many and Tragius prayed like mad that none of them would choose that moment to look up. It would only take one free willed undead to spot them and raise the alarm...

     They almost made it. They were within a thousand yards of the Palace, close enough to see which of the thirty two principal courtyards contained the very heart of the Shadow, when the flying invaders became aware of a great disturbance all around them. A sudden bustling of activity as the vast ranks of the undead became aware of a group of aliens in their midst. The first thing the invaders were aware of was a sense of puzzlement and confusion spreading out across the city like ripples on a pond, spreading out from the wraith who’d sensed a concentration of supernatural power where no power should have been and who’d called the attention of his fellows to it.

     There was, at first, no sense of animosity or hostility from the inhabitants of the Necropolis. After all, the invaders were clearly undead and so they had to be on their side, didn’t they? But then the inhabitants of the Palace became aware of the commotion outside and a member of the Circle of Raks, too lazy and complacent to have noticed the disturbance in the Shadow caused by the invaders, looked out through one of the windows to see what was going on.

     “They’ve seen us!” cried Adantus in alarm. “Quick, before they...”

     But even as he was speaking a great cry went up. A voice that used the substance of the Shadow itself as a giant supernatural sounding board to amplify it so that it was heard across the entire city. “INVADERS! DESTROY THEM!” The city’s undead obeyed instantly, and soon a vast swarm of angry spirits was rising up to meet them, a great many of them between them and the Palace. They would be surrounded and under attack in just a matter of moments.

     “Protect the Samnians!” cried Fangrap, and the Skorvosians spread themselves out into a shield along the leading edge of the invaders’ flying formation, ready to take the brunt of the onslaught. The gl hugzi did the same along the trailing edge, guarding the formation’s rear and the Samnians gathered at the centre where they’d be as safe as possible. Resalintas and the other Samnian priest raks hated it, feeling the need to take part in the battle in every bone of their mummified, undead bodies, but they were forced to accept the need for it. As the only ones able to speak the Holy Words that would punch a hole through the Shadow, they had to be protected at any cost.

     The Eeii, meanwhile, used their psychic powers to make themselves invisible and broke away from the formation, falling towards the palace like a cargo of putrid, undead bombs. They didn’t care what happened to the rest of the assault force, but the battle would provide a useful diversion while the cthillians attacked the Circle of Raks.

☆☆☆

     Surdeth, the rak currently occupying the Bone Throne, watched the city’s undead rising up to surround and attack the flight of invaders, being able to see them clearly through the many holes in the dome of human ribs that covered the colossal throne room, and the overriding emotion he was experiencing was one of stunned, paralysing surprise. Of all the possible countermeasures that the life of this world might have attempted, this was the one that had never been thought of.

     “What in the name of the Shadowlord do they hope to achieve?” he asked out loud, the tiny, burning points of light that served him as eyes dimming in perplexity.

     “They are desperate,” replied a second rak, Darrowghlop. He was an undead fell man, very similar to the gl hugzi who formed a part of the assault force and the only member of the Circle of Raks who wasn’t human. “They recognise the fact that their defeat is inevitable and they are ready to resort to any mad plan in their desperation. Take it as a sign that victory is now very close. Maybe only days away.”

     Surdeth nodded his shrunken, mummified head and was about to say something else when he became aware of another presence in the throne room. An undead presence, but unlike any other he’d ever encountered. It was something monstrous and alien, and how monstrous and alien would a creature have to be to appear so to a Shadowrak? He rose from the throne, leaving the spectral, evershifting Sum of all Emperors behind him, and cocked his head, trying to filter out all the other presences he could sense in the palace in an attempt to focus on the one that shouldn’t have been there.

     He located it about thirty feet in front of him, having apparently just entered through one of the room’s many doorways. “So, one of you has gotten away from the rest, have you?" he said, trying to prevent a note of uncertainty from creeping into his dry, rattling voice while bringing the words of powerful attack spells to his mind. “Show yourself, my friend. Let’s see what kind of man dares to enter the throne room of the Imperial Palace itself.”

     The creature complied, allowing its psychic cloak of invisibility to fade away, and the two raks gasped when they saw the putrid, swollen corpse that was standing before them, its limply dangling proboscis bulging and swollen with liquids that had drained from the rotting tissues of its head. Neither of them had ever seen an Eeii before, but they knew their fearsome reputations and babbled out the words of attack spells in near panic. Thoughts are a thousand times faster than words, though, and a massive blast of psychic energy hit Surdeth before his spell was half complete, blasting him into a shower of bone fragments and tattered strips of tissue that flew halfway across the huge room.

     Darrowghlop gasped in horror, almost losing the half formed attack spell he was casting, but he recovered his composure and completed it before the undead cthillian could bring its tremendous psychic weapons to bear upon him. The sagging, bleached white skin of the cthillian was torn open and semi-gelatinous putrefaction poured out, splashing and soaking into the layer of dust and broken bones that covered the floor. A moment later, though, the Shadowrak was hit by a second blast of psychic energy from another Eeii that had entered alongside the first but which had chosen to remain invisible. Darrowghlop was thrown back, great holes torn open in his shrunken, mummified body, but then he recovered and began the casting of a protection spell. Another psychic blast hit him before it was half complete, though, completing the job of blasting his body to fragments.

     The second Eeii then turned to the first, which was sagging and collapsing as its putrid fluids continued to drain out of it. “They will reform unless we find and destroy their arks,” it said, communicating telepathically with its fellow. “I will leave you here. You will follow and aid the search when your body has reformed.”

     The damaged Eeii acknowledged the order as it toppled over, more fluids splashing out of its ruptured skin as it hit the ground. The Eeii reformed much faster than ordinary raks. It would be back on its feet and good as new within 24 hours while the Shadowraks were still scraps scattered on the floor.

     The second Eeii regarded its temporarily fallen fellow one last time, then turned and left the room, returning to its colleagues who were hunting the other shadowraks through all the rooms and corridors of the palace.