[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion

by Steve Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  The dead came through the flames, pouring over the walls in vast numbers, lurching forwards, ablaze as they stumbled to their knees and reached up, clawing the flames from their skin even as the fires consumed their flesh.

  Still they came on.

  The dead surrounded them on all sides.

  The horses kicked out in panic.

  The conflagration spread, eating through the timber framed buildings as if the walls were made of nothing more substantial than straw.

  Kallad dragged Gretchen towards the central tower of the keep, forcing his way through the horses and the grooms trying to bring the frightened beasts under control. The flames chased along the rooftops. No matter how valiant the defenders’ efforts, in a few hours Grunberg would cease to be. The fire they had lit would see to that. The dead wouldn’t destroy Grunberg; the living had managed that all by themselves. All that remained was a desperate race to beat the fire.

  No direct path to the great hall lay open, although one row of ramshackle buildings appeared to be acting as a kind of temporary firewall. Kallad ran towards the row of houses, racing the flames to the doors at the centre. The hovels of the poor quarter buckled and caved in beneath the heat, and caught like tinder. Kallad was driven towards the three doors in the centre of the street; the intensity of the blaze forced him to skirt the heart of the fire. Only minutes before, the crackling pile of wood before him had been a bakery.

  Kallad swallowed a huge lungful of searing air and, taking the middle door, plunged through the collapsing shell of an apothecary’s as demijohns of peculiarities cracked and exploded. Gretchen followed behind him, the child silent in her arms.

  The lintel over the back door had collapsed under the strain, filling the way out with rubble. Kallad stared hard at the obstacle, hefted Ruinthorn and slammed it into the centre of the debris. Behind them, a ceiling joist groaned. Kallad slammed the axe-head into the guts of the debris again and worked it free. Above them, the groaning joist cracked sharply, the heat pulling it apart. A moment later, the ceiling collapsed, effectively trapping them inside the burning building. Cursing, Kallad redoubled his efforts to hack a path through the debris blocking the back door. He had no time to think. In the minutes it took to chop through the barricade, thick black smoke suffocated the cramped passage. Over and over, he slammed Ruinthorn’s keen edge into the clutter of debris, and as chinks of moonlight and fire began to wriggle through, he kicked at the criss-cross of wooden beams. The smoke stung his eyes.

  “Cover the child’s mouth, woman, and stay low. Lie on your belly. The best air’s down by the floor.” The thickening pall of smoke made it impossible to tell if she’d done as she was told.

  He backed up two steps and hurled himself at the wooden barrier, breaking through. His momentum carried him sprawling out into the street.

  Coughing and retching, Gretchen crawled out of the burning building as the gable collapsed and the roof came down. She cradled the child close to her breast, soothing it as she struggled to swallow a lungful of fresh air. The flames crackled and popped all around them. Inside the apothecary’s, a series of small but violent detonations exploded as the cabinets stuffed full of chemicals and curiosities swelled and shattered in the intense heat.

  Kallad struggled to his feet. He had been right, the row of buildings acted as a kind of firebreak, holding the flames back from this quarter of the walled city. The respite they offered wouldn’t last. All he could do was pray to Grimna that it would last long enough for him to get the women and children out of the great hall.

  He ran across the courtyard to the huge iron-banded doors of the keep and beat on them with the butt of his axe until they cracked open an inch and the frightened eyes of a young boy peeked through.

  “Come on, lad. We’re getting you out of here. Open up.”

  A smile spread across the boy’s face. It was obvious that he thought the fighting was over. Then, behind Kallad and Gretchen, he saw the fire destroying the shambles of his city. He let go of the heavy door. It swung open on itself, leaving him standing in the doorway, a length of wood in his trembling hand: a toy sword. The lad couldn’t have been more than nine or ten summers old, but he had the courage to put himself between the women of Grunberg and the dead. That kind of courage made the dwarf proud to fight beside the manlings; courage could be found in the most unlikely of places.

  Kallad clapped the lad on the shoulder, “Let’s fetch the women and children, shall we, lad?”

  They followed the boy down a lavish passage, the walls decorated with huge tapestries and impractical weaponry. The hallway opened onto an antechamber where frightened women and children huddled, pressing themselves into the shadows and dark recesses. Kallad wanted to promise them all that they were saved, that everything was going to be all right, but it wasn’t. Their city was in ruins. Their husbands and brothers were dead or dying, conquered by the dead. Everything was far from all right.

  Instead of lies, he offered them the bitter truth, “Grunberg’s falling. There’s nothing anyone can do to save it. The city’s ablaze. The dead are swarming over the walls. Your loved ones are out there dying to give you the chance of life. You owe it to them to take that chance.”

  “If they are dying, why are you here? You should be out there with them.”

  “Aye, I should, but I’m not. I’m here, trying to make their deaths mean something.”

  “We can fight alongside our men,” another woman said, standing up.

  “Aye, and die alongside them.”

  “Let the bastards come, they’ll not find us easy to kill.”

  One woman reached up, dragging a huge two-handed sword from the wall display. She could barely raise the tip. Another pulled down an ornate breastplate while a third took gauntlets and a flail. In their hands, these weapons of death looked faintly ridiculous, but the look in their eyes and the set of the jaws was far from comical.

  “You can’t hope to—”

  “You’ve said that already, we can’t hope. Our lives are destroyed, our homes, our families. Give us the choice at least. Let us decide if we are to run like rats from a sinking ship or stand up and be judged by Morr, side by side with our men. Give us that, at least.”

  Kallad shook his head. A little girl stood crying beside the woman demanding the right to die. Behind her, a boy barely old enough to walk buried his face in his mother’s skirts.

  “No,” he said bluntly, “and no arguments, this isn’t a game. Grunberg burns. If we stand here arguing like idiots we’ll all be dead in minutes. Look at that girl. Are you prepared to say when she should die? Are you?

  “For all that your men are laying down their lives knowing that in doing so they are saving yours?” Kallad shook his head. “No. No you’re not. We’re going to leave here and travel into the mountains. There are caverns that lead into the deep mines and stretch as far away as Axebite Pass. The dead won’t follow us there.”

  In truth he had no idea if that was the case or not, but it didn’t matter, he only needed the women to believe him long enough to get them moving. Safety or the illusion of safety, at that moment it amounted to the same thing. “Now come on!”

  His words galvanized them. They began to stand and gather their things together, tying cloth into bundles and stuffing the bundles with all that remained of their worldly goods. Kallad shook his head, “There’s no time for that! Come ON!”

  The boy ran ahead, the toy sword slapping at his leg.

  “That stays here,” Kallad said, dipping Ruinthorn’s head towards an ornate jewellery box that one woman clutched in her hands. The only things leaving this place are living and breathing. Forget your pretty trinkets, they aren’t worth dying for. Understood?”

  No one argued with him.

  He counted heads as they filed out through the wide door: forty-nine women and almost double that number of children. Each one looked at the dwarf as if he was some kind of saviour, sent by Sigmar to deliver them to salvation. Gretchen stood beside him, the c
hild cradled in her arms. She had eased the blanket down from over the child’s face, and Kallad saw at last the reason for the child’s silence. Its skin bore the bluish cast of death. Still, the woman smoothed its cheek as if hoping to give some of her warmth to her dead baby. Kallad couldn’t allow this one small tragedy to affect him—hundreds of people had died today. Hundreds. What was one baby against this senseless massacre? But he knew full well why the sight of the dead child was different. The child was innocent. It hadn’t chosen to fight the dead. It represented everything that they had given their lives to save. More than anything else, it showed what a failure their sacrifice had been.

  Then, the baby started to move, its small hand wriggling free of the blankets. The child’s eyes roved blankly, still trapped in death, even as its body answered the call of the Vampire Count.

  Sickness welled in Kallad’s gut. The child had to die.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He didn’t have a choice. The thing in Gretchen’s arms wasn’t her baby. It was a shell.

  “Give me the baby,” he said, holding out his hands.

  Gretchen shook her head, backing up a step as if she understood what he intended, even though she couldn’t possibly know. Kallad could barely grasp the thoughts going through his head they were so utterly alien. “Give me the baby,” he repeated.

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  “It isn’t your child, not any more,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. He took a step closer and took the child from her. The child was a parasite, but despite the wrongness of it, the woman’s instinct was still to nurture her baby.

  “Go,” Kallad said, unable to look her in the eye. “You don’t need to see this.”

  But she wouldn’t leave him.

  He couldn’t do it, not here in the street, not with her watching.

  He moved away from her, urging the refugees of Grunberg to follow. He held the child close, its face pressed into the chain links of his mail shirt. Glancing back down the street to the ruin of the stables, Kallad saw the dead gathering, the last of the moonlight bathing their rotten flesh in silver. They had breached the wall and were pouring over in greater and greater numbers. The fire blazed on all sides of them, but they showed neither sense of fear nor understanding of what the flames might do to their dead flesh. The last of the men were lining up in a ragged phalanx to charge the dead. Their spears and shields were pitiful against the ranks of the dead. Even the sun wouldn’t rise in time to save them. Like their enemy, they were dead, only Morr had yet to claim their souls.

  Kallad led the women and children away; he had no wish for them to see their men fall. The fires made it difficult to navigate the streets. Alleyways dead-ended in sheets of roaring flame. Passageways collapsed beneath the detritus of houses, their shells burned out.

  “Look!” One of the women cried, pointing at part of the wall that had collapsed. The dead were clambering slowly over the debris, stumbling and falling, and climbing over the fallen.

  “To the mountains!” Kallad shouted over the cries of panic.

  Avoiding the pockets of burning heat became ever more difficult as the fire spread, the isolated pockets becoming unbroken walls of flame.

  Kallad set off at a run towards the safety of the mountainside and the caverns that led down into the warren of deep mines, across the open ground of the green, and down a narrow alleyway that led to the entrance to the caves. The wriggling child didn’t slow him. “Come on!” he yelled, urging the women to move faster. There would be precious little time to get them all into the caves before the fire claimed the alleyway. “Come on!” Some dragged their children, others cradled them. None looked back.

  “Where do we go?” the young boy asked. He’d drawn his toy sword and looked ready to stab any shadow that moved in the firelight.

  “Take the third fork in the central tunnel, lad. Follow it down. It goes deep beneath the mountain. I’ll find you. From there, we’re going home.”

  “This is my home.”

  “We’re going to my home, lad: Karak Sadra. You’ll be safe there.”

  The boy nodded grimly and disappeared into the darkness. Kallad counted them all into the caverns. As the last of them disappeared into the tunnels, he turned to look up at the city walls.

  Through the dancing flames, he saw the battle still raging. The dead had claimed huge parts of the city, but the manlings were fighting on to the bitter end. He scanned the battlements looking for his father. Then he saw him. Kellus was locked in a mortal struggle. From this distance, it was impossible to tell, but it looked as if his axe was gone. He shifted onto the back foot, the flames licking the stones around him, and was forced further back into the flames as the dead poured over the wall. The last vestiges of Grunberg’s defences were breached. The white-haired King of Karak Sadra fought desperately, hurling the dead flesh of mindless zombies from the wall.

  A cloaked figure sprang forwards, unbalancing the king. His cloak played around his body like wings in the wind. Kallad knew the beast for what it was, a vampire. Probably not the undead count himself, but one of von Carstein’s gets, so dose as to be almost identical, but nothing more than a pale imitation at the same time.

  The vampire tossed its head back and howled at the moon, exhorting the dead to rise.

  For a moment, it seemed to Kallad as if his father could see him through the black smoke and the raging flame. Every bone and every fibre of Kallad’s being cried out to run to the old king’s aid, but he had been charged with another duty. He had to see these women and children to safety, giving worth to the great king’s sacrifice. He couldn’t abandon them when he was their only hope. Down there in the deep, they would die as surely as they would have if he had left them in the great hall.

  The creature dragged Kellus close in the parody of an embrace and for a moment, it appeared as if the two were kissing. The illusion was shattered as the vampire tossed the dead dwarf aside and leapt gracefully from the high wall.

  Kallad turned his back, silent tears rolling down his impassive face.

  The babe writhed in his arms. He laid the child on the floor, face down because he couldn’t bear the accusation that he imagined he saw in its dead eyes. Sobbing, he took the axe and ended the child’s unnatural life.

  Smoke, flame and grief stung the dwarfs eyes as he knelt down over the corpse and pressed a coin into the child’s mouth, an offering to Morr, the humans’ god of death. “This innocent has suffered enough hell for three lifetimes, Lord of the Dead. Have pity on those you claimed today.”

  One day, he promised himself, rising. One day the beast responsible for all this useless suffering will know my name; that will be the day it dies!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kaiser, König, Edelmann, Bürger, Bauer,

  Bettelmann

  DRAKENHOF, SYLVANIA

  The cold heart of winter, 2055

  Two of Konrad’s Hamaya dragged the old man into the cell between them. Von Carstein didn’t deign to turn. He made the man wait. It was a delicious sensation and he fully intended to savour the final moments before the kill. There was nothing in the world like bringing death where moments before there had been life. It was such a fleeting thing, life: so transient in nature, so fragile.

  He smiled as he turned, although there was no humour in his eyes, and nodded.

  The Hamaya served as the Vampire Count’s personal bodyguard, his most trusted men, his right and left hands depending upon the darkness of the deed he desired done. They released their grip on the prisoner, kicking him as he sank to his knees so that he sprawled across the cold stones of the cell floor. There was no fight left in the old man. He barely had the strength to hold his head up. He had been beaten repeatedly and tortured to the extremes of what his heart would bear. It was so like the cowards to send an old man to do their dirty work.

  “So, are you ready to talk, Herr Koln? Or must we continue with all this unsavoury nonsense? We both know the outcome so why subject yourself to the p
ain? You will tell me what I want to hear. Your kind always does. It’s one of the many weaknesses of humanity. No threshold for pain.”

  The old man lifted his head, meeting the vampire’s gaze, “I have nothing to say to you.”

  Konrad sighed, “Very well. Constantin, would you be so kind as to remind our guest of his manners?”

  The Hamaya backhanded Koln across the face, splitting his already swollen lip. Blood ran into his beard.

  “Thank you, Constantin. Now, Herr Koln, perhaps we can dispense with the charade? As much as I enjoy the tang of blood in the air, yours is sadly past its best. You are the much-vaunted Silver Fox of Bogenhafen, are you not? The Silberfuchs, I believe they call you? I assume your paymaster is Ludwig von Holzkrug, although where the loyalties of a man like yourself lie is always up for debate. The Untermensch witch perhaps? Or maybe some other lesser schemer. The Empire is so full of petty politickers, one so much the same as any other that it is difficult to keep track of who is stabbing whom in the back at any given time. No matter. You are what you are and what you are is, without question, a spy.”

  “Why don’t you kill me and have done with it?”

  “I could,” the vampire conceded. He circled the old man. It was the act of a predator. He moved slowly, savouring the helplessness of his prisoner. “But that would hardly do you justice, Herr Koln. The… ah… notoriety of the Silberfuchs demands a certain… respect. Your head must be filled with such interesting truths it would be a crying shame to lose them. Act in haste, repent at leisure, no?”

  “What would you have me tell you, vampire? That your people love you? That you are worshipped? Adored? You are not. Believe me. You are hated. Your kingdom is fit only for robber barons and fools. It is held together by fear. Fear of the Vampire Count, Vlad von Carstein.” The old man smiled. “You are not loved. You are not even feared. None of that is of any consequence, of course, because, more than anything, you are not your sire. The only fear around you is the fear that drives you. Compared to Vlad you are a pale shadow.”