“Fascinating,” Konrad said. “Is that what you intended to tell your paymaster? That the von Carstein threat is vanquished? That there is nothing left to fear?”
“I will tell him the truth: that the scum is rising to the surface, as it always does. That everywhere in Sylvania there is disorder, that the fetid stink of corruption clings to the swamps. I will say that the streets crumble while the parasites suck the lifeblood out of the people, that the peasants despise you for the blight that afflicts their farms, that you are loathed for the famine that cripples the livestock, and blamed for the exorbitant rents you demand from them in return for pox-ridden ground. I will tell him that if they fail to please you with tributes you let your cursed Hamaya feast on their carcasses. Oh, I could tell them that and so much more. I could tell them that your so-called court is infested with sharks that would feast on your royal blood. That Drakenhof is a cesspit of liars, thieves, murderers, spies, and worst of all backstabbing sycophants who whisper sweet nothings in your ear while plotting behind your back. That you are loathed by your own kind, and that you are a fool for believing that they love you.”
Konrad’s own grin matched the old man’s. “You are indeed enlightened, Herr Koln. Obviously you are privy to the deepest, darkest secrets of my kind. Yes they would have me dead, it is the nature of the beast to seek out weakness and exploit it. They have not brought me down, as you can see. Drakenhof is mine by right of strength and blood. I am von Carstein. I do not merely call myself such, as others do.” He turned his attention to the two Hamaya who had stepped back from the old man and waited silently. Take Jerek, for instance, he understands his place. His loyalty is unquestioning. The blood of our father sings in his veins. He is pure, unlike Constantin, who has claimed the name by right of… what was it, Constantin?”
“Conquest,” the Hamaya supplied.
“Conquest, that’s right. Conquest is another word for murder in our world. He earned the title von Carstein by killing another. Our kind survives by strength alone. Strength breeds loyalty. Like Jerek, his loyalty is pure, and yet you have the audacity to tell me that my truth isn’t the truth? That my world does not work the way I believe? Should I be flattered or furious, Herr Koln?”
“I say what I see. If you do not like what you hear, well, with respect, all you can do is kill me.”
“Not so, killing you is the very least that I can do. I could drag your soul kicking and screaming back from the comfort of Morr’s underworld and consign you to the unlife of the living dead, for instance. I could slay you and raise your corpse to dance to my whims like a puppet, or I could leave you to rot. Don’t underestimate the torments beyond death that I could inflict on you if I so choose. Now, tell me about the lands you left behind, spy. Tell me about your beloved Empire.”
The old man’s head dropped. He lapsed into silence.
“Oh, do speak up while you still can, Herr Koln. The cat hasn’t gotten your tongue yet.”
“I am no traitor.”
“But I think you will be before the sun rises on the new morning, if that is any consolation? I think you’ll be delighted to spill your guts. Jerek and Constantin will no doubt be sick of the sound of your voice.”
Konrad stopped his pacing, drawing his sword, a blade of bone with a skeletal wyrm carved into its hilt, from its sheath. The blade’s edge whickered as it slid free. Konrad rested it against Deitmar Koln’s left ear.
The old man screamed as the vampire sliced his ear off with a single smooth stroke. Blood flowed freely through Koln’s fingers as he clutched at the ragged hole in the side of his head. He didn’t stop screaming as Konrad raised the severed ear to his lips and sucked the blood from it.
The vampire tossed the ruined ear aside.
“Now, where were we? Oh yes, you were telling me nothing I didn’t already know, how those around me are untrustworthy. How I have surrounded myself with fools and traitors and those who are loyal now could be traitors tomorrow. How loyalty can be bought with fear. How fear can inspire treachery. You speak in vagaries meant to inspire paranoia. I am nobody’s fool, Herr Koln. How does anyone know whom to trust or who to kill? Tell me that, Silberfuchs, and then, when you are through answering the unanswerable, tell me all about dear old Ludwig and the squabbles of the Empire. I yearn for a good story and it would be an honour to hear the Silver Fox of Bogenhafen’s last lament.”
The old man slumped against the wall, his bloody hand pressed up against the side of his head. What remained of his life could be counted out in moments, and yet despite the sure and certain knowledge of his fate, he tapped some inner well of strength that allowed him dignity in death.
Konrad resumed his pacing, his slow, measured footsteps echoing hollowly on the stone floor. He didn’t say a word, but a smile twitched at his lips as the old man suffered.
“Do we really have to take this to its logical conclusion, Herr Koln? I had hoped you would see sense before my patience finally wore thin. It seems I was wrong.” With that Konrad lashed out a second time with the bone sword, cutting deep into the hand Koln threw up before his face to ward off the blow. Bone cleaved bone, although Konrad pulled the blow before it completely severed the old man’s wrist, leaving the hand hanging uselessly by a single tendon. Blood pumped from the ragged wound, at first it came in a huge gush that sprayed like a fountain, but it quickly dwindled as shock set in.
The old man gibbered through the pain, his eyes glazed over. It was doubtful whether a single coherent word would escape his lips before his body finally succumbed to the shock, and he died.
Konrad knelt, taking the old man’s chin in his hand and tilting his head until their eyes met. Koln tried to say something. His lips moved and sounds gurgled out of his mouth, but Konrad couldn’t make any sense out of them.
“Is this the way it ends? Not with a bang but with a whimper? Tragic, utterly tragic, but so be it.”
Konrad rose, lifting the wyrm-hilted blade above his head, poised to grant death and end the old man’s torment. Instead, very deliberately and very slowly, he sheathed the sword and hoisted Deitmar Koln to his feet. The old man’s legs refused to hold him. Konrad nodded to his two Hamaya, who peeled away from the shadows to support the spy between them. His body sagged as if he was being crucified.
Konrad slammed a fist into his gut. The old man folded in on himself until the Hamaya straightened him up. Konrad hit him again.
“I could tell you that this hurts me more than it hurts you. I would, of course, be lying. This doesn’t hurt me at all. Between you and me, I quite enjoy it actually. Now, before I get carried away, I’m going to offer you one last chance to spill your guts before I spill them for you. Do we understand each other, Herr Koln?”
Deitmar Koln lifted his head. Blood smeared across his face and into his mouth. His eyes were glazed and his skin had taken on a sickly grey cast. The old man’s tongue licked along his lips as he tried to form a word. Konrad allowed himself a self-indulgent smirk. “They all talk eventually,” he said, leaning in close to hear what the dying man had to confess.
Koln spat in his face.
An elbow in the base of the neck from the Hamaya Constantin drove the old man to his knees.
Konrad kicked him in the face. It was brutal. The sound of bone and cartilage breaking was sickening. He kicked the old man over and over until Jerek’s reassuring voice cut through the fugue that violence had wrapped around him.
“It’s over.”
It was. The Silver Fox of Bogenhafen was dead, his secrets taken to the grave.
Konrad’s fury dissipated, leaving him standing over the bloody corpse of the old man, none the wiser, and ruing the cost of giving in to his anger.
“Fool,” he muttered, toeing the dead man under the chin to bring his sightless eyes up to meet his gaze. “All you had to do was talk. The feuding of the would-be emperors is common knowledge. A few choice comments about the Sigmarites sparring with the self-proclaimed Emperor Ludwig could have bought your life, or at le
ast your death.” He turned to Constantin. “Still, waste not want not. Take him down to Immoliah Fey. I am sure she will appreciate the gift.”
“As you wish, lord.” The Hamaya gathered the dead man into his arms as if he weighed nothing and carried him out of the cell, leaving Konrad and Jerek von Carstein alone.
“Walk with me a while, my friend. This place brings depresses me.”
“It is understandable,” Jerek said. “Being trapped in this cloying dark is no way to live.”
The pair wandered the labyrinthine halls of Drakenhof Castle, working their way slowly toward the rooftops. The castle was a curious mix of decay and renewal: certain corridors were wreathed in cobwebs and dank with mildew, and one entire wing of the castle had been abandoned to the ghosts of the dead and was buried by dust. Some warmer chambers in what had once been the van Drak tower were darkened by thick velvet drapes, and danced to the shadows of guttering torches and freshly laid fires.
The tower itself had suffered the most complete transformation, to the extent of owning a new name. Vlad’s birds had overrun the spire of the old tower, transforming it into the Rookery. Gone was the opulence of Vlad’s reign. Konrad and the new breed of von Carsteins offered austerity; their world was one of decay. There was no place for the redeeming love of beauty Vlad cherished.
“We owe our lives to you, Wolf, don’t think that I have forgotten,” Konrad said, finally. He pushed open a heavy wooden door and stepped out into the night. The winds cradled him, wrapping his cloak around his thin frame. He breathed deeply of the night air as he looked around the battlements. Only, of course, they weren’t battlements anymore. This place had become a haven for Vlad’s birds. Even the servants called it the Rookery now. He took solace in the company of the birds.
“Nonsense,” Jerek said.
“Don’t be so quick to dismiss the importance of what you did. When others lost their heads and surrendered to bloodlust, you kept yours. You didn’t give in to panic. You didn’t flee in mindless terror. You thought a way out of death. You brought us back from the point of extinction, but more than that, you brought us home. We are here now because of you, my friend. You are a good man.”
“Hardly,” Jerek grunted, uncomfortable with the vampire’s praise. Vlad’s ravens scattered as he walked among them. “I’m not a good man. Perhaps I was once, it is difficult to remember now, but whatever I was in life, I’m not even a shadow of it in death. I have changed to the point that I don’t even know who I am. I have cravings that I don’t understand, longings and desires that even a few years ago would have disgusted me, and yet somehow I have become a “good man’? No. I am not a good man. Everything has changed. The sun no longer shines for me, lord. I miss that more than anything.”
“You speak as if you are not who you were. That is a lie. We are all who we were, but we are all more complicated than simply being good men or bad men. We all have countless identities inside us. We have the savage who would rip out a man’s heart and feed on it greedily, we have the friend whose nobility of heart is pure, we have the lover who sings to us the sins of the flesh and worships the pale alabaster skin of our woman, we have the child we once were, the lad whose fears have never left him, and we have the man we might have become.
“All these and more live inside our skin, my friend. We listen to all their voices when they cry out. We are truly the sum of our life, of who we were. That is who we are, not some newborn dead thing. We are in every way ourselves, and yet we are more than that. We remember all the fears, all the dreams we shared, we remember and they make us stronger. They do not simply disappear. We carry the joys we knew in life, the compassion, and the love—if we were blessed enough to know it—and equally we carry the hatred and horrors of our existence. The difference is that now we draw pleasure from both aspects of our twin souls. You are still the White Wolf of Middenheim, but you are so much more as well. You find yourself enjoying death in a way that you never did before, but my friend, believe me, that capacity for joy was always within you.”
“Perhaps you are right, although I cannot find myself in here anymore, Konrad. I am selfish. I would live in the sun once more. That is the truth of it.”
“Ah, but the truth is like an expensive whore, Jerek. She comes dressed in many pretty dresses and will bend over for any with the money to pamper her. Your truth is not my truth and my truth was not Vlad’s. We each shape the world as we walk through it. We write the “truth” with our actions, if we are victorious, then others come to accept our truth, whereas if we are defeated those same people will vilify our truth as damnable lies. Do not overcomplicate life with the search for one unifying truth, it does not exist, my friend.”
“Concubine, courtesan, whore, they’re all words that mean the same thing, she lies with anyone with the coin to have her.”
Konrad knelt to cradle a beady-eyed raven in his hand. The bird didn’t react to his touch. “My point exactly. Now, I think we’ve done this dance long enough. What is bothering you?”
Jerek stared out over the moonlight town far below, imagining the laughter and life around the hearths, and the simple delight those unseen people found in their pitiful existence. He envied them their ignorance. He envied them their happiness. A mass of black winged birds took flight, banking high in the sky to block out the moon as they circled as one.
“An omen?”
“Birds are always an omen, Jerek. It is whether we chose to pay them heed or not that is important. The psychopomps deliver their messages of foreboding, it is why they exist; they are nothing more than playthings of the gods. We see them now, but, tell me, should we take heed of their warning?”
Jerek turned his back on the birds.
“Do you trust me, Konrad?”
It was a simple question and deserved a simple answer, despite the fact that the answer itself was far from simple. “Yes,” Konrad said, resting a hand on Jerek’s muscular shoulder. “Yes, I do.”
Jerek nodded, “Which makes what I am going to say easier and more difficult at the same time.”
“Speak freely.”
“Ah, if only it were that easy. I fear there is a traitor amongst us, my lord.”
Konrad laughed. “I am surrounded by traitors and assassins, my friend. That is why I bid you gather the Hamaya, the best of the best, the most trusted. With them as a shield, I am at least protected from the more overt manipulations of my kin. They have saved me once from my beloved kin’s back-stabbing knives, they will no doubt save me again.”
“That is why the betrayal hurts the most. I believe the traitor lies within the ranks of your bodyguard and feeds information to one or more of Vlad’s gets, conspiring against your leadership.”
“A traitor in the Hamaya? Are you sure?”
“No,” Jerek admitted, “not sure, but suspicious.”
“Then I must trust your suspicions, my friend. I would be a fool to ignore you and the birds. The vultures are cycling, it would seem, and as ever they are hungry to feed on weakness. I am not weak. There will be blood in the water, much blood, but it will not be mine. Their fall from grace will be a lesson to all. No one crosses me. Find the traitor, Jerek. Find them, skin them and roast them on a spit until only their ashes remain. I want everyone to know the cost of betrayal.”
CHAPTER TWO
Shadow of the Vampire
THE SIGMARITE CATHEDRAL, ALTDORF
The bleak midwinter, 2055
Kallad Stormwarden had been in Altdorf for three soul-destroying weeks. This wasn’t his home. He missed the mountains. The cold stone of the buildings was soulless stuff. He dreamed at nights of the stone halls of Karak Sadra.
He was here because of the vampires of Grunberg. As long as the vampires lived, his own life had but a single purpose: retribution.
The path of vengeance had led to Altdorf before it had cracked and broken, and finally died out.
The war of the Vampire Count had taken a heavy toll. Cities live, and like people, cities die. The puls
e of Altdorf had weakened and become erratic, the life choked out of the place. It was a shadow of its former glorious self, although the inhabitants did their damnedest to carry on their everyday lives as if nothing had happened. The dwarf found it fascinating and tragic at the same time. Denial it seemed was the primary characteristic of the human condition.
Not for the first time, he wondered how they could do it. There was no miracle to it though; it was a case of necessity. They had to foster denial, or they would drown in self-pity and be as dead as if the Vampire Count had sucked them dry. That would have been the biggest tragedy of all: for the survivors to give up living because of the high price of victory. Their stubborn determination was a way of honouring those who had paid the ultimate price for their freedom.
In truth, there was little difference between this and the way Kallad lived his life. The memory of Grunberg and those who had fallen there overshadowed each day he lived. Days and weeks, and months could pass, it didn’t matter, the passage of time had lost its meaning to the dwarf.
If anything, the Altdorfers losing themselves in the mundane tasks of rebuilding their lives was healthier than the grudge he nursed. They at least were looking to the future, not living in the past where the anger only festered.
“When they’re dead,” he promised himself, “and honour’s served, then we start living again, right lad?”
Beside him, Sammy Krauss, the butcher’s boy, sat whittling at a curiously shaped stick with his bone-handled knife. Sammy was simpleminded. They had been almost constant companions since his arrival in the city. The boy, it seemed, had taken a shine to him. Kallad didn’t mind. He enjoyed the company. It had been too long since he’d enjoyed the simple pleasure of conversation. Given the city’s recent history, it wasn’t hard to imagine why the boy had attached himself to the dwarf. It wasn’t for his rapier wit and philosophical insight: the finely crafted gromril discs beneath the chain links of mail and his double-headed axe, Ruinthorn, were far more reassuring. Kallad was a fighter. With his parents dead, that was what the boy truly needed.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 3