“That’s not what makes him special, priest, you and I both know it. Why not turn him over to the almoners?”
“He ahh well his affliction… shall we say that some feel he was maimed in the service of the church, and as such we carry the weight of guilt, which is, of course, preposterous.”
“A thief losing his hands in the service of Sigmar? Are you being serious?”
“Not at all,” the priest assured him.
As if sensing that he was the topic of conversation, the man finally moved away from the window.
A few minutes later, the huge iron banded doors flew open and Felix Mann staggered out of the temple gasping and out of breath from running through the vast cathedral. He was not in a good way. His face had begun to collapse in on itself, his cheeks and eyes waxy sunken hollows, his nose sharp and angular. He was gaunt beyond the point of malnutrition. The waste of a man was shocking to see. What remained were the remnants of Felix Mann. He was less than human.
The thief staggered forwards on shaky legs and debased himself at Kallad’s feet, the bandaged stumps of his wrists up in front of his face. Kallad had to imagine the ghosts of hands clenched, begging.
“Just put me out of my damned misery, dwarf! Do it! Crush my skull. Cut my head off my shoulders. Slice my throat, open my gizzards, just do something to finish it, please. I… I don’t want to live like this anymore. I don’t want to be a prisoner, a freak fed and watered and forced to give thanks for being a cripple to a god who hasn’t done a damned thing for me except see to it that I wound up like this. Have pity on me, dwarf. Finish what the vampire started. Do that for me. Do that!”
“You are not a prisoner here. Far from it,” the acolyte said coldly. We have made you welcome, fed and cared for you. You could have been left to beg in the gutter like a common criminal. You are free to leave at any time. Remember that before you call us your gaolers.”
“I am not free. If I were there would not be men outside my door at night.”
“We would not have you harm yourself. Sadness over your, ahhh, affliction, might undo reason. We seek only to help you.”
Sammy had backed away behind Kallad, and the acolyte looked distinctly disappointed at the thief s ravings.
“Stand up, man.”
“Look at me. I’m a cripple.”
“Aye, but it ain’t the end of the world. I ain’t one for judging a man by his looks or his name, better to judge him by what he does. He can curl up an’ die or he can get up an” start living again. So stand up.”
“Damn you,” Felix Mann said, but there was no strength in his curse. He spat in the priest’s direction and then sagged and folded in on himself, beaten.
“I already am,” Kallad said calmly. “I am Kallad Stormwarden, the last dwarf of Karak Sadra. The vampires destroyed my people.”
“Then you understand,” Mann said flatly.
“No, I don’t. I took their beating and I stood up again. Now, I hunt them. I will not rest until every last vampire is purged from the face of the Empire.”
“Then you’ll be joining your people wherever your dead go. You cannot win.”
“Don’t grieve for me just yet.”
Felix Mann shook his head violently, “You don’t get it, do you? You’re dead already, you just don’t know it. I’ve seen the daemon you are stalking. He did this to me.” Felix held up the stumps where his hands had been severed. You can’t beat it. It can hide in plain sight. It lives in the shadows. You can’t fight it, because you can’t see it.” His voice took on a hysterical quality, the words beginning to tumble into each other in their rush to be out of his mouth. You can’t beat it. It isn’t alive. It’s immortal. It’s got the ring. It can’t die. It can’t die, dwarf. It can’t die. Do you understand that? You can hunt it, but you can’t kill it. Cut off its head and it will come back. Cut out its heart and it will come back. Burn it and it will rise from the ashes. It will come back and it will keep coming back. Do you understand that? Do you?”
Mann’s daemons were like no vampires Kallad had ever heard of, invisible, invincible, they sounded like something invented to scare children. However fanciful, the thief s hysteria had the ring of truth to it. Something had driven the thief to the point of madness. It wasn’t hard to imagine that something being the same monster behind the unnecessary evil of the slaughter of Grunberg. That made Felix Mann’s story the first real lead Kallad had found since coming to Altdorf, and by necessity that made Felix Mann the missing link that he had been searching so long to find. He just had to bring him back from the edge.
“Rubbish,” the acolyte sneered. “You’re fully of fanciful nonsense. Down to the trauma, no doubt. The Grand Theogonist himself laid down his life to save us from these daemons you rave on about. The threat is gone.”
He was one crucial step closer to finding the fiend that had butchered his people.
“I understand,” Kallad said, “that the thing has frightened the life out of you, and I understand why the priests have taken pity on you. All I can say is, that way lies madness. This is no way to live.”
“Don’t mock me,” dwarf Mann said, the edge of reason creeping back into his voice. “Kill me or be done with it and leave me to rot in peace would you?”
Kallad shook his head.
“That’s not the way it’s going to happen. If you want to live again, help me to kill the beast. If not, well maybe I should crack your skull and put you out of your misery.”
Felix Mann held up his ruined wrist stumps. “What can I do?” and again, this time more a question than a statement of uselessness: “What can I do?”
“I can help you, thief, if you are willing to help yourself. Given a forge to work in I can craft hands. Well not real hands. They’ll be more like gauntlets than real hands and they’ll have to fasten to some kind of shoulder brace. They won’t be pretty, and they won’t move or have any kind of grip, but they’ll be better than nothing. I’m no master smith, but I can make one like it’s holding a cup and give the other a kind of hook attachment. They’ll give you your life back. You’ll be able to feed yourself and start living again. The rest is up to you.”
Silence hung between man and dwarf.
“Why?”
“Because you fought it and you lived.”
“Only because it let me.”
“That doesn’t matter. You know it. I’ll give you your hands back and in return I want you to talk. Tell me everything you can remember about the vampires. Everything. A good hunter knows his prey. There are less surprises and they die easier that way.”
“They just don’t stay dead,” Felix Mann said, bleakly.
“This one will,” Kallad promised. “Believe me, this one will.”
CHAPTER THREE
Voice of Shadows
BENEATH THE SIGMARITE CATHEDRAL,
ALTDORF
The bleak midwinter, 2055
Jon Skellan sneered as the soldier’s fist thundered into his face. He spat blood. He was beyond pain. They could beat him, burn him and brand him, but they couldn’t break him. They cuffed him with silver bonds that seared into his flesh, burning it raw. It didn’t matter. He was immune.
“Is that all you’ve got, soldier?” Skellan mocked. The soldier backhanded him twice, hard, knocking the wind out of him. Skellan rolled his head with the blows.
At first his captors’ abuse had verged on the inhumane, but as the days had faded into weeks and the weeks into months so their appetite for his suffering had faded. The beatings became more mundane. They lacked imagination. They lacked the hatred that made torture so terrible. They weren’t cold or emotionless. They were… benign. Skellan drew strength from the fact that they toyed with him, testing the limits of his endurance. Day after day they beat him savagely, but it only served to make him stronger. He lived. They didn’t dare kill him, but they suffered no such restraint when it came to beating him bloody. Skellan was no fool. If the Sigmarites had wanted him dead they could have killed him on any numbe
r of occasions. He was under no illusions. He was at their mercy. No, the simple truth was that they wanted him alive.
That meant they needed him.
For all the taunts, for all the experiments with devices of torture meant to break him, they needed their pet vampire.
It gave him the strength to resist them.
Behind the bars of his cage Skellan had few comforts. Soiled reeds were spread across the floor to insulate it from the cold and damp, and he had a blanket. Rats kept him company, creeping in through the cracks in the stone walls and working their way up from the subterranean sewers of the capital as the rains came, flooding out their lairs. Those he could catch, he killed and fed off. It was no way to live, but it was fresh blood, and blood renewed him.
The soldier moved around behind him and delivered a crushing blow to the back of Skellan’s neck. The force of it sent the vampire sprawling across the reeds. With his hands cuffed, he had no way to catch himself as he fell. Skellan lay on his stomach as the soldier delivered a solid kick to his ribs. The kick was savage enough to lift him six inches off the ground. Gasping, Skellan drew his knees up towards his chest. Jagged strands of reed dug into his face.
“Better?”
The soldier said nothing.
The vampire wasn’t worth his words.
Skellan knew what they thought of him.
He crawled towards the small mound of dried reeds that he had gathered to form a crude mattress. His gaolers had taken his chair away after Skellan had broken the leg off and beaten one of his captors to death with it in an attempt to provoke his own death in return. They let him live, but stripped his cell, leaving him a pot to relieve himself in and little else. The pot was useless, of course. His body didn’t process the usual liquids or toxins as a living man’s did.
The worst thing, by far, was that knowing he needed blood to survive, the priests brought it to him.
They fed him with it as they would a suckling babe.
They bled themselves and brought it down to his cellar dungeon, still warm, but already congealing as the heat left it. The blood was vital, but had little restorative value after being drawn from the donor. Little was better than none. Although it only took a few minutes for it to lose the life that Skellan needed to survive, the priests didn’t trust their prisoner to feed off the living—with good reason.
His pitiful diet meant that hunger tormented him constantly. The need to feed drove Skellan to the verge of madness and hallucination. He began to believe that he could smell the Sigmarites’ lifeblood pulsing through their veins as they prowled the corridors beyond his prison.
In the darkness, he closed his eyes and sent his mind out, imagining that he could actually hear each and every distinctive pulse that filled the chambers of the cathedral above him, despite the layers of stone and mortar. He savoured the rhythmic dub-dub beat of a hundred hearts in a hundred bodies that knelt in prayer; the way they missed an occasional beat or raced as the emotions demanded. In the darkest hours, Skellan allowed himself the fantasy of feeding properly. He played with images of white flesh and blue veins rising to the surface of the pale skin as he sucked hungrily at the throats of the priests.
There was nothing like fresh blood drawn from the still living. It was ambrosia. Skellan fantasised himself running amok in the cathedral, draining the priests one by one in a mindless orgy of blood, paying them back for every last one of the torments they had inflicted since his capture.
It was a sweet fantasy, and it would be fulfilled. He promised himself that.
They would age and weaken. He wouldn’t.
He would live, and one day he would be free. When that day came they would know the nature of the beast they caged in their cellars, until then he would suffer their beatings.
The bolt on the door slid back and Reynard Grimm, Guard Captain of Altdorf, entered Skellan’s prison. The man was a curious contradiction. Trapped in his skin were two distinct men, one a brutal sadist and the other a weaselly sycophant who clung to the Sigmarite gospels as an excuse for his cruelty. Grimm drew far too much pleasure from the pains he inflicted on his captive to be the guardian of righteousness his swaggering pretended.
The shadows shifted curiously around Grimm as he pushed the door closed, as if something hid within them, invisible to the naked eye. Skellan followed the peculiar blur as it merged into the darkness in the corner of the cell. It must be was a trick of the guttering light. There was nothing there. He turned his attention to the soldier.
“Nothing better to do with your life, Grimm?” Skellan asked. The fear was gone. An uneasy contempt rested in its place. The reverse, however, was not true. The Grimm Skellan had come to know was a coward.
“What could be better than listening to you scream, vampire?”
“Oh, I can think of any number of things, but then, I have an imagination. It is both a blessing and a curse, believe me,” Skellan said, letting the corner of his lips curl into a derisive smile.
“Save your breath, vampire, you’ll need it to scream soon enough.”
Skellan shook his head. “You still don’t understand do you, Grimm? I don’t have breath to hold. I don’t have a heart that beats. I don’t have those weak human emotions like love and fear, I am kin to the damned. I am a vampire. I am purged of all the weaknesses of your kind. I shall walk amongst the living long after you have become dust and slipped from memory. But you, Grimm, you are nothing, less than nothing. You are a child in a man’s skin. You are afraid. You fear me. I can smell it. Your cowardice clings to your skin, it infects your sweat. It cries out to every predator in creation: Kill me! Kill me!”
Behind Grimm’s shoulder, the cell door opened once more. The Lector looked troubled as he walked into the small prison cell.
“I begged you, guard captain, no more torture. I speak with Sigmar’s mouth, do his words mean nothing to you?” the Lector laid a hand on Grimm’s shoulder.
“Shut up, priest.” Grimm shook the priest’s hand off.
A ripple of movement in the shadows behind the Lector caught Skellan’s eye. He was about to dismiss it when he saw it again, a few feet away from where he had first seen it, much closer to the Lector now: a crease in the shadows, a slight blurring of the wall as something passed in front of it. He wouldn’t have been able to see it if he hadn’t been looking for it, but now he knew what to look for it was not particularly difficult to follow. There was someone—or something—in the shadows, creeping up behind his two captors.
Skellan forced himself up from the reeds, to kneel before his jailors. It was anything but a gesture of subservience. He was defying them. He met Grimm’s eye. The soldier was demented. There was no rationale in his gaze, no thought. He hated Skellan, not for who he was, but for what he was. The guard captain had lived through the Siege of Altdorf. He had seen friends and comrades die at the hands of the vampires. He had reason to fear and reason to hate all that Skellan represented. Those reasons drove the man. He was avenging ghosts every time he laid a hand on Skellan. And every time Skellan dragged himself back to his feet he was mocking the man, reminding him that his dead were still dead and that there could be no revenge for the living.
Grimm lashed out, but his blow never connected.
The outline of a tall, thin man gathered substance within the shimmering dark. The stranger threw back his hood and grabbed Grimm by the hair, tugging back hard on his scalp to unbalance him. The surprise and sudden ferocity of the attack meant that Grimm fell back into the stranger’s deadly embrace. He was utterly helpless. In the moment before the stranger sank his teeth into Reynard Grimm’s throat, his eyes met Skellan’s. Recognition passed between them sending a shiver soul deep. For the first time, Skellan believed he was truly insane. He wanted desperately to believe that Vlad von Carstein had materialised out of the shadows to save him, but it was impossible.
The Vampire Count was beyond resurrection, and yet Skellan saw the Count’s eyes. They were ancient, knowing, and so, so cold. They stripped a
way the layers of lies and identity, and delved deep into the core of who he was. They knew him.
The stranger sank his teeth into the soldier’s throat, pinning his arms to his side as he kicked out helplessly. He drank hungrily and then snapped Grimm’s neck with a sickening economy of movement.
Grimm’s body crumpled and collapsed on the floor in a lifeless heap.
Skellan sprang forward, launching himself from his knees like a cannonball. He arched his back and used the full momentum of his body to hammer his forehead into the Lector’s chin. He connected with a sickening crunch of bone, his weight bowling the priest off his feet. The priest sprawled across the floor, insensate.
The stranger, Vlad, smacked his lips as he toed Grimm’s unmoving corpse. “Rather like drinking vinegar when rich Bretonnian claret is so near by, but it slakes the thirst. Still, we’ll sample some of that vintage before we make good our escape. No doubt you have a debt or two to settle with the priests.” He saw the way Skellan was looking at him, partly in awe, partly in fear and with unmistakable recognition. “I’m not him,” he said.
“But you look—”
“Similar,” the stranger conceded. “We are, after all, similar monsters, are we not?”
“But you are his aren’t you? I can smell him inside you.”
“I am von Carstein, if that is what you mean. There is some of him in me, as there is some of your sire in you. Vlad brought me into this life. It was a long time ago, longer than I care to remember, and a long way from this ruined burg. He saw something in me he liked, a ghost of himself perhaps? Only he could say for sure. He may not have loved me the most—that honour I feel sure went to Isabella—but he most certainly loved me longest. Now feed, and then we leave.”
“What about these?” Skellan held up his manacled hands. The silver had cut deep wounds into his flesh.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 5