Therefore, Jerek had bent the knee and sworn always to offer his lord the truth as he saw it, not wrapped up in pretty words meant to flatter into deception. Even as he made the pledge, he knew that he would come to regret it.
With that promise spoken, he had returned to his home and taken to haunting the survivors he had left behind. At night, he roamed the Palast District, hugging the shadows along the north wall of the city. He prowled the Middenpalaz and its warren of buildings crowded in around the Graf’s palace, he even stole into the ducal mausoleum to stare at the tombs of the men he had served in life.
He watched ladies walk beside their beaux in the Konigsgarten, and when he could put it off no more, he returned to the Square of Martials, descending the small flight of stairs into the great square to sit on the wooden benches and remember the days when he had drilled his men beneath the watchful gaze of Gunther Todbringer’s statue. Sitting there brought back more ghosts than he cared to remember. This cobbled square was as much his home as any place in the world. He heard them all, the clatter of hammers, the buckling of shields, the curses and the cheers, and over and over the chant: “Ulric! Ulric! Ulric!”
It was that memory that took him to the great bronze statue on the corner of West Weg and Sudentenweg.
“How did you find the strength to do it?” he asked the man of bronze. He didn’t expect an answer, because there were no answers. Two children balanced on the statue’s broad shoulders and a broken-backed rat was crushed beneath its foot. At the height of the Black Plague, Graf Gunthar had sealed the city gates for six long months, condemning thousands to die. It must have taken incredible fortitude to resist the temptation to open the gates when so many innocent people were dying, but Gunthar had had no choice, the gates had to stay closed to save Middenheim. It was an old story, but one worth remembering: from great sacrifices, great victories are born.
Jerek bowed his head and turned to enter the spectacular Temple of Ulric, the very heart of the city itself. Doubt touched him. Could the creature he had become walk into a holy place? Did enough of his self, enough of the White Wolf, remain to allow him to enter? He steeled himself.
This was it, his last farewell to the person he had been. It was true what they said, you could not go home again. It was only to be expected that a city changed, moved on. Like Graf Gunthar, Jerek was a thing of the past. Few, if any, would remember him. It was one thing for a child to return home a man and find that the streets he knew had grown smaller, but it was quite another for a dead man to return to a city only to find it so fragile and mortal. Everything about the place, even the stone walls that had seemed so resolute and unchanging, owned an air of transience, as if they knew their time was fleeting.
“I am a man,” he told himself, “beloved of Ulric. That is what I am, not the beast von Carstein made me.”
He believed it, and his belief was so sincere that he stepped through the doors and stood still beneath the vast vaulted roof, amazed once more at the architecture that defied gravity’s pull. He wasn’t struck down for his temerity. In the centre of the temple, the sacred flame burned brightly. This was why he had returned home: a final test of himself.
He felt an unfamiliar sickness gnawing at his belly as knelt before the eternal flame. In his mind, he held the thought that had been with him since Konrad first issued the order for the Hamaya to breed.
The god had prophesied that so long as the flame burned the city would endure. The flame still burned and the city had withstood plague and the ravages of the Vampire Count’s undead host, so perhaps there was an element of truth to the legend. If that was the case, then perhaps more of the old stories held true. One in particular rose in Jerek’s mind: the sacred flame would not harm a true follower of Ulric.
Twisting the words of Magnus the Pious, Jerek whispered, “If I am wrong then the flames will surely consume me,” and thrust his hand into the fire.
He stared at the flame and his flesh, feeling the agonising heat as it seared at his hand, but the flame did not burn him. Jerek withdrew his unblemished hand.
“Then perhaps I am not damned,” he said, turning his hand over to examine the perfect skin.
Despite the sickness in his gut, Jerek left the temple convinced that the Wolf God had given his blessing.
The sign of a hangman’s gibbet and noose swung in the night breeze. The Last Drop was not the kind of establishment that Jerek Kruger had frequented in life. In death, it was made for Jerek von Carstein. Its iniquities were many and varied, and for that reason soldiers and thieves alike loved it. Jerek pushed open the door and stepped into the thick pall of smoke and stale ale that filled the taproom.
No one looked up; no one challenged him. The Last Drop was that kind of place. Patrons kept themselves to themselves. There was nothing to be gained by idle curiosity, but there was everything to lose.
Roth Mehlinger sat alone beside the fire, his gnarled hand closed around a tankard. Five years had worn hard on the soldier. After all that he had seen, it was no surprise he had sought solace in his cups.
Jerek sat himself at the table beside the man who had, in life, been his right hand, the Grand Master’s Shadow.
Mehlinger had always been a loner, dour and taciturn.
The man’s guilt at their failure was etched deep into his face. Black hair hung lank and greasy over his eyes. The Knights of the White Wolf had failed him, or he had failed them. It didn’t matter. He was alone, and as Jerek had drummed into them over and over, alone they were weak, only when they stood together were they giants.
It was difficult to see the man like this.
“Hello, old friend.”
Mehlinger looked up from his drink. He didn’t seem unduly surprised to see the dead man. “Come to haunt me have you, Wolf?” He raised the tankard in a toast, “Here’s to the dead who won’t stay dead, eh?”
The man was drunk, Jerek pitied him. It wasn’t an emotion he was used to feeling. Indeed its wrongness only reinforced the message of the sacred flame—his humanity had not yet been expunged. There was some good in him, enough, at least, to feel pity for a friend.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Jerek said.
“No? You mean I don’t have to live through it day after day, drinking myself into oblivion and still unable to escape my damned daemons? You think I come here for fun?” Mehlinger waved expansively, his gesture taking in the whole taproom. You think these people are my new friends? I don’t and they aren’t. I come here to drink myself to death, maybe then I can escape, eh? Maybe then…” The irony of his own words was lost on the drunk Mehlinger.
“Come with me, Roth. Be my shadow once more.”
“Nah, got good drinking still to be done. You go haunt one of the others for a while, leave me in peace.”
“Come with me,” Jerek said again, pushing his chair back and standing.
“Can you make it all go away? Can you make it disappear? Can you take the things I lived through from my head and make me forget them?”
“I can,” Jerek promised.
“Ah, what the hell,” Mehlinger muttered, dragging his chair back. He staggered and almost fell, but Jerek reached out and steadied him. “Let’s go then. Look at me, going for a walk with my ghosts and leaving half a tankard of ale on the table to boot. Must be losing my mind.”
They left the alehouse together, Mehlinger leaning heavily on Jerek’s shoulder for support. He led the old soldier away from the front door and the softly sighing sign, and down a narrow alleyway. Jerek pushed the soldier up against the wall, hard, and forced his head back to expose the pulsing vein at his throat. He sank his teeth in, drinking hungrily from his last living friend, gorging himself until Mehlinger was seconds from succumbing to death, and then he relinquished his bite, the soldier sagging in his arms.
“Join me, Roth. Feed on me.”
They shared the Blood Kiss.
He had fed on humans before, but this was different. This was intoxicating. This was exhilarating, but
even as he felt his tainted blood mingle with Mehlinger’s, he tasted the last shreds of vibrancy that had been the man’s life. As it faded his gut twisted and clenched, the last vestiges of his humanity rebelling against the siring. Jerek gagged, coughing up Mehlinger’s blood, but it was too late. The kiss had been shared.
In that instant, Jerek von Carstein hated the man that had been Kruger and Jerek Kruger loathed the beast that had become von Carstein.
“Why?” Mehlinger gasped, the vampire’s blood running from his mouth. “Why did you do this to me?” Hatred blazed in his eyes as he sank to his knees, dying.
Jerek couldn’t answer him, but he knew then that he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t sire another soul into this unlife he lived.
“I am sorry,” he whispered into his friend’s ear as the last breath of life escaped his lips. “I am so sorry. I will be here when you wake,” he promised.
He saw out the night cradling the dead man in his arms. He hated the thing von Carstein had made him, but that was who he was now: the Wolf was dead and in his place walked a monster.
An hour before dawn, Mehlinger awoke.
CHAPTER SIX
All on a Summer’s Night
NULN
The dog days of summer, 2056
A natural balance asserted itself between Skellan and the stranger as they travelled. By night, they ran as wolves, sharing their kills and feeding off the beasts of the field, but the blood of the lamb and fox and deer was no substitute for the blood of virgins or whores.
The hunger for real blood, the thick, intoxicating stuff of life, lured them into the villages and towns along the roadside.
The richness of it was impossible to resist.
It was in their nature to hunt and feed, but both revelled in the bringing of death and the intimacy of feeding. Any flesh, any blood, would have sufficed, but the pair developed a preference when it came to their kills. They liked them young and ripe for the taking, not soiled old hags. So they hunted the daughters and sisters, coming up on them in the dark, dragging them down into the dirt, tearing at their skirts as they kicked and struggled. Their desperation heightened the thrill of the kill. It didn’t matter if they were farmer’s daughters or the porcelain-skinned brats of the aristocracy, they begged and pleaded just the same as the vampires sank their teeth into them and they tasted every bit as delicious.
In Kemperbad they feasted on the blood of sixteen virgins in the shrine of the goddess Shallya while the statue of the goddess herself wept her perpetual stony tears.
They delighted in the profanity of it, defiling a holy place, ravaging the little mothers of the shrine while they cried out. It was more than death, more than merely taking lives. It was a ritual. It was a twisted glorification of all things beautiful, since they took only those closest to perfection, those who exemplified the feminine ideal. They dined on exquisite corpses. They sated their hunger on innocent meat, and they worshipped at the divine altar of sex, with passion.
They didn’t just kill: they devoured.
They discarded the dead one by one, tossing them aside as they moved on to the next. The dead women sprawled across the cold stone floor, arms and legs akimbo, necks broken, the only colour on their otherwise alabaster-pure complexion the twin rivulets of blood that dribbled from the puncture wounds in their throats.
They became a plague on the countryside, leaving a trail of death in their wake.
In Striessen they savoured the kills, taking several nights to seek out the few jewels in the town’s crown: three girls, the daughter of a pawnbroker, the sister of the silversmith and the young wife of a chandler. They were by far the most delicious of Striessen’s offerings. Where Skellan was hungry for the kill the stranger urged him to take it slowly and savour it.
“Anticipation serves to heighten the sweetness of the feast,” he explained, standing on a street corner beneath the chandler’s sign. A candle burned in the window above invitingly.
“Let me take her.”
“No, my eager young friend, we wait. We draw it out slowly, ounce by precious ounce, tasting it as it drips down our throats like the sweetest elixir.”
“I am hungry.”
“And you will be hungry again tomorrow. We wait. We are not savages. There should be beauty in all that we do, even killing.”
“You sound like him.”
“In many ways he was the best of us all, anyone who would be ruler of the vampire nation would do well to study his philosophies.”
“He was weak. At the death, when it came down to it, he was weak.”
The stranger shook his head, like a teacher disappointed in an otherwise apt pupil.
“It takes great strength to rule wisely. All it needs is a hint of weakness to succumb to your most base desires. Think on it.”
“I will, and you know what else? Tonight I will feed.”
With that, Skellan had scaled the outside of the building, climbing the clematis and other vines that clung to the facade of the old house, and tapped at the window.
His smile had opened the window. Her screams had been heard across the town.
The following night, he had claimed the silversmith’s sister. This time they had sat on the thatch of her roof, deliberating the effect the chandler’s wife’s death had had on the small town. Skellan savoured the panic it had injected, while the stranger saw it as the death knell on their brief sojourn amongst the cattle. They would have to move on instead of being left alone to graze selectively for weeks and months more.
The girl’s death was a bloody affair. She died in the window, shattered glass digging into her breast even as she sank down onto the wooden frame, the life leaking out of her as Skellan fed.
The pawnbroker’s daughter was the last of the true beauties of Striessen to die.
“This one is mine,” had the stranger said as Skellan stood on the threshold.
“Is she now?”
“Yes.” And the way he said it left Skellan in no doubt that he was serious. “Wait outside. Go find a goat or something.”
He left Skellan at the bottom of the stairs. The girl didn’t scream once, although she was far from silent. By the sound of it, she gave herself willingly to the stranger, urging him to take her life.
It was too easy.
They left Striessen before dawn. The stranger urged caution, but Skellan was buoyed up on the adrenaline of the feast and argued for one last stop on the way home: Nuln.
They had to wait before they could enter the old capital. The wooden bridge had been drawn up to allow a three-mast schooner passage down the Reik. In places, the wall that ringed the city was low enough so that raiders would only need carts to scale them, not ladders.
It was easy to see why Nuln had fallen at the feet of Vlad von Carstein, where Altdorf had stood in stubborn defiance. The cities were not comparable. Nuln itself was a city within a city, an ancient core at the heart of the new city, still ringed by the crumbling walls that marked the boundary of Nuln’s old town. The old streets of the Old City were so narrow that the two could barely walk side by side, so naturally, this was the busiest district of the city. The place was a curious hodgepodge of architecture. Each new generation had crowded in its own peculiar buildings, cramming them into spaces where there weren’t really spaces, making the streets claustrophobic and unpleasant. Even as night gathered, the air was thick with the smoke of blacksmith’s fires and the acrid tang of the tanner’s newly treated hides.
Women of dubious repute congregated around the streets between the Merchants Gate and the City Gate, calling out to passers-by who looked as if they had coin to spare on a bit of rough and tumble.
Skellan drank in the many and varied pleasures of Nuln with relish. The lure of the big city called to him. On every corner there was a feast to devour. Every night for two weeks, Skellan stepped out, walking amongst the prostitutes as they worked the streets, feeding in the dark alleys before dawn, and disappearing into the remnants of the night while the stranger watche
d, biding his time, being careful to select the finest blood rather than the vinegar that Skellan drank so greedily.
It was no surprise that the spires of the great city inspired the pair to new heights of cruelty.
In the course of a single night, they changed the city forever. The ruling family, Liebowitz, was more than merely ousted, it was defenestrated, despoiled and degraded. Their deaths became the thing of legend.
“The Family Liebowitz will mourn this night for centuries to come.”
“You give the cattle credit for a long memory. In my experience, they fart, roll over and forget it ever happened,” Skellan said. They stood in the centre of Reiks Platz, listening to the chestnut vendor struggling to sell the last of his wares. The smell of caramelised sugar was a tantalising counterpoint to the all-pervading reek of leather.
“That, my friend, is because you do not give them something worth remembering. It’s all petty pain with you. Back alleys, brothels, and smoke houses. It lacks any panache. Who cares if a prostitute dies? Who cares if some fool strung out on laudanum winds up dead in a gutter? Tonight, we walk into the houses of the rich and the beautiful, bringing death to the fore. We show the city that no one is safe, not even in their own home. The death we offer can find them anywhere. That is how you make them remember. You make death visible. You make it frightening.”
“I still don’t see what they have done to deserve such thorough extermination? In every other killing you preach caution, but now you would have us throw it to the wind.”
“It is personal, a debt to be repaid, in full. I will say no more on it. Tonight, we sup on the blood of the aristocracy and see if it is truly blue. No more back street whores. The Family Liebowitz may rule the city for a few hours more, but their fall will be spectacular, and the people of Nuln will remember this night like no other. Tonight, we dine in a style befitting who we are, my friend.”
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 8