The stranger nodded once and spun on his heel, drawing the cloak around his head and disappearing into the shadows. The cell door opened and closed on nothing as the vampire slipped out. A moment later, the stifled cry of a guard echoed back to Skellan as he knelt over the Lector’s corpse, his chin slick with the priest’s blood. The killing had begun.
When he looked up, the stranger stood in the doorway, holding the key to his manacles.
“Care to join me in a feast?”
Skellan nodded. “I will taste their blood,” he said, simply.
“Good. Hold out your hands.”
The stranger manipulated the key in the tiny lock mechanism until it sprang and the silver cuffs fell to the floor.
Skellan rubbed at his ruined wrists. “Who are you?”
“Come with me and find out.” The stranger turned his back and disappeared through the door.
Skellan had no choice but to follow him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Night of the Daemon
THE SIGMARITE CATHEDRAL, ALTDORF
The bleak midwinter, 2055
Screaming priests shattered the peace of the secluded graveyard.
For a moment, none of them moved, frozen by the arcane magic of the unexpected scream, unwilling to believe it was actually a scream and not some distant memory, risen to haunt them—a ghost of the past or some revenant shade stirred by their presence amongst the graves. They had all heard enough screams and seen enough horrors for such a basic trick of the mind to unnerve them. It was a curse of the age. This, however, was a blood-curdling scream that clawed out of the confines of the cathedral’s underbelly. It wasn’t the imagination playing tricks. More powerful than any of the eight winds, the scream drew its strength from the most primitive of sources, that primal fear deep in every man. It held the priest, the thief, the dwarf and the simpleton wrapped in its fragile spell. Then the spell shattered as a second scream strangled off into wretched silence.
Whatever had caused the first scream had silenced the second.
Kallad felt the chill touch of premonition as his hands closed around the leather-wrapped shaft of Ruinthorn.
Felix Mann was the first to react. His face crumbled, his newfound resolve short-lived. “See… see…” he moaned. “They won’t die… they won’t die. They won’t.”
“Quit your blithering, man.” Kallad Stormwarden dragged Ruinthorn clear and hoisted it over his shoulder. He hadn’t gone two steps towards the doors of the temple before the young acolyte grabbed at his shoulder.
“No!” The dwarf spun around. “For Sigmar’s sake, no weapons in the house of our god!”
“With all due respect, you stick with your prayers for comfort and I’ll stick with Ruinthorn. Sammy, get out of here.”
The youngster shook his head.
“We’re friends.”
That said it all.
Kallad nodded. There was no argument. The lad had used his own words back at him.
“Aye, we are lad, but I can’t be worrying about you in a fight. You do as you’re told.”
Sammy Krauss bunched up his knuckles, ready to fight, and stubbornly refused to move. “I can fight.”
None of them had time for an argument. There had been no more screams in the last few seconds, but that didn’t mean dying wasn’t still going on inside the cathedral. In Kallad’s experience, death was silent more often than not.
“Come on, priest,” Kallad urged. Ruinthorn was a reassuring weight in his calloused hands. This is your house, let’s go find out what all the ruckus is about.”
Like Mann, the acolyte looked more than simply shocked by the screams: his eyes were filled with growing terror. The pair knew something he didn’t, that much was obvious, and what they knew troubled them deeply.
The acolyte was hesitant to enter the cathedral.
Kallad gave him a none too gentle shove and followed him in.
At first, the smell reminded Kallad of the deep mines beneath Karak Sadra, the tang of iron sharp in the foetid air, but the priests burned incense and an assortment of powders to take away the reek of unwashed bodies. Blood smelled like iron. What they smelled as they entered the cathedral was blood. It was a cloying out of place stench, acrid against the closed-in musk of the priests.
It didn’t bode well.
Kallad kissed the mark of Grimna on Ruinthorn’s head and stepped into what he feared would be a charnel house of slaughter.
There were no more screams.
He felt his gorge rise as he walked down the narrow passage. It was quiet: too quiet.
“Something’s wrong here. This place stinks of death. What do you know, priest? What are you hiding from me?” Kallad growled at the acolyte. The young priest shuddered and made the sign of Sigmar in the air before him. The man was a nervous wreck.
Kallad pushed past him. The corridor divided into three, a truncated passageway that led to two massive oak doors, and two longer passages that curled left and right. Kallad sniffed the air. The reek of blood was redolent. It was impossible to tell where the concentration was strongest. He listened, but there was nothing, no sign of life within the great cathedral. A hundred priests and countless penitents should have been inside the cathedral’s walls. There shouldn’t be any place for silence among so many souls. It sent a bone deep chill through the dwarf.
“Taal’s teeth, I don’t like this,” Felix Mann said, behind him. “It’s too damned quiet. Where is everyone?” The thief had a gift for stating the obvious. “It’s out, isn’t it?”
Kallad turned to see that Mann had pushed the young acolyte up against the wall and was forcing the ruined stub of his wrist into the man’s throat.
“You let it escape. You fools. You bloody stupid fools!” His voice escalated into hysteria. His accusation echoed through the passageway, the word “fool” folding in on itself over and over again.
Kallad dropped his axe, grabbed Mann by the shoulder and pulled the pair apart. He slammed the thief up against the wall. Mann’s breath leaked out of him in a slow moan. His eyes were wild and wide with terror. Kallad had no idea what the thief was seeing in the dark, but whatever it was clearly had the man frightened.
“You let it escape,” Mann repeated, his voice flat and subdued. He was trembling violently.
“What?” Kallad pressed. “Let what escape?”
“The thing in the cellar.”
“No,” the acolyte whimpered. “No. They couldn’t… it couldn’t escape.”
They all heard it: the sound of running feet. For a moment, Kallad believed that the sound belonged to the ghosts of this place, the dead locked in a never-ending cycle of flight and death. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the uncomfortable malaise that had settled about him since entering the cathedral.
He pressed Mann up against the wall. “Let what escape?”
He didn’t need the thief to answer. He knew. It made a sick kind of sense. The Sigmarites had taken one of von Carstein’s brood prisoner after the siege, it was the only reasonable explanation for their fear. Now the beast was free and they had nothing to restrain it with. The holier-than-thou idiots believed that their god would protect them come what may. That kind of blind faith was dangerous.
“You didn’t… tell me you didn’t try to cage a vampire down there. Don’t you people ever learn? Look at what the creatures did to your city—” Kallad was almost knocked from his feet by a frightened-faced priest as he came hurtling out of the kitchens. The priest’s ceremonial robes were up around his knees and his sandalled feet slapped on the cold stone floor. The man looked as if he had come face to face with every daemon his faith had ever imagined into being. For a fleeting moment, Kallad pitied the fool, before he remembered that they had done it to themselves.
“The beast is free! Run! Run for your lives!”
Kallad bent down and picked up his axe. Ruinthorn was an extension of his soul, not merely a weapon. With it in his hands, Kallad Stormwarden was complete. Anger surged through
his veins. The fools had tried to harness a daemon. The arrogance of manlings never ceased to amaze him.
He turned his back on the thief and the priest, and loosing a mighty war cry charged in the direction the frightened-faced priest had come from. He didn’t care if the others followed him or not. A vampire was loose in the cathedral. One of the stinking creatures that had slain his family was within spitting distance. His thoughts glazed over with a veil of hatred. He would find the creature and he would rip its dead heart out with his bare hands and ram it down its gaping throat.
He stalked down the chill corridor, listening, but only hearing the echo of his own footsteps. The entrance to the vaults would, he reasoned, be off the main chapel, assuming that the vaults were part of the crypt or could be reached through the mausoleum. The other logical choice was the kitchens, since they would no doubt have access to either cold storage or a wine cellar. Either of these might link into the vaults. There was no guarantee of course. With these old buildings, the vaults could actually be some long forgotten dungeon with a secluded stairwell hidden away somewhere. He stopped at a corner as a whiff of cider and roses hit him, but laid over it was the unmistakable tang of blood. He followed his nose and found the kitchens. Knives had been abandoned in the middle of cutting a succulent shank of ham. Pots of vegetables stewed on the fire. There was no starvation in the house of this god. More importantly, he found a staircase leading down to the depths of the cathedral’s cold stone heart: the cellars.
From there, he followed a narrow passage down until he found a fork that offered two choices, one to the depths of the crypts and the makeshift dungeons, the other back up to the House of Sigmar. The staircase down was thick with dust. Although it had been disturbed recently, it was definitely the path less travelled. He took the stairs down.
The air grew noticeably colder as he descended, prickling Kallad’s skin. There was a peculiar quality about it. It wasn’t like the air of the deep mines, there was no vitality to it. It was starved.
The smell of blood hung heavy in the air, richer and stronger than anywhere else in the cathedral.
It was a slaughterhouse reek.
The torches along the walls were dead, burned out. Kallad paused at the bottom of the stairs, listening. He could hear moans from deeper in the darkness. He followed the sounds through a maze of passages until he saw an open door.
Two priests were huddled over the dead bodies when he walked into the cell. He couldn’t make out what they were saying—some kind of last rites for the dead, perhaps.
“Where is it?” Kallad asked, making sure the holy men saw Ruinthorn and were left in no doubt as to the meaning of his question.
Sammy Krauss stepped into the cell behind him. Neither Mann nor the Sigmarite had followed. Sammy looked scared but resolute. The lad had guts. Kallad hoped he’d get to keep them after the day was out.
“It’s daylight,” Kallad pressed. “The creature can’t be far. Talk to me, damn it!”
He looked at the two bodies sprawled out across the floor, and the silver cuffs laid almost ceremoniously between them: one soldier, one priest. He couldn’t understand how the beast had slipped its bonds, but it didn’t matter. The creature was free and at least two men were dead for their foolishness.
The dead priest’s robes were different to those worn by the others, marking him as special. His head hung back unnaturally on his broken neck, exposing puncture wounds where the beast had drained every last ounce of blood from his body. A crust had dried around the wounds. The soldier had shared a similarly grisly fate of a broken neck and bloody punctures.
Death was death, ugly and dirty no matter whom it befell. There was no special sanitised death for the devout. They bled and soiled themselves exactly the same as the thieves, whores and beggars. When it came, death was the greatest of all levellers. All men left the world equal no matter their station in life.
The tableau of butchery confirmed Kallad’s worst fears. Instead of frightening him, the knowledge galvanised the dwarf.
The elder of the two priests looked up from ministering to the dead, the fallen priest’s hand cupped in his. “The beast is free.” His voice was as dead as the men sprawled out at his feet.
“Tell me,” Kallad urged.
“There is nothing to tell you, dwarf. The Lector believed he could trap a daemon. He was wrong. He paid for his error with his life. Now the beast is free and others will pay the same price, Sigmar save their souls.” The way that last, part plea part prayer, came out of the priest’s mouth left Kallad in no doubt that the man’s faith had been deeply shaken. Violence had a way of making weak men lose their religion and strong men find theirs.
“What are you doing here?” the second priest challenged, finally looking up. His eyes were red-rimmed with tears, his young face deeply scarred from the pox or some such youthful disease.
“Saving your life. Now, help me, instead of asking stupid questions.”
The sound of breathless running had them all looking towards the door as Felix Mann stumbled through it. “It’s killed dozens up there, dwarf. Bodies are everywhere.”
“Is it still here?”
“How the hell should I know? I came to find you because you’ve got an axe. The way I see things, you’re my best chance of making it out of here alive so I am sticking about two steps behind you.”
“Show me,” Kallad said.
Kallad followed him through the vaults, up to the cellar and finally into the main floor of the cathedral. Neither spoke.
It was true. The pews were strewn with broken bodies, necks snapped and hanging impossibly, throats opened, blood congealing in the gaping wounds. Kallad counted twenty corpses littering the aisles of the great domed cathedral. The naked savagery of the attack was shocking. That it should have happened in the House of Sigmar made it doubly so.
They found fifteen more corpses scattered around the many rooms of the cathedral, left where they had fallen, necks broken, flesh tinged blue where the blood had been drained from them.
“How could one creature do this?” Mann asked, looking down at another ruined corpse. In death, the brothers of Sigmar looked distressingly alike, rigor ridding their features of any individuality.
Kallad didn’t have a chance to answer, but like the thief, there was something about the scale of the slaughter that disturbed him. He couldn’t see how one creature could wreak so much devastation unchecked. Surely someone should have raised an alarm. Nothing about the escape rang true. It was too… clinical.
A cold stone of certainty sank in Kallad’s gut.
The creature wasn’t alone.
Its escape wasn’t some spur of the moment opportunity. Someone, or something, had freed the beast.
That led to the disturbing possibility that there was a traitor inside the cathedral.
Who could he trust? Could he trust anyone?
The answer was no. He couldn’t trust anyone.
Kallad searched the library. The same instinct that told him the escape was not some random happening nagged him when he looked at the chaos that had been the cathedral’s library. He picked up one of the damaged tomes, reading the words off the spine as best he could.
The frightened young acolyte that had met them at the gate found them in the library. The place was a mess. It had been ransacked, books ripped open, spines torn, pages scattered across the table. The librarian sat at the head of the table, his head lolling impossibly on his broken neck. Impossibly, well, impossibly for the living, not for the dead it seemed. The killer had taken the time to mock them, putting a book in the dead man’s hands. The beast had gouged the old librarian’s eyes out to complete the irony.
The young acolyte slumped into a chair across the table from the dead librarian, his head in his hands.
“They were my friends,” he said simply.
“They were fools for thinking that they could cage a vampire and make it dance to their tune.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
&n
bsp; “No?”
“No. The Lector thought that if we could study the beast we could learn its weaknesses. You can’t beat an enemy you don’t know, that’s what he said.”
“Well the man was an idiot. Believe me, you can fight anything and anything can fight you, and only a complete idiot would let a bloodsucking monster into his home and not expect it to cause bloody murder.”
“But he—”
“Ain’t no buts about it. How long was the thing here?”
“Since the siege.”
“But that was years ago.”
The young acolyte nodded.
“But you’d have had to feed it… blood.”
The young acolyte nodded again.
“Grimna’s balls, man. Didn’t you see what it was doing? Just by being here it was turning you all into monsters. You fed the thing blood?”
“Our own. We bled ourselves to feed the thing.”
“You gave it a taste for your own blood? Your own blood? And you kept the thing caged less than fifty feet beneath you as you just prayed to your precious god. Listen to yourself, even Sammy here wouldn’t be naive enough to think that was a good idea. Now you’re paying the price for your stupidity. Ask yourself if it was worth it. When the beast is breaking your neck to get at the big fat vein pulsing in your throat, ask yourself if it was worth it.”
Silence stretched out between them, the truth of the dwarfs words heavy in the air. You couldn’t cage a beast forever. At some point it would break free.
The young acolyte walked around behind the dead librarian, treading on pages of ancient texts. Kallad looked at the earnest young man. The light spilling in from the vast stained glass window of the library’s far wall fragmented his face into yellows, reds and greens, and vast hues of sickly colours between.
Tears stood out in his eyes when he spoke.
“Kill it,” he said, simply. “Find the monster and kill it. We have money. We can pay you. Find it and kill it before it causes more death.”
“Aye, that I will, but not for your coin, your money’s no good to me. I want four good swords, reliable men, not the kind who lose their heads to panic in a tight spot and some kind of mage or sorcerer, and I’m thinkin’ four clerics of Sigmar. We’ll set out at dawn and have all day to hunt the beasts. They can’t get far.”
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 6