He had taken measures to protect himself, of course. He was no fool.
Konrad no longer slept in his own coffin. While it was empty, the coffin was set up to look as if the new Count slumbered within. Instead of the coffin, Konrad preferred the solitude of the rooftops when Morrslieb and Mannslieb held sway, or the subterranean seclusion of the cathedral when the sun was at its zenith. This night, he held a lonely vigil on the balcony outside his bedchamber.
The armies had gathered, billeting the city below.
The differences between Konrad’s new army and the last army that had marched to the banner of the von Carsteins were marked. Where Vlad had enjoyed the portability of tents, Konrad chose to stamp his authority on the land, claiming ownership of houses and leaving families begging for scraps. For him, there were no banners or pennons snapping in the wind, no black pavilions for the marshals, and no supply wagons. The dead had no need of such accoutrements. There was movement, however: black coaches rumbled through the streets bearing the seal of the von Carsteins.
Hundreds of small fires burned in the fields between the castle and the city. He didn’t look directly at them, knowing their dance would slowly mesmerise him. He needed to be alert, watchful. He kept his gaze moving over the countryside without allowing it to settle on anything for too long. Every once in a while, he glanced up towards the green aura of Morrslieb and the brighter silver corona of Mannslieb; it all served to break up the monotony of waiting for the inevitable.
He listened to the nocturnal chorus: the insects, the hoot of an owl, the mournful cry of a wolf, and the wind in the gutters of the tower.
Ravens gathered along the balustrade, their beady eyes surveying the night world. At times like these the birds kept him company. Their presence also held the ghosts at bay.
The chamber door creaked open. The wait was over. They had come for him.
With the torches lit, the room was fully illuminated, although the glass between them effectively rendered Konrad invisible. He watched as the three men, wrapped in dark cloaks, crept up on the coffin, standing at the head and on either side of the wooden box. It was a measure of how little his brothers regarded him. Three assassins. Three humans. Insult aside, it was fascinating to see his own murder taking place, or what they thought would be his murder.
The attack when it came was shocking in its savagery.
The body in the coffin was butchered.
He suffered a curious sense of disassociation, watching his would-be murderers hacking away at the corpse in the coffin. It was like watching his own death through the eyes of a stranger.
He would have to thank Immoliah Fey for the corpse, and for the glamour that disguised it.
Konrad watched until their frenzied cutting subsided into exhaustion, and men pushed open the balcony door and walked into his bedroom.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but it seems I am still very much alive.”
One of the assassins dropped his blade in fright. It clattered on the floor.
“You, on the other hand, well, forgive me if I am wrong, but I think you could very well be dead.”
He came at them in a vengeful fury, his fist bursting through the ribcage of the first assassin and wrenching the dead man’s heart out of his chest with one vicious tug. Spinning on his heel, he lunged out with his hand extended and rammed clawed fingers into the second assassin’s throat, rupturing his windpipe. The man dropped his sword, gagging, and stumbled back, clutching at his throat as he suffocated.
Konrad turned on the last assassin.
“Which of my brothers sent you?”
The man said nothing.
Konrad moved in closer. He reached out. His hand closed around the man’s jaw.
“I’ll ask you again, which of my brother’s sent you?”
He squeezed, hard.
“Fritz.”
He had got what he wanted. Not what he expected, but what he wanted. He still didn’t relent, even as he felt the bone crush beneath his fingers. The man’s screams were silenced abruptly as Konrad snapped his neck.
He stripped the dead man of his hood. He recognised him. It was one of his own. He stared at the man’s twisted face. The recognition was galling.
Quickly, Konrad stripped the hoods from the remaining assassins. Again, both were, or had been, his own thralls. They should have been bound to him, and as such incapable of rising against him. They should have been subservient, existing solely to do his bidding. The evidence to the contrary lay dead at his feet.
Somehow, Fritz had turned them against him. That fact was more disturbing than the botched assassination attempt. Fritz had found a way to break his hold on his own servants.
Konrad had been sure that the fop was only interested in his hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, but obviously, the whole harmless philanderer persona was an act, one he played perfectly. He surrounded himself with whores and doxies to help keep up the act, but obviously the Fritz he thought he knew was not who Fritz really was. This would bear thinking about.
In that moment, cold-blooded fury overwhelmed him. All rational thought burned up within his anger. Had he been his sire, he would have dragged their souls back from the abyss, kicking and screaming, and raised them again, as mindless zombies. He wasn’t his sire, however, and his impotence maddened him all the more.
He lashed out, splintering the side of his coffin with his fist.
He upturned the box, spilling parts of the dismembered corpse across the bloody floor. He tore down the portraits from the wall. He splintered the back of the chair on the open door and, raging, pulled the books from the shelves. He shredded the spines and ripped out the pages, scattering them around him like confetti. Blood soaked into the pages where they fell around the bodies.
His rage consumed him. It was blinding. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was spent. All that remained was slow smouldering fury.
He looked at the assassins with thinly veiled hatred. He would extract his price for this insult. Fritz would pay.
He stood in the doorway, calling for a servant to fetch the Hamaya.
“I want these,” he gestured at the bodies, “delivered to my brother Fritz’s chambers immediately.”
Onursal bowed. The Hamaya betrayed no expression upon seeing the devastation that Konrad had wrought in his own chamber. “It will be done.”
He gathered the body of the last assassin in his arms.
“I know this man. He was no assassin.”
“Until today,” Konrad said, the implication obvious. Something had turned the man into a hopeless assassin. Onursal was no fool, the fact that he was being asked to deliver the bodies to Fritz was a clear indication of where the responsibility for the man’s conversion lay.
Jerek von Carstein stood in the doorway.
“Are you sure this is wise, Konrad?”
“Are you questioning me, Wolf?”
Jerek shook his head. “Not at all, just urging caution. Once you deliver these to Fritz’s door there can be no turning back. You know that.”
“Take one of the damned bodies, Jerek. You are not my conscience, so stop acting like it. I’ll carry the third myself. I want to see his face when his filth washes up on his own doorstep.”
Only he didn’t carry the third, he beheaded it and carried the head by a bloody tangle of hair.
Together, they swept through the cold passages of the castle, climbing the hundreds of stairs to Fritz’s high chamber. Konrad threw the door open and sneered at Fritz’s surprise as he bowled the assassin’s head into the room. The head cracked off the doorway as he threw it. It landed at his brother’s feet.
Konrad stepped into the room. The Hamaya didn’t cross the threshold.
“What do you have to say for yourself, brother-mine?” Konrad asked, cruelly mimicking Fritz’s intonation.
“If you want something done right, do it yourself would seem to be appropriate.”
“Indeed, that would be why I am here.”
Konrad drew his dae
mon blade, feeling the vibrations course through him as the blade sang out, demanding blood.
Fritz was unarmed.
“It seems you have me at a disadvantage,” Fritz said, stalling. He cast his gaze left and right, looking for something that could be used as an impromptu weapon. There was nothing.
“I don’t really care, brother,” Konrad said, moving closer, “but more to the point, I don’t see why I should.”
“We’re family” Fritz offered, a smile spreading across his face as he spread his arms.
The smile incensed Konrad, as he knew it was calculated to. He did his best to stifle the anger he felt building, but it was difficult.
The need of the daemon blade sang in his tainted blood. It demanded a death, demanded sating. It fed off the heat of his rage, stoking it even as he battled for control.
Slowly and deliberately, Konrad brought the dark blade to his lips and kissed it before shifting into a fighting stance.
“So be it, brother-mine.” Fritz clapped his hands sharply, twice. Doors on either side of his chamber opened, and his women entered, hunkering down and giving themselves over to the form of she-wolves. They circled around Konrad, jowls curled back in feral snarls. “Seven angry young women, Konrad, I would call this an even match.”
“You’ve miscalculated, brother. I don’t need to kill them, only you. They can snap and snarl all they like. It doesn’t matter. They are all tied to you. Your death will be enough to put an end to any threat they might pose, pretty though they might be with their shiny pelts. I would have thought swords would have been more your style, Fritz. They are so terribly… suggestive, after all. Now, I am taking what is mine, by eternal right. Say your goodbyes. I am sure your bitches will miss you.”
Kicking a wolf aside, Konrad launched a blistering attack, the sheer ferocity of it driving Fritz towards the window. Fie ignored the howling wolves as they snapped at him. They were insects, annoying, but inconsequential. He only had eyes for Fritz. The traitor would pay.
Lunging, he buried the bone blade deep in Fritz’s stomach. The sheer momentum of the attack carried the pair out through the huge window, spraying glass everywhere, and for a moment, they were falling, locked together by the daemonic sword. Their black cloaks wrapped around the pair as they wrestled then flared out wildly as the wind ripped them away. For a moment, they became the silhouette of vast black wings as Konrad lost his grip on the sword and Fritz fell away, the sword still impaled in his gut.
He fell soundlessly, threw his arms wide and burst upwards suddenly, his body going through a hideous transformation, the cloak fusing to his arms like leathery wings, his bones breaking and metamorphosing into the shape and form of a huge black bat.
The sword tumbled away harmlessly, chased by the black ghost of Fritz’s shed clothing.
Konrad spread his arms wide, focusing on the form of a bat in his head. He gave himself to it, feeling his body respond. He stopped freefalling, and was flying.
As a bat, he was blind.
He reached out with his remaining senses, using the displacement of the air caused by the panicked flapping of his brother’s wings to build a picture in his mind, and chased Fritz out into the darkness.
They banked high, arcing back towards Konrad’s Tower—what used to be called the Raven Tower in Vlad’s day—and swooped low along the castellations, scattering the birds. He lost Fritz in the chaos of wings.
Konrad scoured the sky for a quarter of an hour, but what seemed like thousands of the black birds had taken flight, blinding him in the sheer volume of wing beats and caws.
Cursing himself for a fool, he went to ground, dressed and collected his sword. Its hunger was far from sated, but its longing would be answered before the night was over.
He could, at last, sleep. There would be no more attacks tonight. Fritz was beaten, and Emmanuelle would prevent Pieter from giving in to any kind of rash stupidity.
First, he had one thing to do.
He climbed the several hundred stairs to Fritz’s chamber and, revelling in their screams, butchered his brother’s harem while Jerek and Onursal looked on dispassionately. He didn’t care that their true deaths weakened the vampires as a whole. Losing seven gets in a single night would virtually cripple Fritz, which was what mattered.
He left the corpses littering the floor for Fritz to find if he was foolish enough to return.
That would not be for a long time yet.
The link between sire and get was a powerful one, and Konrad knew that Fritz would be lying somewhere in a gutter, stinking with fear, and sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was dying.
“He will not cross me again,” Konrad said to the Hamaya as they returned to his tower.
“He would be a fool to,” Onursal said, opening the heavy wooden door.
“We will stand guard at your door tonight, all the same.” Jerek said as Konrad entered the chamber. The room looked as if a tornado had blown through it. Jerek stooped and righted the toppled coffin. The side of the box was splintered where Konrad had hit it, but it would do for a few hours more. “Sleep well, my lord.”
And sleep he did, the sleep of the damned.
He dreamed he was walking the streets of the city below, loitering in the seedier districts of Drakenhof. On a corner, he saw the indistinct shape of a woman, blurred as is the nature of dreams.
* * * * *
She lurks in the darker shadows of the alleyway. He can see that she is wearing an exquisite gown of flowing silks and a veil that covers the lower half of her face. Even so, he knows that she is beautiful.
“Do you think I am beautiful?” she asks, as he approaches.
All he knows is that he must possess her.
Up close, she is even more attractive.
She reminds him, in almost every way, of his sire’s bride, Isabella.
“Of course you are,” he says.
“Liar!” she screams, tearing away the veil that covers her mutilation. Her mouth has been ripped open, her unnatural smile spreading from ear to ear, her tongue lolling horribly through the gash. “Tell me again, now that you see me, am I beautiful?”
Konrad stares at the ruin of Vlad von Carstein’s bride, screams and tries to flee, but she is too fast. She snares him in claws that he cannot escape and draws him up close to whisper: “I want to do to you what was done to me,” in his ear as she pulls a sharpened stake from the many folds of her gown and plunges it into his heart.
As he dies in her arms, her face blurred, losing focus and form, shifting into the face of Jerek, into the face of Vlad, into the face of Skellan, of Miesha, of Pieter, of Hans, of Fritz, Onursal, Immoliah Fey, Constantin, Emmanuelle.
The faces of those he once called friends.
He awoke in a cold sweat, trapped inside the confines of his coffin. He lashed out, hammering at the wooden lid until it shattered, and surged out of the wooden box, gasping even though he had tasted his last breath more than a century earlier.
He rose, trembling, as Jerek and Onursal burst into the room. Their expressions said they expected the worst. Konrad was not about to confess his dream.
“Leave me.” The manner in which he said it brooked no argument. The Hamaya backed out of the room.
He didn’t know who he could trust.
Trust, he laughed bitterly. The truth was that he could trust no one.
He couldn’t stand to be cooped up in the castle anymore. He needed to feel the wind on his face, to feel the illusion at least of freedom. He wondered if this was how Vlad had felt. Thinking of his sire made him think of the hundreds of nights when the ancient vampire had haunted the rooftops of this very tower. That decided it for him. He gathered his cloak up, fastening the gold chain around his throat, and swept out of the chamber and past the Hamaya.
“Stay!” he commanded, as if he was talking to a pair of dogs.
He climbed the stairs to the roof at a run, taking them two and three at a time in his need to be out beneath the bruise purple sky.
He pushed open the door.
The wind sucked and pulled at his cloak, folding it around him and billowing it out behind him in turns as it funnelled around the rooftop. Konrad strode right out to the edge, standing on the brickwork of the castellation itself, nothing between him and a fall of a thousand feet.
He looked down.
For a moment, it was as if he was suspended out in the black heart of the night. It was breathtaking, that sense of liberation.
The rush of vertigo was dizzying, but there was no fear.
He could willingly have given himself to the fall if he had wanted to, even one thousand feet was not enough to kill him.
Indeed, he wanted to jump, to fly free in the sky.
The ravens gathered around his feet, pecking at his toes and worrying at the leather of his boots. He let them.
“He’s not the only one,” the largest of the ravens said, its voice a raucous caw as it craned its neck to peer up at him with its beady yellow eyes.
“I know,” Konrad said, still looking out over the world below.
“They all want you dead,” the creature’s voice cut deep into his nerves, the words like nails on glass, as it coughed them up.
“I know.”
“There are enemies on every corner.”
“I know.”
“Your brothers would rise in your place.”
“I know all of this, bird.”
“You do, you do, but know you Pieter? That he plots your downfall? That he dreams of dominion?”
“Then I shall have to see that his dreams become nightmares.”
“Oh yes, yes, yes, nightmares. Before he dies—nightmares. Kill them, Konrad. Kill them. They would kill you.”
Konrad looked down at the carrion bird. It looked positively enraptured by the prospect of more death in the old castle.
“You are your master’s creature, aren’t you, bird?”
“Oh, yesss.”
“There will be more blood, take that message to your master in whatever Hell he is in.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the raven cawed. “Trick Pieter, see him dead, before he tricks you. They scheme and scheme, your lying kin, they would see you rot, cut you into pieces and feed you to us birds, yes they would, yes, yes, yes.”
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 14