by Andy Remic
ANDY REMIC
Vampire Warlords
BOOK THREE OF THE CLOCKWORK VAMPIRE CHRONICLES
This novel is dedicated to my great friend and fellow writer, Ian Graham, author of Monument. Ian is a huge hairy fellow, a brilliant guitarist, a wonderfully creative and brutal writer, and criminally overmodest of his own work and talents. We have shared many a beer, campfire, dodgy acting experience and critiquing session… and one day, we will work on that threatened collaboration!!
To Ian, then. I raise my mead tankard in salute, sir!
Long live the Stinklings!!
PROLOGUE
Portal
The wind howled like a spear-stuck pig. Black snow peppered the mountains. Ice blew like ash confetti at a corpse wedding. The Black Pike Mountains seemed to sigh, languorously, as the sky turned black, the stars spluttered out, and the world ceased its endless turn on a corrupted axis. And then the Chaos Halls flickered into existence like an extinguished candle in reverse.
A sour wind blew, a death-kiss from beyond the world of men and gods and liars, and smoke swirled like acid through the sky, black and grey, infused with ancient symbols and curling snakes and stinging insects. The smoke drifted down, almost casually, to Helltop at the summit of the great mountain Skaringa Dak. The Granite Thrones, empty for a thousand years, were filled again with substance. With flesh.
The three Vampire Warlords, as old as the world, as twisted as chaos, formed against the Granite Thrones where they were summoned. Almost. Their figures were tall, bodies narrow shanks, limbs long and spindly and disjointed, elbows and knees working the wrong way. Their faces were blank plates on a tombstone, eyes an evil dark slash of red like fresh-spilled arterial gore, and yet their worst feature, their most unsettling feature, was in their complete physical entirety. For in appearing, they did not settle. Did not solidify. Their nakedness, if that was what it was for the Vampire Warlords wore no clothing, was a diffusion of blacks and greys, a million tiny greasy smoke coils constantly twisting and writhing like an orgy of corpse lovers entwined, cancerous entrails like black snakes, unwound spools of necrotic bowel, and their flesh relentlessly moved, shifted, coalesced, squirmed as if seeking to strip itself free of a steel endoskeleton forged from pure hate. Their skin coagulated into strange symbols, ancient artefacts, snakes and spiders and cockroaches and all manner of stinging biting slashing chaos welcomed into this, The Whole. They were not mortal. They were not gods. They were something in-between, and oozed a lazy power, terrible and delinquent, and none could look upon that writhing flesh and wish to be a part of this abomination. Their skin and muscle and tendon and bones were a distillation of entrapped demons, an absorption of evil souls, an essence of corrupt matter which formed a paved avenue all the way back to the shimmering decadence of the vanishing Chaos Halls.
The Vampire Warlords turned their heads, as one, and stared down at the two men… the two vachine, who had summoned them, released them, cast them into ice and freedom.
And the Vampire Warlords laughed, voices highpitched and surreal, the laughter of the insane but more, the laughter of insanity linked to a binary intelligence, a two-state recognition of good and bad, order and chaos, pandemonium and… lawlessness.
"You," said Kuradek, and this was Kuradek the Unholy, and his skin squirmed with dark religious symbols, with flowing doctrine oozing like pus, with a bare essence of hatred for anything which preached the word of God upon this decadent and putrefying world. In the history books, the text claimed Kuradek had burned churches, raped entire nunneries, sent monasteries insane so that monk slew monk with bone knives fashioned from the flesh-stripped limbs of their slaughtered companions. Kuradek's arm lifted, now, so incredibly long and finished in fingers like talons, like blood-spattered razors. General Graal, mouth hung open in shock and disbelief, hand pressed against his face where Kell's axe had opened his cheek like a ripe plum, nodded eagerly as if frightened to offend. Fearful not just of death, but of an eternity of writhing and oblivion in a tank of acrid oil.
"Yes, Warlord?" Barely more than a whisper. Graal bent his head, and stared in relief at the frozen mountain plateau beneath his boots. Anything was better than looking into those eyes. Anything was better than observing that succulent flesh.
"Come here, slave."
"Yes, Warlord."
General Graal straightened his back, a new anger forcing him ramrod stiff and his eyes narrowed and he stepped up onto the low plinth where the Granite Thrones squatted like black poisonous toads. Kuradek was standing, and the other Warlords, Meshwar the Violent and Bhu Vanesh, the Eater in the Dark, were seated, gore eyes glittering with an ancient, malign intelligence.
"You sought to control us, just as the Keepers controlled us," said Kuradek.
Silence flooded the plateau, and all present lowered heads, averted eyes, as a wind of desolation blew across the space, chilling souls. Graal, teeth gritted, did well to maintain that gaze. Now he was close, he could make out finer details. The skin, the flesh of coiling smoke, of writhing symbols, of constantly changing twisted imagery, was glossy – as if wet. As if oiled. And now he could see the Vampire Warlords' vampire fangs. Short, and black, like necrotic bone. Not shimmering in gold and silver like the vanity of the vachine. Graal ground his teeth. Oh how they must have laughed at the narcissism of the vachine sub-species. How they must now be revelling in such petty beauties the vachine had heaped upon themselves.
"No, I…"
Graal stopped. Kuradek was staring at him. Foolish. He could read Graal's mind. Kuradek made a lazy gesture, and for a moment his entire being seemed to glow, the smoke swirling faster within the confines of its trapped cell, Kuradek's living flesh. General Graal, commander of the Army of Iron, was punched in an acceleration of flailing limbs across the granite plateau. He screamed, a short sharp noise, then was silent as he hit the ground and rolled fast, limbs flailing, to slap to a halt in a puddle of melted snow. He did not move. Kuradek turned to Kradek-ka, who half-turned, as if to run. He was picked up, tossed away like a broken spine, limbs thrashing as he connected with a rearing wall of savage rock. He tumbled to the ground, face a bloody, smashed mask, and was still.
Now, the other Warlords stood. They moved easily, fluid, with a sense of great physical power held in reserve. All three gazed up as the Chaos Halls gradually faded and the stars blinked back into existence, one by one. Now, the wind dropped. Total silence covered the Black Pike Mountains like a veil of ash.
"We are here," growled Meshwar, and as he spoke tiny trickles of smoke oozed around his vampire fangs, like the souls of the slain attempting escape.
"Yes," said Bhu Vanesh. Also known as the Eater in the Dark, Bhu Vanesh was a terrible and terrifying hunter. Whereas Meshwar simply revelled in open raw violence, in pain for the sake of pain, in punishment without crime, in murder over forgiveness, Bhu Vanesh was more complex, esoteric, subtle and devastating. Before his imprisonment, Bhu Vanesh had prided himself on being the greatest vampire hunter; he would and could hunt anything, up to and including other Vampire Warlords. Before their chains in the Chaos Halls, Bhu Vanesh had sought out the greatest natural hunters in the world and let them free in forests and mountain landscapes, using himself as bait, himself as hunter. When the hunt was done, with his captured victims staked out, he would gradually strip out their spines disc by disc, popping free of torn muscle and skin and tendons, and he would sit by the camp fire as his hunted victims screamed, or sobbed, or simply watched with stunned eyes as Bhu Vanesh savoured his trophy, licked the gristle from the spine in his fist, sucking free the cerebrospinal fluid with great slurps o
f pleasure. Bhu Vanesh was the most feral of the three Vampire Warlords. He was the most deadly. An unappointed leader…
Bhu Vanesh was the Prime.
Meshwar pointed to an albino soldier. "You. Soldier. Get Graal." The man gave a curt nod, and crossed to the General, helping him wearily, painfully, to his feet. Graal leant on the albino soldier, panting, blood and snot and drool pooling from his smashed mouth, his battered face. His pale vachine skin was marked as if beaten by a hammer.
Kuradek strolled across the clearing, and a cool wind blew in as the world was restored to normality, as blood-oil magick eased from the mountains like a backdoor thief slinking into the night. Kuradek climbed up a rocky wall, his thin limbs and talons scarring the rock. Pebbles rattled down in the wake of his climb. Then he stood, on a narrow pinnacle of iced slate, and gazed out over Silva Valley, once home to the vachine civilisation, now flooded, thousands of vachine drowned to seal the magick that would return the Vampire Warlords to the mortal realm.
Shortly, his brothers joined him, and the three tall, spindly creatures, their shapes a mockery of human physiology, their flesh constantly shifting in chameleonic phases of smoke and symbols, stood tall and proud and surveyed the world like newborns.
"The vachine are dead," said Kuradek.
"Mostly," observed Meshwar.
"Those that live need to be hunted," said Bhu Vanesh, a smoke tongue like a rattlesnake's tail licking over black fangs. He anticipated the hunt in all things. It was what gave his existence simple meaning.
"Not yet," said Kuradek. "We are new again to this world. We are weak from escape and birth. We need strength. We need to build the vampire clans. Like ancient times, my friends. Like the bad old days."
"Suggestions?" Meshwar turned to Kuradek, narrow red eyes glowing with malevolence.
"I remember this country," said Kuradek, looking back over hundreds of years, his mind dizzy with the passage of time, coalescing with images of so many people and places and murders. "This is the homeland of the Ankarok."
Bhu Vanesh made a low, hissing sound.
"They were imprisoned," said Meshwar. "Just as we."
"Yes. We must watch. Be careful. But until then, I feel a stench in the air. It is an unclear stench. It is the stench of people, of men and women and children, meat, unhealthy and unclean, with no pride or power or natural dignity. We must separate, my brothers, we must head out into the world and," he licked his black fangs, eyes glinting by the light of the innocent moon, "we must repopulate."
"So we go to war?" said Meshwar, and his voice held excitement, anticipation and… something else. It took little for Meshwar to become aroused.
"Yes. War. Against all those deviants, lacking in vampire purity!"
CHAPTER 1
Underwurlde
Events were a blur for Saark, the rich dandy, the flamboyant womaniser, for all that interested him in life was fine wine and raucous sex, silver platters of finely carved pig-meat, juicy eyeballs soaked in thin apple sauce from the figarall fish caught in iron traps under the Salarl Ocean. He was obsessed with pleasure, with joy, his own unstoppable and unquenchable lust; Saark was a hedonist, a narcissist, a nihilist, and unashamed of his open succulent fire. And yet now, now it was a blur. His life was a blur, and everything in it filled with a dreamlike quality, a haze of misunderstanding, of confusion – and more importantly, of–
Pain.
The knife cut into his chest and he may have screamed, his kicking limbs lurching in epileptic spasms. The knife was burning hot then ice cold, burning, burning as the tip skewered his skin, and his muscle, and sawed rhythmically and with razor-eagerness through his breast-bone leaving him gasping, teeth clacking repeatedly, fingers flexing as he begged begged to make it stop make it stop, but the face over him was hard and brutal, the face of the vachine Watchmaker, Kradek-ka and Saark's blood flushed down his chest, his belly, and he felt something removed from him.
Saark lay there, gasping, flopped like a fish on the Granite Throne and black snow fell and a cold wind whistled, disturbing his long black curls. The wind smelled good, smelled of ice and freedom beyond the mountains, beyond this imprisonment of the blade which had sundered his pale weak brittle flesh. The mountains. The Black Pike Mountains. Skaringa Dak. Helltop.
These names were distant, now, tails of smoke, and his blood pounded in his veins and he was different. Saark had been infected by the bite of the Soul Stealer, her venom pumping round his veins and infusing him with the toxin of the vachine, the vampires, a secondrate disease for a second-rate hero… Saark laughed. Blood bubbled around his lips from punctured lungs. He felt like he was dying. And he knew: surely he was.
Saark could ascertain noises, shouting, the clash of weapons, but they were all gone and lost to him. Consciousness fled like a startled kitten, and when he awoke the cool granite of Helltop was pressing his face like a lover. He heard more shouts, and sobbing, and one eye could see the dark sky filled with a portal into the Chaos Halls, the Blood Void, the Bone Graveyard, and a fist of fear punched through Saark as he listened to the steady thump thump of his heart, open to the world, and slowly his hand crawled across the ground. His fingers crawled across his own slick flesh, slick and cold, drenched in iced blood, and he found a hole gaping over his heart, and his fingers could feel the trembling of his heart within because he was open to the world, carved up like a pig on a slab, and that was so sweet, so ironic, so frightening.
A hand soothed his brow. Beyond, he could feel a terrible presence, of death and hatred and omniscient rage. The Vampire Warlords had arrived. And Saark, even in his disorientated state, knew desolation.
"It will be all right," soothed a voice in his ear, and he recognised Nienna and he smiled, and her hands were stroking his face. He could see fear in her eyes, though, and knew then he would die. What could she see? How could she save him?
Saark tried to speak, but could not.
Saark tried to move, but could not.
Distantly, through a mesh of fractured thoughts, words came to him, all tangled, interlaced, like the stranded threads of cotton his mother used to repair his trews. We must go. We must! We cannot! He's dead. Bring Saark. Bring Saark. He's dead. They echoed backwards and forwards, reverberating as if they were a drunk's uneven song in the bottom of a sediment-layered tankard. Bring Saark! Bring him! A woman's shriek. Oh how he longed for a woman's shriek, but that was a different world, a different age.
Movement. Ice. Cold. Wind. And then–
Plummeting. A feeling of weightlessness. And Saark remembered no more.
On the icy plateau of Helltop, with the Vampire Warlords solid and real behind him, newborn demons and dark gods and vampires from the Chaos Halls, Kell, with Saark over one shoulder and dragging Nienna behind him, his mighty axe Ilanna in one huge fist and rage and fear pumping through his breast like molten hate, Kell leapt for the hole in the mountain's summit, leapt for the vertical tunnel so recently brimming with waters which spilled out, were forced out under awesome pressure to flood Silva Valley and drown the vachine living within…
Kell's logic was simple. Leap down the vertical tunnel. Escape! It had water, down there, somewhere, spoke his desperate mind; and that would cushion their fall. If not? Well, a grim side of Kell's soul decided, if not then sudden impact, sudden death, it would be better than living as slaves to the vampires.
Kell blinked. General Graal was in his way.
Nothing stood in Kell's way.
In reflex, Ilanna flashed up, smashing Graal's sword aside as if wielded by a tottering toddler, and in the same movement singing blades sliced Graal's left cheek apart as if paring tender braised beef from bone. Graal stumbled back with a shriek, and Kell and Saark and Nienna tumbled into the hole, into the ancient tunnel worn through rock by a million years of probing meltwater. In that instant, Kell glimpsed three figures on the Granite Thrones. They were fashioned from black smoke. Their eyes were blood red. And they were watching him.
Gravity caught Kell
in its fist and pulled him downwards, separating him from his companions. All thoughts and fear were smashed aside like a blow from a helve. Acceleration became his mistress, fear glued his teeth shut, and Kell fell into a headlong dive that seemed to last forever…
The tunnel was long. White. Images flashed and blurred before Kell's eyes. He tumbled occasionally, hitting the sides of the vast tunnel wall but they were smooth, worn by floods and ice and a raging torrent. His hair and beard streamed behind him. Tears eased from old eyes. He dragged Ilanna, his axe, his sweetheart, to his chest and lowered his chin and waited for a terrible impact…
It never came. Gently, the tunnel curved and Kell was sliding, then free again and falling, diving, and he heard a distant scream but could do nothing. He glanced back, and saw only darkness. Again, he was cradled by a curve in the tunnel, and friction slowed him, burning the flesh of his hands and he yelped, in surprise, in shock at sudden raw agony but it told him one thing, one certainty: it hurt like a bastard, and that meant he was alive. This was no dream. Kell narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth and fell through Skaringa Dak – dived, through the heart of the mountain.