[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion

by Steve Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  Why Vlad had thought them worthy of his time, Konrad had no idea. Perhaps it amused the dead Count to play lord and master? Konrad found no such amusement in the game, at least not when it was played straight. Changing the rules offered some possibilities. Improvisation was the secret to entertainment. Many of the petitioners he simply had thrown to the wolves, not caring if they were the wronged party or the wrongdoers. Their deaths were poor sport. They fell on their knees and begged and wept, a few even put up a fight, but in the end their bare hands were no match for the wolves’ teeth. He saved a few special victims as treats for his necromancers to experiment on. It would teach the others a lesson: not to bother him with trifles.

  Konrad savoured his reputation as a cruel count, even cultivated it: it kept the cattle in their place and sent out a clear message of dominance to his kin.

  Konrad swept down the marble stairs of the grand staircase and through the great hall with its crush of penitents, ignoring the pleas and grubbing hands that reached out to touch him. He was in no mood for the smell of unwashed cattle—they stank and they made his home reek of bodily fluids. He paused, halfway through the hall, imagining the place aflame, the cattle burning away to nothing. There was something to be said for a cleansing fire. Smiling, he continued on his way.

  The room he was looking for was buried deep within the bones of the old castle, beneath the cellars and the dungeons, even beneath the crypts. Once, it might have been a treasure house, but now it was a macabre gallery of sorts. The heads of thirty dead men, in various states of decay, were set on three, tiered rows of spikes. He knew every one of them, or had known every one of them well enough to kill them. Over the years, he had taken to collecting, as trophies, the heads of those that wronged him. It gave him grim satisfaction to know that in death they were his.

  He visited the room regularly, using the captive audience to talk through his thoughts, looking for flaws in his reasoning. Talking aloud helped, and having an audience made the talking easier.

  Only recently, they had started talking back to him.

  It was nothing more than a word or two at first, little enough that he had doubted he had heard it in the first place. However, those precious few words soon grew into full sentences. He stopped hearing whispers of: “murderer” and “fiend” and found himself eavesdropping on conversations of treachery and betrayal as the heads argued amongst themselves.

  “Still alive then?” the head of Johannes Schafer asked.

  “Yes,” Konrad said, closing the door.

  “We’re surprised, considering,” the skull of Bernholdt Brecht mocked. Brecht was the oldest, his skin stretched like leather and smooth where the burns had taken his life. “We hear things, you know, even down here.”

  “You keep us locked in the dark, but we still hear whispers.”

  The voices were a maddening chorus, their words interchangeable, their voices insubstantial and indistinct as they blurred around one another. Konrad could barely tell them apart as they became more animated.

  “We know the darkest secrets of those around you.”

  “You surround yourself with people who say what you want to hear, but behind your back they plot and scheme away, planning your downfall.”

  “You place too much trust in those who say what you want them to say instead of giving you good council. You love the flatterers and ignore those who would serve you well. It will bring about your end.”

  “You will not walk so tall then, dead man. Oh no, you’ll be like us, stuck on a spike and left to rot, Morr take your soul to keep.”

  “He already has it,” Konrad said, no hint of irony in his voice.

  “No, it walks the long dark road searching for rest. It is locked in eternal torment, trapped between waking and sleep. There can be no rest, not for the killer in you, not for the boy in you or the man in you. Your soul withers in denial. The boy you were burns. The man you were burns. It never ends. The fire never ends. It consumes all that you were and all that you could have been.” The voices were in such a rush to talk that their words tumbled into a single demented voice, losing all separation and identity as they filtered through the thickness of Morr’s veil.

  “You aren’t real. You think I don’t know this? You are all in my head.”

  “And you are in all of ours.”

  “All of ours.”

  “Yes. In all of ours.”

  “If we are in your head our words must be the truth as you believe it to be. Welcome to your truth, Konrad. Welcome to your truth, a soul damned to the fires of hell, no rest for you, not when they send you on your way. Oh no. Not when the knife in the night cuts out your rotten heart and feeds it to you. No rest for you. Trust no one, not even your closest. Oh no, in the land of the blind, who can see the invisible threat? Who will remember you when you are gone and turned to dust? They circle around you, they are looking for a weakness to exploit, and they will find it. They will, because you are weak.”

  “I am not weak.” Konrad lashed out, taking the head clean off the spike and sending it rolling across the floor.

  The others laughed, a horrible mocking sound that threatened to deafen him.

  He kicked the head viciously into the wet stone wall and walked down the line, hand drawn back to strike any head that goaded him.

  “He will be first,” the last head said.

  “Who will be?”

  “The golden one, the one that shines brightest, the one that burns. All that glitters is fakery to lull the fool. To trust him is to die.”

  Konrad paced the small chamber, clutching at his head as he tried to clear it, to think straight. The heads had never let him down before, in that regard their council was not easily discarded.

  “How can I know?”

  “Look in the mirror and see the lies reflected in the glass.”

  Konrad laughed bitterly. “I am surrounded by lies and liars, and none of them cast reflections. That is your wisdom? It is the curse of our kind to be invisible.”

  “The invisible threat is the one that the wise man fears most, because they are like you. They are weak and their weakness drives them. They are not to be trusted, like snakes. Snakes, yes. They are snakes, not to be trusted. Oh no, not to be trusted.”

  Konrad knelt, gathering the fallen head in his hands. Slowly and deliberately he impaled it back on its spike.

  “This is insanity.”

  “These are your thoughts, aren’t they? This is your wisdom, spoken aloud. Trust no one. That is the wisdom we offer you. Heed it. You should. It could save your life.”

  The voices fell silent as one.

  There was nothing left to say.

  Someone would betray him, someone close to him. Someone he thought of as a friend: the Golden One.

  Konrad walked along the line of faces, studying them one at a time.

  None spoke.

  He prodded them with a finger, poked them, held either side of their jaws and tried to force them to speak, but they had nothing to say.

  They had imparted their wisdom.

  He wanted to dismiss what they had said, but he couldn’t. They knew things they couldn’t know. They knew things he didn’t know.

  And still they came to pass.

  He sat a while in silence, thinking about what they had said. There was no great trick to it. All men of power surround themselves with advisors of ambition and hunger. Treachery is a part of their hearts. Few who strive for power are pure. To say that the seeds of his downfall were all around him was nothing more than his own paranoia talking, sowing the seeds of doubt.

  Yet even the paranoid man can have good reason to fear those around him.

  He was not von Carstein’s only heir, but for now, he had the support that gave him power enough to hold off the threat of the others.

  That might not always be the case. He would have to be a complete fool to think otherwise. Loyalties shifted. People could be bought and sold.

  He was playing the long game. He needed to ce
ment his power, become the undeniable master of the vampire nation.

  While the others lived there was always the threat of usurpation. They were strong, among the strongest of Vlad’s remaining kin. They were von Carsteins. The legacy of Vlad’s tainted blood flowed in their veins. The irony was that he needed to build up the strength of his people, yet his paranoia would have him tear out the heart of them to save his own skin. Given the chance, they would kill him. He knew that. He couldn’t allow them the chance.

  However, before the game played out, he would have to deal with them.

  It was the only reasonable solution.

  Konrad left the room of heads. He found Constantin in the library. In another life, the vampire had been a scholar with an uncanny grasp on the histories of the Old World.

  “How goes it?”

  “It goes,” Constantin said, scratching the back of his head with ink-stained fingers. Papers were spread out on the desk before him.

  Konrad settled into a chair beside the first of his own gets. He felt an acute bond with Constantin. It was almost fatherly in nature, and like any father, he had high expectations and higher hopes for his son. He steepled his fingers and feigned interest in the peculiar sigils scrawled across the papers laid out in front of him.

  The new library was just a small part of Konrad’s legacy, but it was a vital part. With knowledge came power. By surrounding himself with great knowledge gathered from the four corners of the world, Konrad hoped to secure even greater power. He ached when he thought of the wealth of knowledge that his sire had lost in his folly. No doubt the damned Sigmarites had burned everything and Nagash’s genius was lost to the world forever. It was a sickening thought. With a single spell, Vlad had raised an army from the dirt. What could he, Konrad, have done with that power at his disposal? That was Vlad’s other sin: he had lacked imagination. Power existed to be unleashed.

  “I see you are making progress.” Konrad gestured at the spread of papers.

  “Cataloguing this would take twice my lifespan,” the scholar said, and then seemed to remember that his world had changed and he had time enough at last to read all of the books in this vast library, and then more. “I suppose you are most interested in the histories?”

  With Constantin’s care, Konrad’s library would rival any house of learning across the world when it came to tomes of magic and ancient knowledge. The histories were Konrad’s own addition. With the scholar’s aid, a new version of his life was being fed into the history of the old world. It didn’t matter if the stories were lies, given time they would merge into truth. Konrad could create his own dynasty, tracing his blood back to Vashanesh, the first great vampire, and eventually enough people would believe the lies and the lies would become accepted truth. That was the wonder of knowledge; it was fluid, malleable.

  Konrad had studied the history of the Empire as much as father, mother and circumstance forced upon any aristocratic boy—it didn’t do to be ignorant amongst your peers. He knew of the plagues and the wars, the triumphs of spirit and the darkest days when all, it seemed, would come to an end. The dates and details had lost their clarity, but it didn’t matter. With Constantin, he was slowly rewriting the world, one page at a time.

  “And the… ah… other matters?”

  Konrad had no gift for the arcane and so, of course, found himself utterly fascinated by it. He sought to learn everything he could from the likes of Constantin who had a natural grasp of it, but the more they explained, the less he understood.

  “When documents of interest surface they are taken down to Immoliah Fey. She is most grateful for your sponsorship, my lord, and hopes to repay your trust when the time is most pressing.”

  There was that word again: trust.

  “Indeed, nothing in this world is given freely, Constantin. She knows that I expect something in return for my generosity. The day will come when I extract my price, whatever it may be. There is no trust involved in our relationship. I command her, master to servant. Tell me Constantin, is there trust in our relationship?”

  “My lord?”

  “Do you trust me, and more to the point, should I trust you?”

  The scholar thought about it for a moment, which pleased Konrad. It wasn’t an automatic response. He wasn’t kow-towing to his lord. He was weighing up the various aspects of their relationship. If that was not a sign of trust, what was?

  “No, my lord. I fear there is little or no trust between us. For my part, I live in fear that I shall displease you and suffer the fate so many others have. You brought me into this life, and blood aside, this life is not such a bad place to be, but there is no trust there, only fear. For your part, I suspect that you covet that which you do not have, in this case, that would be knowledge. You see these papers and you despise the fact that they mean nothing to you. You hate the weakness that highlights in you. It means, despite your strength, that you are the lesser man in at least one regard, so, you intend to leach out what you can, and then crush me when you have bled me dry. There is no trust there, only bitterness.”

  “You are a perceptive man, Constantin.”

  “For all the good it does me, my lord.”

  “Ah, but you see, ours is a healthy relationship, is it not? We have a respect for one another, founded on fear perhaps, but it is a mutual respect. We need each other.”

  “One day my usefulness will come to an end,” Constantin said, picking up his quill and dipping it in the inkwell beside the open book, “and that is the day that I die.”

  “Then it is up to you to make yourself useful, is it not?”

  “I try, my lord,” Constantin said.

  “I would have you write a ballad, something heroic. It would be good to have troubadours singing of my triumphs, don’t you think?”

  “It shall be done,” Constantin said. Your legend shall be sung across the land.”

  “You are a good man, Constantin. I hope you will always be as useful to me.”

  “As do I, my lord.”

  Konrad pushed his chair back and rose, pausing midway as if struck by an impromptu thought. He nodded to himself. “At tonight’s feast I would have you join the top table.”

  “It would be an honour, my lord.”

  “See if you can’t have something to perform, there’s a good man.”

  “As you wish, my lord, although it may be a little… ah… hurried.”

  “I have full confidence in you, Constantin. You won’t let me down.”

  The scholar began to scratch hastily at the page in front of him, only to score out the line he had written. Konrad left him to work in peace.

  The feast itself was a drab affair, unlike the banquets he had enjoyed in life. The Hamaya had selected ten lucky penitents to be the centrepiece of the feast. They were stripped and bled slowly, one by one, their thick red blood decanted into goblets and passed among the creatures at the top table, still warm. Jongleurs juggled and took pratfalls, but it was all rather dull. Konrad was bored by the whole affair. He gave a lazy wave and the performers were dragged from the stage, joining the delicacies on offer. Their deaths raised a smile from the Vampire Count.

  “Some entertainment at last,” he said, leaning over to Pieter.

  His brother grunted.

  “You always were easily entertained.”

  Pieter had been changed by his days in the Drak Wald. They all had, but Pieter more so than the rest of his twisted mockery of a family. He had regressed, become almost animalistic in his mannerisms, and he fed as though every meal might be his last. It was disgusting.

  He had made his play for power in the forest, challenging Jerek’s right to lead them to safety. The Wolf had slapped down the challenge, effectively emasculating Pieter. He was by far the weakest of them now, reduced to sneaking around, sniffing for victims in the dark like some low hunter, a ferret or a stoat, or some such animal used to living in the filth of humankind.

  Emmanuelle, Pieter’s wife, was a different monster altogether. He could
see why Pieter had chosen to sire her. It was not for beauty; she was interesting more than attractive and the angles of her face were all slightly askew. No, Pieter had sired her for the woman she had been. Even now, the mortal shone through, eclipsing the immortal. With her lips rouged by fresh blood and her eyes wells of lost souls, it was easy to see that in life the woman must have been enchanting. In death, she was magnificent.

  Beside her, Hans looked less than amused. Of them all, he was perhaps most like his sire. There was an edge of detachment about him, but it cracked easily beneath his vile temper.

  Jerek lurked in the shadows, not joining them at the top table. He never did. Hans could not stand the Wolf. He made no secret of his disgust that Vlad should have soiled the bloodline with a brute like Jerek. In mock deference, Jerek chose to put himself as close to Hans as he could at any given time, stoking the embers of the vampire’s temper. He would serve as Hans’ personal bodyguard at feasts, knowing it riled Hans. He felt, Konrad was certain, that his own place in the family was threatened by the last of Vlad’s gets. It was difficult for Hans to be the bigger man. At times, he was curiously childish, like a brat that had been spoiled and subsequently found it maddening not to get his own way.

  Fritz, the last of the brothers, sat beside Constantin; he was the sun to Hans’ moon. Where Hans was sullen and took to brooding, Fritz was gregarious and garrulous. He surrounded himself with a coven of gets, seven glorious women who crawled all over each other to satisfy even his most basic whim. In life he had been a hedonist, in death he satisfied his every desire, no matter how extreme.

  Lesser vampires sat at benches around the walls, where they satisfied themselves with some of the local meat.

  “Bring on the dancing girls,” Fritz said, clapping his hands. His seven gets moved to centre stage, dancing with veils of finest silk, their movements supple and erotic as they danced for their father-in-death. Fritz crossed his hands across his belly and sat back to enjoy the show.

  Konrad stared at the women. They made him uncomfortable with their provocative dance. He saw his mother’s disapproving shade behind them, her twisted face shattering the frisson of intensity for him. Still, he watched as they moved, bringing out curved swords that they placed on the floor and adopted into the dance, bringing a dangerous edge to the sensuality of their movements.